3

Terrorism

‘If I had an hour to save the world I would spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution.’

Albert Einstein

Politicians are often accused of not answering the question. We do this because answering the question could compromise us personally, or the party, or indeed government policy. Sometimes we don’t answer the question because we are acutely aware of the follow-up question, which we usually don’t want to answer. Sometimes we hedge our bets in case the answer turns out to be the wrong answer, sometimes we don’t know the answer; and sometimes we’ve simply not heard the question and aren’t brave enough to say so. But most often it’s because we’ve decided long before doing the interview ‘the message’ we want to convey, so whatever the question is we are still going to give you the answer we prepared.

The policy-making on terrorism is a little like that pre-prepared answer: we’ve decided what the answer is long before we heard the question. We’ve presented solutions to terrorism before understanding and unpicking terrorism itself. In Part Three I will be laying out my answers to the challenges we face, but I want to start by asking the question: what is terrorism?

In recent years for Britain it’s 7/7. It’s the day London experienced the worst single terrorist atrocity on home soil, the day fifty-two men and women lost their lives and hundreds more were wounded, losing limbs and receiving life-changing injuries. The victims were of all races, faiths and backgrounds. On that day four British men, all with connections to my home county, Yorkshire, and all followers of my faith, Islam, blew themselves up in a suicide mission; the capital’s tubes and buses ground to a halt, and thousands walked home in silence. On that day terror struck at the heart of the nation’s capital, and terrorism in Britain became truly synonymous with ‘the Muslims’.

Sadly terrorism has become an intrinsic part of the British Muslim journey, the bit of the Muslim story that manifested itself as angry young British Muslim men publicly and horrifically turning to violence to make a political statement. To understand the journey of Muslim Britain we must understand terrorism, not just terrorism in the name of Islam but terrorism per se. We must understand its history, its many manifestations, whether what we face today is the same as or different from terrorism we’ve faced in the past and whether we have learned any lessons from the successes and failures of previous attempts to tackle terrorism.

That day, 7 July 2005, was a few short months after the General Election in which I had fought a parliamentary seat in my home town Dewsbury. It was four years after the Real IRA had killed seven in a car bomb in Ealing, and we once more experienced bombs on the streets of London.1

Britain tried to understand the shocking news that some of our own had done this: not people from faraway lands, not foreigners, not immigrants, but young men born and raised in Britain. This was not planned and performed from afar, as had been the terrorist attack on Pan AM flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, killing 270, this was terrorism made in Britain, and my home town Dewsbury found itself in the spotlight as the home of the ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan. I knew the family: Khan had lived a short walk from my parents’ home; his mum-in-law was the happy, warm dinner lady in my junior school. All four bombers had been raised in Yorkshire, and three of the four were of Pakistani descent.

For me all this was too close to home.

Like me, the bombers were British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent; they were Yorkshire folk, ordinary boys from ordinary families; like me, two were graduates.² The young men launched an indiscriminate attack on Britain, seeing it as both high-value political propaganda for ‘their’ cause and revenge and punishment for Britain’s military action overseas. Khan said this about their actions: ‘Our words have no impact upon you, therefore I’m going to talk to you in a language that you understand. Our words are dead until we give them life with our blood.’ 7/7 was the taking of innocent British life for what Khan described as the taking of innocent lives of ‘our people’, the Muslims. This was Khan’s opposition to British foreign policy, this was his dissent; for him his act of terrorism was his outrageous way of saying he disagreed.

I refer to Khan because he is the only one we heard from in his words explaining why he did what he did. The others left no messages. They were silent participants in a horrific act of violence.

But, however horrific we found those acts on that day, terrorism is not simply defined by such acts. It is not just defined by the carnage it creates, the injuries it inflicts or the fear it features, as all these, when ‘legitimately done’, such as in war, are not defined as terrorism. The appalling moment of violence on innocent civilians on 7/7 was terrorism not just because it was a violent act but because it was an unlawful, unofficial and unauthorized violent act and one with a political end, a cause. Terrorism is defined through the prism of the intent and identity of the perpetrator, not just the atrocity of the act. And in modern-day Britain the terrorist perpetrator of our time is seen as ‘the Muslim’.

On 7/7, ‘the cause’ of these terrorists, our fellow Brits, was not ‘us’ but ‘their Muslim brothers and sisters in Muslim lands’. They had chosen to kill people at home as revenge for people killed in far lands. We felt their loyalty wasn’t with Britain but with their fellow Muslims thousands of miles away. We felt that our fellow Brits had behaved like the enemy within.

And whilst we may have found it impossible to understand this mindset, it wasn’t a new and unusual occurrence. We have faced, witnessed and been subjected to such arguments in the past; the Irish conflict and British Catholics is one such example.

