Charles Moore in The Telegraph still doesn’t quite get it, with his preference for Islamist over Islamic to describe that which menaces us, but otherwise a good article.
On the same day this week as Gordon Brown gave his statement about terrorism to the House of Commons, I happened to be carrying a gun on a train.
I use the weapon - a licensed shotgun - only for sporting purposes. It was locked in its case, unloaded. I was not pointing it at anybody in order to make a political point or to get a seat. I was simply taking it from A to B.
When I asked the railway authorities what principle they followed in deciding whether people may carry guns on trains, they said something very sensible. "It's not so much the item," they told me, "it's the behaviour."
A free society can function properly only if it works out what is a threat and what isn't. If it ignores threat, it will be attacked. If it treats everyone as a threat, it will grind to a halt.
This is where the Government's thinking is so patchy. Mr Brown is right to want to look at public buildings to see how they could be better protected from vehicle attack. He is right, belatedly, about the need for better border controls. But the question to settle before you can take effective action against terrorism is: "What and whom are we talking about?"
On Wednesday, the Commons listened with close attention to everything the Prime Minister said about physical protection from attack, but when he turned to how to challenge what he called "extremist propaganda", MPs started to chat among themselves.
This was instructive, and depressing. As Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, said in a recent public speech, "The root of the problem is ideological". We cannot know why and how we are likely to be attacked if we do not understand what the violent ideas are, who is purveying them, who is failing to counter them and who is trying to act upon them.
Mr Evans said that roughly 2,000 people are currently "posing a direct threat to national security and public safety". It is reasonable to believe - even though money and grudges and family tensions and hormones all come into it - that every single one of these people will be acting on the basis of a fanatical idea. Unless this is understood, physical protection is not very helpful. As a letter writer put it in this paper yesterday, "Fortress Britain? Yes - with the enemy already well within the castle walls."
In this respect, Mr Evans's thoughtful speech was itself guilty of some evasion. In it, he referred directly to Islam only once (and once more in quoting the name of an organisation). He said that the problem was ideological, but he said very little about what the ideology was.
At present, the Government is confused on this subject, and divided. Some ministers, notably Hazel Blears, who is Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, and David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, are robust about working out who really is a moderate Muslim and who isn't. Others, notably Jack Straw, who always watches his seat in heavily Muslim Blackburn, and John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills (George Orwell himself could not have made these New Labour titles up), are far less rigorous.
So the people chosen by the Government to help combat extremism are sometimes not so moderate themselves. The Government is reviewing Islamic studies at our universities. Its approach is based in part on a report by Dr Ataullah Siddiqui of the Markfield Institute of Higher Education and the Islamic Foundation there. The Markfield bodies adhere to the Islamist ideology of Abul Ala Mawdudi, who founded the Jamaat-i-Islami movement, preaching extremist politics in Pakistan. The Markfield ideas about what should be taught are not liberal, to put it mildly.
The organisations on the Government's Mosques and Imams National Advisory Body, designed to clean up extremism in mosques, include the Muslim Association of Britain. MAB leaders support suicide bombings in the Middle East and are closely connected with the work of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. Their idea of extremism is not yours or mine.
In the latest issue of Private Eye, the Labour Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, has a letter defending Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the religious teacher who also promotes the ideology of suicide bombing and terrorist attacks on our forces in Iraq. Qaradawi believes, in his own words (not quoted by Mr Livingstone), that "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror", but that such conquest "need not necessarily be by the sword".
Ken and others are promoting a sort of Muslim Sinn Fein - men who encourage violence in various contexts, men who attack the Western way of life, but who hope to win support here by taking a "not in my back-yard attitude" to terror. You Westerners won't get killed, is the message, so long as you have the foreign policy we want and let us control the Muslims - teaching, preaching, politics, Islamic banking - in your midst.
This is not what the dominant Muslim traditions in this country want, and even if it were, it would be disastrous for us to accept it, yet the Government talks to such people every day. Some are even its paid advisers and officials. Mr Brown says that £70 million "is being invested in projects devoted to countering violent extremism". Who will get it? Is Mr Brown clear who is extremist and who isn't?
The main Muslim bodies, such as the Muslim Council of Britain, get very annoyed when people speak of "Islamic terrorism" or even (a better phrase, because it draws attention to the fact that the terrorism is inspired by a version of Islam rather than by all Islam) "Islamist terrorism". They say it is a slur on Muslims. The Government now runs away from these terms.
But if substantial numbers of people are killing other people in the name of their God, surely those descriptions are, in a shorthand way, accurate. And surely the spokesmen of that religion should devote their energies to defeating the extremists, not to lambasting those who point the extremism out.
Yes, the root of the problem is ideological, and we need to dig much deeper to pull it up.
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