When Mohammed Emwazi went out from west London to Syria literally to carve out a new career as “Jihadi John”, masked avenger of non-wrongs, England lost an “extremely kind, extremely gentle“ idealist. That is, according to a group called CAGE, whose director Asim Qureshi was moved to chivalrous indignation by the security services” blatantly racist practice of quizzing known Muslim extremists about Muslim extremist terrorism. MI5 “harassment”, Qureshi opined, may have been the proximate cause of the young social justice campaigner’s flight into regrettable (if understandable) excess. He did not exactly say that the problem was rooted in aeons of Islamophobia, but that implication is always taken as read in such rationales.

When three teenaged girls from Bethnal Green flew from London to Istanbul to rendezvous with Islamist eye candy, it was obviously not their fault, because they were too “vulnerable” and too female to be autonomous individuals. Nor was it anything to do with their families “ nor certain excitable Koran passages. It was the internet, but also the Metropolitan Police, who had handed letters about an absconded schoolmate to the girls to give to their parents rather than to the parents directly.

Asian ex-police superintendent Dal Babu “apparently “much-respected” for having founded the National Association of Muslim Police “ weighed in, saying that the police anti-terror program Prevent was a “toxic brand” among most British-based Muslims. As if this was not atrocious enough,

“The core cause of British jihadism is of course the mass immigration mainstream politicians continue to promote, even though it was always obvious that when you import people you also import their pathologies “ and when you assimilate no-one you alienate everyone.”


Muslims, he went on with increasing incoherence, should never be put in a “separate box”, even when investigating Muslim extremism.



Other MPs offer more useful suggestions, including Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, who in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute praised the security services, and placed the blame rightly “ “The responsibility for acts of terror rests with those who commit them. But a huge burden of responsibility also lies with those who act as apologists for them.” His speech consisted of platitudes carefully expressed. Yet platitudinising, if not yet a revolutionary act, today risks raising a Twitchhunt, and so for a Conservative minister constitutes an act of near-bravery.





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