This attack on London was a violent manifestation of a political position based on historic and current grievances. And it was justified as an Islamic duty. It was not dissimilar to Irish terrorism on mainland Britain as revenge for killings in Northern Ireland and violence used to support a demand to leave Irish lands. For my whole life Britain has faced a threat from Irish nationalists, some of whom felt the only way to secure political change was violence. The goal of an independent Ireland was intrinsically linked to an end to violence, as Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker,3 argued, ‘There can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign, oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically’.⁴

We heard similar words from the terrorists who murdered Drummer Lee Rigby: ‘Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers … bring our troops back … leave our lands and you will live in peace.’5

Irish terrorism too relied upon a bond of brotherhood rooted in an identity of faith. The Fenian Dynamite campaign of the 1880s was an indiscriminate campaign of violence that led to a series of explosions in British cities including Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, and in London succeeded in targeting Mansion House, the Underground, the Metropolitan Police, the House of Commons and that bastion of Tory male life, the Carlton Club.⁶ It was organized and funded by the Irish-American ‘brothers’, the Clan na Gael. Grievance and anti-colonial sentiment were exploited to justify the use of violence, and faith offered as a basis to unite. Irish-American Catholics connected with Brits through a cause, and violence became the expression of the frustrated Irish youth who felt that ‘direct action’, ‘propaganda by deed’, was the only way to get the British to pay attention to the Irish question.⁷ This is not unlike the terrorists of today, who use grievance, historical and current, to justify violence as the only way to be heard.

Other religious communities too have been here. After the Second World War and during the creation of Israel, the use of violence against British armed forces and the support for it by British Jews made them appear to be the enemy within. Questions about British Jews serving in our armed forces and their connection to the Jewish resistance movement made us question the loyalty of our fellow citizens. We found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that our fellow Brits felt the need to use violence against us for their ‘cause’.⁸

A connection, a brotherhood, an affinity and indeed a loyalty to ‘them’ rather than ‘us’ – these are neither new nor unnatural. Affinity keeps diaspora communities connected around the world; it’s a sentiment that drives many ex-pat Brits who have lived overseas for decades to support their ‘home teams’ in football and to demand a right to vote in UK general elections. It’s an emotion that means many British Indians, Pakistanis and Bengalis fail the Tebbit cricket test.⁹ It’s a pull that takes evangelical Christians around the world as missionaries in support of their co-religionists and many third- and fourth-generation British Jews to invest in and make Israel their home.

In the 1980s we celebrated and indeed exploited such connection, brotherhood and loyalty amongst the Afghan mujahideen, whom we in the West regarded as freedom fighters but who in the eyes of the Soviet Union were terrorists. ‘Mujahideen’ was a generic term that we, the UK and US, used for those fighting jihad, a holy war. We saw the mujahideen as our fighters in a positive and noble war against the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, which was supported by the Soviet Union. In this battle of the Cold War we supported the mujahideen to help to keep Afghan resistance alive and supported the provision of military equipment, ‘including surface to air missiles’. We felt that ‘one of the objectives of the West in this crisis was to keep the Islamic world aroused about the Soviet invasion [and] that would be served by encouraging a continuing guerrilla resistance’. In other words we supported and saw the benefits of violence in the name of Islam. Sir Robert, now Lord, Armstrong, cabinet secretary in the 1980s, said: ‘So long as Afghans were ready to continue guerrilla resistance, and Pakistan was prepared at least to acquiesce in Pakistani territory being a base for such activity, the West could hardly refuse to provide support, where it could do so with suitable discretion.’10

This arousal of the ‘Islamic world’, which we directed to our advantage, helped create British mujahideen, who went on to become a source of recruitment for subsequent wars across the world, from Chechnya to the Balkans and beyond. Their talk of adventure and brotherhood is just as attractive today.¹¹ Many Brits who travelled to Syria at the end of 2011 and during 2012 to fight against President Assad’s army felt they were simply continuing the work of the mujahideen of yesteryear and indeed, by joining the Free Syrian Army, felt that they too were in line with UK interests.¹²

The mujahideen were also the forerunners of Al Qaeda, which formed in the late 1980s to make jihad international. It was Al Qaeda who took credit for the 9/11 attacks, claiming them as revenge for Islamic ‘humiliation and degradation for eighty years’, for ‘security in Palestine’ and for ‘the infidel armies to leave the land of Muhammad [Saudi Arabia]’

These are not unlike the words of 7/7 bomber Mohammad Siddique Khan, who ‘justified’ his attack as revenge for British foreign policy and the killing of Muslims around the world.¹³

The grievance on which Muslim terrorism was predicated stretched back to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the British/French carve-up of the Muslim world that became the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement and ended in a rejection of modern-day ‘western foreign policy’. More recently it has become a rejection of the very notion of the western world, in the creation of an ‘Islamic state’ where people can live out an ‘Islamic life’ and reject both western and national cultures, values and identities. Hundreds of Brits, some with their families, have responded to this call and travelled to Iraq and Syria, including young men from my home town, Dewsbury.

