That only goes to show that the right hon. Lady and I do not co-ordinate our efforts as seamlessly as perhaps we ought, because I should have known that. Anyway, the important thing about the article is that it looks at the consequences and conclusions of our recently published Intelligence and Security Committee report on the terrible events in Woolwich. The main question in Charles Moore’s mind about the killers is: what is it that made them so bloodthirsty and so bold in the first place? Why did they want to do such a terrible thing? He comes to the conclusion:
“Islamist extremism combines something very new—the power of internet technology—with something very old—the power of belief.”
He says that the report establishes that
“Lee Rigby’s murderers were ‘self-starting’”,
but that
“they were not lunatics or even ‘lone wolves’. They took large doses of the drug called ideology…It was supplied by pushers who might live in their neighbourhood, but might equally well live in Yemen or Aleppo.”
Charles Moore refers to the calls that have been made to start a counter-narrative, but he notes that MI5, for all its good work, does not have—some would say that it should not have this; it is not necessarily its responsibility to have it—an ideological unit. He says:
“It is rather as if we were trying to combat Communism without knowing the theories of Marxist-Leninism.”
He concludes:
“Time after time, it is non-violent subversion that has prepared the ground for serious trouble”,
and he warns against the danger of running around
“trying to catch the bad fruit, instead of taking an axe to the tree.”
This is a problem that we face at a scale that is not yet insupportable, but which could get very much worse.
Somebody once said that the problem with the world is that the ignorant are cocksure and the wise are full of doubt. The problem we have is that some people with a racist, radical, totalitarian, extremist, murderous ideology have found a way, in the name of their interpretation of their God and their Prophet, to do what extremists have always wanted to do, which is to enjoy untrammelled power over everyone else.
One cannot mobilise a society or a community to counter that successfully if one confines oneself simply to dealing with individuals whom one has already recognised as at risk of radicalisation, because they will already be on the conveyor belt to an extremist outcome and, very probably, to a violent extremist outcome. What one has to do is not to be shy about the virtues of democratic politics, institutions and ideas, or about denouncing the follies and iniquities of systems based on an ideology that stands in total opposition to everything that moderate and liberal-minded people believe.