The Guardian view on fighting terror: we must win a war for young imaginations
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Version 0 of 1. The death of Talha Asmal, a young man from Dewsbury, is a tragedy for his family, for the Iraqi people he killed as a suicide bomber, and for the victims’ families. It is desperately sad and futile, a testament to the waste of war. Asmal gave his life for a slave-holding gangster regime that practises mass rape as an instrument of policy as well as pleasure and which is held back from genocide only by its lack of power, a regime so hideous that even Saudi Arabia disowns it, in a war that can only end in its defeat. We must give the lie to the stories that make this war so glamorous to outsiders But his won’t be the last such death. One of the more dreadful features of Islamic State’s regime is that it has managed to recruit suicide bombers to die for a country that doesn’t even exist, and which, if it did, would not even be their own. Until recently, suicide bombing was a tactic practised by civilians in revolt against an occupying army. But in Iraq and Syria, Isis is an aggressive force. Nonetheless, the brutal nihilism of the jihadi movement continues to attract young men and women from the UK and elsewhere in western Europe. None of the simple explanations for this stands up to reality. You cannot casually blame western foreign policy: Isis is fighting a sectarian war against almost entirely Muslim armies, and its most effective enemies, Iran and its allies, are also enemies of America and Europe, even if it emerged from the chaos that followed the botched and unjust invasion of 2003. You cannot in many cases blame poverty or domestic dysfunction: Asmal came from a decent, stable family who have been devastated by his recruitment and death at the hands of Isis. You cannot blame Islam as an ideology. It is obvious that Isis imagines itself in Islamic terms but there are many more Muslim voices raised against it, and no shortage of reputable Islamic scholars to denounce it. To the extent that elements of the problem are Islamic, elements of the solution must be, too. But if it were as simple as getting imams to denounce the jihadi ideology every Friday the problem would have been solved 10 years ago. Nor can the problem be blamed on the hostility of mainstream British society. Even if there is too much evidence of prejudice against Muslims, it is not of a nature to provoke or justify the slaughter of Iraqi civilians. As far back as the 1990s, MI5 concluded that there was no single set of factors that would lead young men or even women to violent jihad. Only a novelist, not a psychologist, could properly describe the paths that led young people to war. To prevent more from following them, we need to pay attention to dreams as much as to realities, for dreams – and nightmares – are what lead people to act. Obviously there is a war on the ground, fought with bodies and blood and horror. That needs fighting too, though not by western troops, and it has its own political and economic logic. But if we are to prevent young British people from joining in we must give the lie to the stories that make this war so glamorous to outsiders. Some of those stories are common to all wars. Some adolescents long for a purging and ennobling catastrophe. It is only 101 years since millions of decent and – until then – peaceful Europeans marched off singing to the unimaginable slaughter of the western front. Some of the attractions of jihad stem from its contrast with the messy complexities of everyday life, and its simple opposition of ultimate good with ultimate evil, but some of them come from its resonances with contemporary culture. Films and video games are full of Manichean and apocalyptic struggles of the kind that Isis preaches. The black-clad killers stalking the streets of Paris could have stepped straight from an Xbox game. These tropes are so widespread in the culture because they appeal to something deep in the imagination. Yet video games, or films, or books, or propaganda don’t lead most people to atrocity. It takes a personal touch for that. The jihadi recruiters who groom their prospects online – like paedophiles, as one disgusted Leeds imam described them – are the real enemies here and we must fight them in the imagination of their victims. The best counter to romantic and wholly unrealistic visions of war is the testimony of those who have survived the real thing. There should be more rejoicing over one jihadi who repents than over 99 who are locked up. |