So the nature of terrorism in the name of Islam and British involvement in it have evolved over the last three and a half decades: from the Afghan mujahideen of the 1980s, to the ‘freedom fighters’ in Bosnia and Chechnya, to the post-Iraq War fighters that became Al Qaeda, including our 7/7 bombers, the ‘home-growns’, and the more recent ISIS recruits, ‘the fourth wave of foreign fighters’.14

Our ‘mujahideen’ eventually came home to terrorize us, Frankenstein’s monsters we created in the name of brotherhood. As Hillary Clinton said:

the people we are fighting today we funded twenty years ago … it wasn’t a bad investment to end the Soviet Union … we said let’s go and recruit these mujahideen … But let’s be careful about what we sow because it’s what we harvest.¹⁵

Honest words from the ex US secretary of state and a good place to start to understand the latest illustration of terrorism.

Today the challenge all countries face in an interconnected, globalized world, where our citizens all carry multiple identities, is how do these ‘connections’, this ‘brotherhood’ and multiple bonds of ‘loyalty’, play out in the face of conflict between our very many identities? For me it’s simple: people pick a side that they believe they have a stronger connection to, and this isn’t necessarily the side they actually have the strongest connection to. It’s something I will explore further in chapter 4.

The 7/7 bombers picked ‘the Muslims’ of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, Muslims who practise and indeed preach a very different life and even faith than the one these young British men practised and preached. Much has been written about the four young men. They appeared to be adjusted, integrated and comfortably British. Indeed one played the very English game of cricket the night before the attack. The Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7th July 2005 states the men displayed ‘little outward sign’ that their religious observance had escalated into anything dangerous. Accounts from family members in the days preceding the London bomb attacks do not suggest ‘angry young men’ stereotypes. Mohammad Sidique Khan was described as ‘a role model to young people’ while Tanweer Hussain was noted to have a character that ‘did not stand out much’.16 And yet they felt that they didn’t belong to us, to Britain, but to an abstract cause overseas.

This again is not new for us in Britain. Many British Sikhs still spend much of their political energy on campaigning for justice for ‘Operation Blue Star’, the attack on the Golden Temple in 1984 by Indian troops. British Sikhs are still trying to get to the truth of what happened and whether there was any potential British involvement.¹⁷

British Tamils have won elections on the back of campaigns to highlight the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka and to bring to justice those involved in their persecution. And many a person of colour and others were moved to protest and show support for their black sisters and brothers in America by shouting ‘Black lives matter’.¹⁸

These are legitimate and understandable sentiments expressed via protests, petitions, parliamentary lobbying and media campaigns and not by bombs on public transport. To have a cause is British; to feel inspired to make the lives of others in faraway places better is British, to have the freedom to dissent is British. To do so with indiscriminate and unlawful violence against fellow Brits is terrorism.

To fight for justice is Islamic; to protect the persecuted is Islamic; to demand freedom and dignity for fellow Muslims is Islamic. To do so with indiscriminate and unlawful violence against fellow Brits is terrorism.

Terrorism is a threat to my nation and my faith, and it’s why it must be defeated.

Across the world there have been and remain movements for the right of people to run their own lives. The argument for the rights of the oppressed, the right to self-determination, of nationalist and separatist movements and the right of the state to govern and quell dissent is made on a daily basis in debates in parliaments across the world. Even in modern-day Europe from Scotland to Spain and Belgium to Bosnia politicians argue about the right of nations to determine their own futures and champion political causes.

The challenge of terrorism, however, arises when these causes leave the organized corridors of power and enter the mayhem of the theatre of war, from Sudan to Somalia, Kashmir to Palestine and Indonesia to Iraq, where violence becomes the tool and is seen as a legitimate way to achieve a political goal, and terrorism is justified in the interests of ‘the cause’. This is not a new concept: allow me to give a little history of terrorism and how we’ve faced it.

The word terrorism today is pejorative, but it wasn’t always so. The term originates from the Latin word terrere, to frighten, and it was first popularized during the French Revolution. Ironically, given its usage today, terrorism originally described a legitimate course of conduct by the state. It was a system, régime de la terreur, adopted by the new government in France in 1793 to restore and maintain order during the transient anarchical period of turmoil and upheaval that followed the Revolution of 1789.19 The system’s chief architect, Maximilien Robespierre, was a politician, a lawyer and an ardent campaigner against the slave trade. This man, described as ‘an advocate for the poor and oppressed, an adversary of corrupt politicians and a prophet of a socially responsible state’, was an influential figure in the Revolution. He declared the régime de la terreur to be ‘justice, prompt, severe and inflexible … therefore an emanation of virtue’.²⁰

But as with all good intentions cruelly implemented, it didn’t end well for Maximilien, who, having seen the end of royal rule, the establishment of the French Republic and the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793, was himself executed by guillotine in 1794, aged thirty-six.²¹ With his early death too died the early unquestioning ‘virtuousness’ of terrorism as a state tool.

Over the following years practitioners of terrorism sold the use of violence against the state or the current order to achieve change as a virtue.

