Why consult the crystal ball when you can read the book? Bevin's epithet is more than ever appropriate as Britain wakes up to the beginning of a long combat with the Islamist ideologies that send young men to kill and maim our citizens.
The calm, rational, determined and unfussed response of the new Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, as well as sombre language from the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is a welcome change after the theatricalities of declaring war on terrorism, or instant consultation committees whose members are keener to denounce Britain's foreign policy than ask hard questions about the thought processes that guide the suicide and car bombers.
Six weeks ago, David Cameron wrote an article in the Observer criticising those who used the word "Islamist" to describe the ideological roots of the terrorist threat. Yet "Islamist" is an accurate description of a global ideology that has been slowly incubating for decades. It took 69 years between the writing of the Communist Manifesto and the imposition of Bolshevik terror on Russia after 1917. Hitler's hatred of Jews was derived from writings and ideologues active before he was born. The Islamist equivalent of Marx's revolutionary appeal can be found in the writing of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, with a growing presence in Egypt, as well as off-shoots such as Hamas and a European network, including prominent members of the Muslim Council of Britain.
Writing in the 1930s, Hasan al-Banna declared: "The Koran is our Constitution. Jihad is Our Way. Martyrdom is Our Desire." At a stroke, the history of modernity that is based on separation of faith and democracy, church and state, politicians and priests was overturned. Today, it is al-Qa'eda and the myriad Islamist outfits from Indonesia to Britain who are inspired by Islamist ideology to carry out evil acts.
These are repudiated by decent Muslims everywhere. I spend more time in mosques than in churches in my constituency of Rotherham, where 10,000 Muslim citizens live. Their imams and members of mosque councils are men of peace. They teach their children to recite the Koran, just as I learnt to recite the Latin mass as an altar boy. British Muslims know the difference between their faith and the ideologies of Islamism. For Mr Cameron to deny the concept of Islamism would have al-Banna and all the other founding fathers of Islamism laughing in their graves.
But measured and impressive as the Government's response (and, to be fair, Mr Cameron's) have been to the attempted atrocities in London and Glasgow, the fact is that the Labour Government, Whitehall and the entire political-media class in Britain have been slow to wake up to the need for an intellectual-ideological confrontation with Islamism.
I experienced this first-hand when, in November 2003, as Europe minister, I made a speech after Islamist terrorists drove a lorry bomb into the British consulate in Istanbul, killing scores - mainly Turks. At the same time, a young man from South Yorkshire had been groomed by Islamists into becoming a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv.
I made what I thought were banal points, saying a choice had to be made between "the democratic rule of law, if you like the British or Turkish or American or European way, based on political dialogue and non-violent protests, or the way of the terrorists, against which the whole democratic world is now uniting. We need to move away from talk of martyrs and I hope we will see clearer, stronger language that there is no future for any Muslim cause anywhere in the world that validates, or implicitly supports, the use of political violence in any way."
Read today, those words are so commonplace every MP would endorse them. Four years ago, they were seen as provocative and unacceptable. "Experts" wrote articles denouncing me. Inside the Foreign Office, I was ordered to negotiate with a representative of the Muslim Council of Britain a partial retraction of my statement. I regret now my temporising, based on the genuine upset I could sense among Muslim friends in Yorkshire and, of course, any politician's wish to hold on to office.
Now, there is no excuse. If ministers and MPs want to know where terrorism comes from, they can read Ed Husain's book The Islamist, with its self-explanatory sub-title "Why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left". Husain is one of a growing number of British Muslims who are telling the truth. Shiv Malik's remarkable reportage on the Islamist factionalism that won control of the July 7 bombers in Leeds can be read in a recent issue of Prospect. Unlike non-Muslims who tried to raise issues before a complacent political-media world was ready to listen, today's witness from British Muslims cannot be gainsaid. They are not like Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of al-Banna, who writes reverently about the founding father of Islamism. Recently, Prospect published a sympathetic profile interview of Ramadan. Last month, the magazine's editor, David Goodhart, wrote an open letter to him after Ramadan condemned a meeting at Downing Street that included Muslim leaders opposed to Islamism. Goodhart pointed out that neither foreign policy nor racist attitudes in a Britain where Muslim citizens have freer lives than in any Muslim state can justify the constant attacks on British democracy from the Islamist ideologues.
Ramadan did not deign to reply. He remains however a Whitehall consultant - despite his refusal to call for the abolition of stoning women to death under sharia.
But the days of refusing to confront Islamist ideology are drawing to an end. There is a new determination in government to spell out hard truths. And soon someone will explain to David Cameron that there is such a thing as Islamist ideology and Islamist terror crimes, and that they represent a fundamental challenge to everything Britain and British citizens - of all faiths and none - stand for.
Denis MacShane was Europe minister, 2002-05 |
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