Why is the West soft on radical Islam?
In a cover story on “political Islam” last month (August 24, 2017), The Economist raised important issues – not least the West’s reluctance to confront head-on the dangers of radical Islam.
In this The Economist is itself culpable. The title of its lead editorial, “Islam and Democracy”, is oxymoronic. Its briefing in the same issue is fawningly titled “Muslim Democrats, Inshallah.”
Despite harsh Sharia law that should have no place in civilised society, The Economist writes amelioratively: “But some Islamists are participating in politics, and even leading governments, moderately and effectively.”
It then goes on to deceptively conflate Islamists and their terror-laden philosophy with Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity: “Islamists are hardly alone in attempting to inject religion into public life. In India the ruling BJP espouses a specifically Hindu nationalism. Israel has a range of parties seeking to create a more overtly Jewish state. In Europe many Christian Democrats take both parts of the name seriously. In America the Republican Party’s platform holds that if ‘God-given, natural, inalienable rights’ conflict with ‘government, court, or human-granted rights’, the former must always prevail. ‘They are saying something on which all Islamists could agree’, says Nathan Brown of George Washington University.”
All of this offers up a broader question: Why is the West, especially Britain, soft on radical Islam? The short, brutal answer: fear and money.
British Prime Minister Theresa May was hauled over the coals during her visit to Saudi Arabia earlier this year. She booked orders for the sale of British weaponry worth several million pounds sterling to the Saudi kingdom in return for turning a blind eye to the Saudis’ medieval practice of stoning women to death for adultery, among other barbaric laws that govern the country.
Fear is the other reason why the British (and, to an extent, the Germans who have take in a million refugees fleeing war in Syria and Iraq) genuflect in front of the wealthy but regressive custodians of radical Islam in West Asia.
The Islamic State (ISIS) faces defeat in its last bastions in Raqqa in Syria and a few smaller desert towns it still holds. But many ISIS jihadists have already melted away with fleeing refugees into Europe. Some are planning lone wolf attacks of the kind that recently failed on the London underground. An 18-year-old Iraqi refugee seeking asylum in Britain, Ahmed Hassan, is under arrest for the home-made bomb (assembled with ingredients bought from Amazon).
Britain has faced four major Islamist terror attacks since March 2017, including the horrific bombing at singer Ariana Grande’s concert in the Manchester arena. Many of the dead were Ariana’s teenage fans.
Britain has developed a proactive strategy against such lone wolf attacks. Several London promenades are now protected by “Talon” nets to stop vehicle-borne attacks on pedestrians. Concrete barriers have been installed around pedestrian-heavy squares and bridges.
And yet, as security forces across Europe know, lone wolf attacks are impossible to prevent. A terrorist has to succeed just once out of 100 attempts. The security forces have to succeed every time.
In India, radical Islam has long been a scourge. India though is fortunate that despite the attempt to radicalise Muslims, most remain moderates. ISIS and al Qaeda have made relatively little headway in India.
More dangerous than radical Islamist clerics in India, however, are politicians using religion to win votes. The three states where this is most virulent are West Bengal, Jammu & Kashmir and Kerala.
West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee regularly uses Durga Puja and Muharram (which follow each other this weekend) to drive a wedge between Hindus and Muslims. She is brandishing the current Calcutta High Court order against her (which she fully anticipated) to convey to the state’s 30 per cent Muslim population that she is on their side whatever the courts may say.
The same sort of divisive politics is being practised by the Communist government in Kerala, now a hotbed of, and recruitment centre for, radical Islam. When you allow politicians like Mamata Banerjee and Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan to communalise politics, it is difficult to re-secularise the polity.
The Economist offers the grim example of this in Muslim-majority Indonesia: “Indonesia shows how the workings of democracy can magnify the power of an illiberal minority. A survey conducted in 2015 by the Centre of the Study of Islam and Society, a think-tank in Jakarta, found that the proliferation of Sharia-based ordinances was largely the result of local politicians acceding to the demands of conservative Muslim grounds in exchange for votes. Once God’s law is enacted, it proves hard for man to rescind. In Aceh a substantial portion of the public has misgivings about Sharia. But none of the major candidates in the elections last spring challenged the recent Sharia strictures for fear of being ostracised.”
The BJP’s attempts to polarise Hindu majority votes is a direct counter to Muslim polarisation that has been endemic since Mohammad Ali Jinnah floated the two-nation theory. But that doesn’t absolve the BJP. It may win elections as Hindus, despite historically being a divided lot, coalesce to defeat Islamist vote banks.
But it must recognise that the Hindu vote is not only divided by caste and region, but is also notoriously fickle. Nurture it, don’t polarise it.
Leave that, at their peril, to Islamists and their apologists in London and Lutyens'.