Carlo Pisacane, Duke of San Giovanni in Italy, was born in 1818. He was killed in 1857 trying to establish republican rule in an independent and unified Italy. He was a pioneering advocate of the use of violence as a necessary element to achieve change. His championing of ‘the propaganda of the deed’ and his view that ‘ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free’ have influenced revolutionaries and rebels for over 150 years.²² Violence, for Pisacane, was necessary not only to draw attention to and generate publicity for a cause, but also to act as a siren to inform, educate and rally the masses. In a Pisacane world peaceful endeavours such as protests, petitions, posters or pamphlets were just not effective.²³ Like the 7/7 bombers he felt violence was a legitimate form of political dissent. We have been here before.

Early adherents of ‘propaganda by the deed’ were the Narodnaya Volya or the People’s Will, a revolutionary organization established in the Russian Empire in 1879. They felt that targeted violence against high-profile figures of the ruling classes was the wake-up call to trigger a mass uprising amongst the peasants, a necessary step for change. They were ruthlessly selective in their use of violence and, although they never made a virtue of terrorism, they did consider it a necessary evil. The group’s assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, a suicide mission, eventually led to their downfall and impacted European history in ways which led to mass bloodshed and persecution.24 Terrorism as a tool of necessary reform became a trigger for no reform in Russia and beyond and a justification for further persecution of the poor and vulnerable, including anti-Jewish pogroms.

Despite this failure of outcome the assassination itself inspired revolutionaries across the world, including London, which became host to the International Anarchist Congress in July 1881, four months after the assassination, where the ‘propaganda by the deed’ approach that is terrorism was argued to be legitimate.²⁵

The gathering fed the fear of a global anarchy movement with its central committee headquartered in London, and newspapers confused anarchists with foreigners, refugees and Jews, which eventually led to parliament introducing its first-ever immigration laws, the Aliens Act, 1905, to control the ‘alien invasion’ mainly from Poland and Russia, which was turning London into ‘a foreign city’.²⁶ This media feeding of fear is something which we see again today, with terrorists being confused with refugees, refugees with settled visible minorities and ordinary law-abiding British Muslim citizens. We’ve been here before.

English newspapers of the time wrote stories of a global conspiracy, and Lord Salisbury, the then leader of the Conservative Party and later prime minister, argued that ‘England is to a great extent the headquarters, the base, from which the Anarchist operations are conducted’,²⁷ an argument that was made once again in more recent years by French officials when they coined the phrase ‘Londonistan’.²⁸

Even in the nineteenth century the concern about ‘foreign terrorists’ – who only ever managed to execute one, albeit unsuccessful, bombing in London, with the bomb detonating before it reached its destination – attracted much more political and media interest than Irish, ‘home-grown’ terrorists who were during the same periods achieving much more success through their Fenian Dynamite Campaign.29

This difference of approach and reaction to different forms of terrorism is today again a feature of policy-making and media reporting on terrorism.

Since 7/7 mainland Britain has seen three terrorist attacks which have resulted in the loss of life. Firstly the killing of an eighty-two-year-old great grandfather walking home from his mosque in April 2013 who was stabbed to death by Pavlo Lapshyn, a white supremacist and far-right terrorist who pleaded guilty to murder and to planting three bombs in mosques in the West Midlands. His cause was ‘racial motivation and racial hatred’. He went out hunting for a victim on the night of the murder and taunted the police during their investigation with photographs of the hunting knife he used with the words ‘white power’.³⁰ Secondly the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, an off-duty soldier, outside his barracks in May 2013, who was stabbed by Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, two black British converts who killed him as a ‘revenge’ attack for the actions of our armed forces overseas.³¹ And thirdly the murder of Jo Cox, a member of parliament and high-profile campaigner for refugees and other marginalized groups, who was stabbed to death outside her surgery in June 2016. Her killer, Thomas Mair, had links to the far right: Nazi regalia was found at his home and upon being asked to give his name in court he replied with the slogan ‘Death to traitors, freedom for Britain’, a slogan subsequently adopted by the now proscribed far-right terrorist group National Action.³²

The first two happened during my time in government. At the time I was a minister both in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). It placed me in a unique position to observe and help shape the response from within both government and the British Muslim community. I saw how government, the media and indeed Britain responded to both murders. Both were terrorist acts, both involved the use of violence against an innocent victim to draw attention to a cause, a belief or an ideology or to pursue a political goal, and yet one hardly made it to the national media. For me both were the tragic loss of life at the hands of evil men.

Within hours of Rigby’s murder the great and the good in government, the police and security services were in an emergency meeting. I was at this meeting, the COBRA meeting at 8.45 a.m. on Thursday 23 June 2013. The highly secretive-sounding meeting name is an acronym of the room within which these meetings were originally held, Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. It’s a pretty nondescript room – bland, stuffy, with awful migraine-inducing fluorescent lighting – but it’s where we meet at what are considered to be moments of national crisis or importance.

