A commonly held fallacy

Yesterday, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, announced that there are at least 2,000 people in the UK who pose a security risk and that al-Qaeda and other groups are recruiting children as young as 15. The BBC, in I suppose what can best be described as their interpretation of objectivity and even-handedness, got a comment from the Ramadhan Foundation that rehearsed the predictable drivel about terrorism being primarily driven by discontent and anger about British foreign policy. This is, of course, nothing new, but that doesn't mean that the argument isn't as disingenuous as it's always been. A lot of people are unhappy about Labour's policies. They demonstrate in the streets; they write newspaper columns and blogs; they vote against Labour. They don't, however, blow themselves up on a bus full of morning commuters. That can't be explained by anger--or even rage--at foreign policy. Ideology drives suicide-murder. It's worth revisiting an article by Hassan Butt, a former Islamist, that ran in the Observer shortly after the foiled attack on Glasgow's airport:

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

Ed Husain, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, likewise confirms this in his book The Islamist. The argument that foreign policy is the reason for terrorism simply doesn't have any weight and it's time that we dispensed with it entirely. Fortunately, Jonathan Evans appears to have a solid grasp of the issues:

But emphasising a point made by Gordon Brown in recent speeches, Mr Evans said: "The root of the problem is ideological."

"This is not a job only for the intelligence agencies and police," he added. "It requires a collective effort in which government, faith communities and wider civil society have an important part to play. And it starts with rejection of the violent extremist ideology across society - although issues of identity, relative deprivation and social integration also form important parts of the backdrop."

Mr Evans warned against governments overreacting to the terrorist threat. "The terrorists may be indiscriminate in their violence against us, but we should not be so in our response to them," he said.