It was months before Mohammed Saleem’s killer was caught and identified as a far-right extremist. When these facts came to light, there was no COBRA meeting or a prime ministerial statement, or a review of policy, or a new structure to tackle terrorism; Lee Rigby’s murder led to the setting-up of the Extremism Task Force chaired by the prime minister. There were no calls to Saleem’s family or local-area confidence-building visits by cabinet ministers. Neither the prime minister nor the home secretary nor indeed any other cabinet minister visited Birmingham for months after Lapshyn killed Saleem and planted three bombs at mosques.

Most of what we did in response to the brutal murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby, a brother, a son, a father and a soldier, was necessary. He was a man engaged to be married, he had his whole life ahead of him, he had joined the army to serve his country, he paid the ultimate price with his life. It was right we united in grief, it was right we showed our respect, and it was right we honoured him in death. It was right for government to both learn if the murder could have been avoided and take measures to try to prevent future attacks. It was great to see people of all faiths come together to remember, to pray and to pledge to fight terrorism together. And for me it was heartening to see British Muslims clearly, confidently and collectively condemn the murder that was done in the name of our faith, a response that wasn’t lost on the PM and my cabinet colleagues.

So why was the response to Saleem’s death so different? Are different forms of terrorism treated differently? Is the seriousness of a terrorist act determined not by the seriousness of the violence but by the identity of the perpetrator and the victim?

The lack of attention to the murder of eighty-two-year-old great grandfather Mohammed Saleem, also the victim of terrorist attack, played into the narrative of grievance for Muslims, the sense that we applied ‘different standards’ to far-right terrorism and terrorism justified in the name of Islam. Mohammed Saleem was described by his daughter as a hardworking baker who did double shifts at the bakery to support his family, a community man, a trade unionist, a fan of the late Tony Benn. He was killed as he walked home from prayers, a family man stabbed brutally in his local area. He received no memorial, no media tributes and no celebrity funeral attendees. For his family this, along with the questionable handling of the case both by West Midlands police and the coroner, means that they still do not have closure.33 So many questions remain unanswered for them. Was Lapshyn a known extremist? What did we know about him? What connections did he have with far-right groups in the UK? And why, knowing his history as a fascist, did the British embassy in Ukraine support his application to come to the UK as an intern in a densely populated Muslim area? A man who had shaken hands with our British ambassador in Kiev had his hands on a hunting knife within five days of entering Britain and had stabbed a British citizen to death. Surely these facts merited a closer look from government in exactly the same way as we spent time, energy and resources on unpicking the murder of Lee Rigby.³⁴

And the difference in approach wasn’t just from policy-makers but from the media too. The obsessive focus quite rightly on the perpetrators of the Rigby murder was in contrast with the indifferent reporting of Saleem’s death, which hardly made it to the national media and which was not even referred to as ‘terrorism’,³⁵ and the kid-gloves, ‘sympathetic’ approach towards Jo’s murderer, who was referred to as a ‘helpful and polite loner with mental health issues’.³⁶

A member of parliament had been killed in cold blood in broad daylight, this was an attack on our democracy, our freedoms, our way of life, and yet there was no outcry, no dissecting of the groups Tommy Mair was affiliated to, no hunting-down of associates, no obsessive daily commentary of ideology and beliefs. A few brave journalists questioned the broader political environment that prevailed in Britain at that time in the middle of the Brexit campaign and its potential impact on inciting hatred but most simply focused on the perpetrator’s history of mental health rather than his history of fascism.³⁷ His conviction for murder didn’t even make most front pages.

Over the last century Europe has seen terrorists who are motivated by nationalism, communism, sectarianism, racism, fascism and religion. In the US too the terrorism space is diverse, from the Hutaree militia to the Unabomber, from Timothy McVeigh, the ex US soldier and Oklahoma bomber, who killed 168 and wounded over 600 more, to James Von Brunn, who killed a security guard during a suicide mission at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Terrorists motivated by anarchy, white supremacy, fascism and ‘Christian’ patriot movement ideology.38 But pick up almost any right-wing paper in the UK today and the picture painted about terrorism is that it’s a Muslim issue, that the Muslims are uniquely violent, that the threat we face is new and unusual, and that it is an inherent part of the faith of Islam. It’s an approach which the media seem to follow in the US too. In June last year a British man, Michael Steven Sandford, an illegal immigrant in the US, tried to shoot the then US Presidential candidate Donald Trump. Upon arrest Sandford said he’d been planning the murder for a year. Sanford sadly suffers from Asperger’s. The story received little coverage, with Trump himself playing it down: a white British non-Muslim man did not fit his narrative of ‘threat’.³⁹

It’s an approach in the media that is part of a broader approach towards all things Muslim, one that reports ‘Muslim’ stories differently from those involving other communities. The Rt Hon. Lord Justice Leveson, in his report following the Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press, argued:

[T]he real point is whether articles unfairly representing Muslims in a negative light are appropriate in a mature democracy which respects both freedom of expression and the right of individuals not to face discrimination. The evidence demonstrates that sections of the press betray a tendency, which is far from being universal or even preponderant, to portray Muslims in a negative light.⁴⁰

It’s an approach which has been in play since before 7/7 and gathered much momentum since we set off on the ‘war on terror’. Sadly, as I will explore in chapter 4, it’s an approach that has fed both the push and pull factors that create the environment within which terrorism breeds.⁴¹

So both policy-makers and the media seem to treat terrorism and violence in the name of Islam differently from other forms of terrorism, but is the challenge we face today, the terrorism of our times, uniquely different to anything we’ve faced before? Should we treat today’s terrorism differently from what has gone before?

The last century saw terrorism used mainly as a tool of nationalism. Both the left and right of politics adopted terrorism as a means to have their cause heard. The murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Habsburg empire, in Sarajevo, the capital of modern-day Bosnia Herzegovina, in 1914 by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, was one such terrorist act which had the dramatic effect of triggering the First World War. It’s a place I’ve visited often, an unassuming side street where the violent actions of one man changed the world. Terrorism worked.

Two world wars also saw the practice of state terrorism in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, a return to the French revolutionary concept of a regime abusing power and inflicting harm on its citizens. And as the world fell apart and was put back together again by men in grey suits many nations felt they hadn’t been heard, that their right to determine their own futures had been overlooked and that their right to self-rule had been crushed beneath the bureaucracy of convenience. As deals were done, lines drawn across maps and the world divided up amongst the powerful, those that were too weak to be heard at the top tables used violence as a means to be heard. Communities across the world in Asia, Africa and Europe used terrorism to assert their right to a nation state against empires they considered alien or colonialists they felt had outstayed their welcome. We received our fair share of direct action both at home from Irish nationalists and overseas in Egypt, India, Kenya and Palestine.42

Violence was seen by nationalist movements as a legitimate course of action by citizens to achieve what was, according to the Atlantic Charter of 1941 signed by Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, their agreed right.⁴³

And so, throughout the twentieth century, from Irgun and Lehi, Zionist paramilitary groups aiming to secure the state of Israel, to the FLN, the National Liberation Front in Algeria combating French colonialism, to the Mau Mau uprising and its brutal suppression in Kenya, to EOKA, the National Organization of Fighters in Cyprus, nationalist political movements employed terrorism in the struggle against colonial rule. Individuals and organizations, ideologues and revolutionaries, nationalists and the religiously inspired have reached for the gun, bomb, and sometimes simply the humble kitchen knife to make their point, to be heard and to change the course of history. And it often worked, resulting in nations becoming independent from colonial powers. Groups whom today we would define as freedom fighters, including the Muslim mujahideen of the 1980s, used violence to achieve our shared interests.

But herein lies the problem with terrorism: it’s a concept and term that is difficult to define because it requires a moral and political judgement, a judgement on whether violence is a necessary ill to bring about good or simply an ill that can never be justified. For some it is a positive part of a struggle; for others it is a negative part of a negotiation. For some it is the weapon of last resort; for others it is a weapon of mass destruction. For some it is the journey to the ballot box and respectability; for others it is the basis for never being considered acceptable enough to be part of the power structure.

Much depends on who ‘we’ at any point believe are fighting a legitimate fight. Bluntly put, it’s our judgement of right and wrong rather than an independent assessment of right and wrong. And because ‘our’ judgement is based on ‘our’ interests, ‘our’ friendships and ‘our’ version of history, it is unsurprising that there is no worldwide agreed definition of terrorism. The definition depends on who the ‘our’ happens to refer to.

Today the term terrorism is widely used. For the media it is shorthand for a wide range of ‘events’, from assassinations to bombings, violent targeting of civilians, sabotage, hijacking, sexual violence, arson attacks on laboratories and indeed any violent act, whether it’s a sophisticated attack by an organization with a cause or simply an outburst by a lone individual. For the public it can include the actions of a government, and accusations have been made against politicians of engaging in ‘state terrorism’. Tony Blair is the ‘world’s worst terrorist’ was the emotional reaction by relatives of soldiers who died during the Iraq War at the publication of the Chilcot Report.44

Internationally, for politicians and policy-makers, as the definition of what terrorism is requires a moral judgement both about the perpetrator and the perpetrator’s ‘cause’, what is considered a ‘legitimate’ cause by some countries is considered by others as terrorism. Our own experience in Northern Ireland divided politicians across the world: whilst we viewed the ‘Irish struggle’ as terrorism, politicians from the United States to Africa and the Middle East viewed it as a legitimate freedom struggle. And even where politicians and policy-makers agree that the use of violence is wrong per se they find it hard to reach agreement on the use of violence as a tool to resist state violence, colonization and occupation. It’s a point made last year by Alex Younger, the current head of MI6, when he said, ‘In defining as a terrorist anyone who opposes a brutal government, they alienate precisely that group that has to be on side if the extremists are to be defeated’.⁴⁵ Cherie Blair once famously got herself into hot water for suggesting that young Palestinians ‘feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up’.⁴⁶ A swift apology followed. To add a further challenge to this already difficult issue, historically politicians have often changed their position on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of different political causes. No mainstream politician today would refer to opposition to western colonization in large parts of the world as terrorism, even though that opposition often took violent forms.

And it is against this complex backdrop that we try to understand, define and defeat terrorism.

Terrorism is a relative term. It can be used in many contexts and has been known to have many meanings. In 2003 the US Army identified over 100 definitions of the term.47

The ‘terrorism’ experts industry is vast: from academics, to statisticians, writers to historians and commentators to politicians. We all seem to have an opinion on terrorism. And yet right now we still do not have one worldwide accepted legal definition or indeed a moral definition.

There have, however, been previous attempts to agree a legal definition at least. The United Nations started working on a draft in 2000; seventeen years on it has not reached agreement. The main sticking point is a lack of agreement on the need to draw a distinction between terrorism and the exercise of the legitimate right of peoples to resist foreign occupation. The view that terrorism should not be equated with the legitimate struggle of peoples under colonial or alien domination and foreign occupation for self-determination and national liberation is one favoured by numerous countries around the world, mainly those that have historically been colonized, but it’s not a view successive UK governments have supported.

In the UK terrorism is defined under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act, 2000, as:

the use or threat of action to influence the government or an international government organisation or to intimidate the public and the use or threat is made for the purposes of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause. The action involves serious violence against a person, involves serious damage to property, endangers a person’s life, creates a serious risk to the health or safety or is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.

The UK definition does not make any allowance for legitimate freedom struggles.

It’s an area of conflict that was discussed by the Supreme Court in 2013 in the case of R v. Gul.48 The Supreme Court noted that, although the issue was one for parliament to decide, the current UK definition of terrorism was ‘concerningly wide’ and cited the concerns of David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation in the UK, that ‘the current law allows members of any nationalist or separatist group to be turned into terrorists by virtue of their participation in a lawful armed conflict, however great the provocation and however odious the regime which they have attacked’.⁴⁹

Although we don’t have an agreed international definition, the UN has passed numerous resolutions to classify specific acts like hijacking as terrorist attacks and has managed to foster international cooperation on ‘terrorism’ without a definition. Within weeks of the 9/11 attacks the UN Security Council, in a meeting that lasted three minutes, unanimously passed UN Resolution 1373, which bound all UN member states to act collectively against terrorism despite not having a collectively agreed definition of the term. Members were encouraged to share their intelligence on terrorist groups and adjust their national laws so that they could ratify all of the existing international conventions on terrorism, establishing terrorist acts as serious criminal offences in domestic laws and reflecting the seriousness of such acts in sentences.

So whilst the world didn’t manage to agree a definition of terrorism it agreed to work together to defeat terrorism.

The Terrorism Act of 2006 was our response to the 7/7 bombings. It created new terrorist offences of encouraging, training and preparing for and glorifying acts of terrorism. The passage of this Act was controversial. The debate between striking the right balance between security and liberty took centre stage, and a broad coalition including human rights activists, the ex-head of MI6 and the Tory Party all lined up against Tony Blair’s proposals. Many raised the concerns about judging who was a terrorist and how this legislation had the potential to chill genuine opposition to oppression. The then shadow home secretary David Davis said:

I want to see people who encourage terrorism either expelled or locked up. But we have got to be very careful on the one hand not to unnecessarily limit free speech or on the other hand give clever lawyers a way out by making it too wide.⁵⁰

But the laws were passed and have not been revoked.

Our definition of terrorism has continued to cause much concern. David Anderson, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, in his 2014 report, found that the UK has some of the most extensive anti-terrorism laws in the western world and a definition of terrorism that is far broader than the various international treaties in this area. The definition covers acts in the UK and overseas and can be invoked even where there is no wish to spread fear or to intimidate. The definition, David Anderson argues, is broad enough to include a campaigner who voices a religious objection to vaccination or the racist who throws a pipe bomb at his neighbour’s wall. He concluded that ‘It is time Parliament reviewed the definition of terrorism to avoid the potential for abuse and to cement public support for special powers that are unfortunately likely to be needed for the foreseeable future.’51 Or as Mike Harris, a writer and campaigner on freedom of expression, argues, our definition would make George Orwell a terrorist for travelling to Spain to fight General Franco’s fascists as it would human rights activists who advocate for the overthrow of Robert Mugabe.⁵²

Now you may ask: what’s in a definition? Isn’t arguing about the minutiae of phrasing and a detailed analysis of the words used simply a pastime of under-worked academics? I would argue not, because how broadly we define terrorism determines how widely we cast the net, and against which Brits we can use what are often draconian and punitive laws. And sadly what may have appeared as wild assertions about the abuse of the use of terrorism laws have been borne out by the way the legislation has been applied in real life.

Let me give you some examples. In 2005 train-spotters at Basingstoke station were apprehended and questioned under anti-terror laws: apparently noting down serial numbers and taking photographs was akin to behaving like a reconnaissance unit for a terrorist cell.⁵³ At the Labour Party conference in Brighton in 2005, an eighty-two-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany who heckled and called the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, a liar, interrupting Straw’s speech on Iraq, was at the receiving end of anti-terror legislation when he was ejected from the conference and refused re-entry. In 2008 a white couple with a mixed-race child with cerebral palsy alleged that they were stopped and questioned under anti-terror laws and questioned on suspicion of human trafficking. Also in 2008 Gordon Brown invoked anti-terror laws against Iceland,⁵⁴ the country not the frozen food shop, to recover assets. In 2012 a former soldier with Parkinson’s disease was arrested at an Olympic cycling event for not smiling.55 Anti-terror laws have been used against elderly peaceful protesters: an eleven-year-old girl at an anti-war protest and even a man with a cricket bat on his way to a cricket match.⁵⁶

These are just a few examples which should convince us that it is important we get this right. Laws designed to keep us safe should not be so broad as to make the innocents fair game. Misquoting Ronald Reagan’s words poignantly said minutes before an assassination attempt upon him in 1981, a ‘Government’s first duty is to protect the people not ruin their lives’.⁵⁷ It’s a phrase which is relevant when we look at the number of people arrested under terrorism laws and subsequently neither charged nor convicted.

In 2015 there were 280 terrorism-related arrests. Only 34 per cent were charged; nearly 40 per cent of those arrested were released without any form of charge, terrorism-related or otherwise. There were 49 convictions in that calendar year. Prior to that, between September 2001 and September 2015, 3,086 people were arrested for terrorism-related offences. Of these 793 were charged, and of those 507 were convicted.⁵⁸ Now, you may argue that these innocent people who are arrested and not charged are simply necessary collateral damage to keep us safe. As I will argue in chapter 4, these individuals – usually young men and women who can have their futures destroyed by a ‘terrorist arrest’ – are exactly the wrongly accused that become potential recruits for genuine terrorists.

This concern about the broader community being ‘fair game’, again, is nothing new. I have had many a conversation with Catholic friends on the pressures of life in England during the Irish ‘troubles’, friends in public life who found their loyalty being questioned, and friends who felt anger both at the violent actions of their co-religionists and the lack of understanding on the part of government as to the underlying causes that led individuals down the path of terror. Whilst there are many opinions on the men involved in the ‘Irish struggle’, whether they were heroes or villains, terrorists or freedom fighters, there can be no disagreement on the violence, victimization and vilification many Catholics faced growing up in Belfast. They had genuine grievances, even though their methods of expressing them were abhorrent and illegal. And there is no doubt that the broader Catholic community in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK suffered as a result of the battle against Irish-related terrorism.⁵⁹

We’ve been here before. During my lifetime thousands have died as a result of Irish-related terrorism on both sides of the divide: unionists and nationalists, paramilitaries, security forces and hundreds and hundreds of civilians – a total of 3,583 between 1969 and 2015.60 But how does this compare to the threat from terrorism in the name of Islam? And how extensive is the current worldwide threat from all forms of terrorism?

Terrorism is serious and real; the threat from it is severe. But, as with all policy areas when government makes a choice between what it spends its time and money on, it’s important that our assessment is based on fact. And when a nation holds a section of its society accountable for violence then it needs to do so on the basis of fact, not myth.

There is a plethora of words which others prefer to use to describe the current phenomenon of terrorism, some of which I will discuss later in the book, but all I believe carry challenges which stop us from both diagnosing and solving the issue. So however clunky my preferred choice, ‘terrorism and violence in the name of Islam or other Muslims’, it will be my long shorthand for describing this challenge that we face today, a good starting point for addressing the challenge.

The statistics on terrorism make for interesting reading, but I start with two caveats. Firstly, just as there is no single definition of terrorism, so there is no single up-to-date world tally of terrorist attacks. I have used some of the most authoritative. And secondly, terrorism is a changing scene, and therefore sadly and tragically one incident can quickly change the stats. We are constantly playing catch-up, but I hope that an assessment of the last fifteen years or so allows us to make assessments on overall trends.

The twenty-first century has seen a consistent rise in the number of deaths from terrorism, increasing from 3,329 in 2000 to 32,685 in 2014.⁶¹ The majority of terrorist acts and deaths caused by terrorism occur in five countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria – although there has been a steady increase in the number of countries which now experience some form of terrorism. In these five countries terrorism greatly increased after the intervention in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq and the start of the Syrian civil war.

Terrorism is most likely to occur where the use of political violence by the government is widespread – indeed 92 per cent of all terrorism between 1989 and 2004 was in such countries.⁶² In the last twenty-five years 88 per cent of all terrorism has been in countries that are experiencing some form of violent conflict – either civil war, insurgency or western intervention and wars.63

In developed countries terrorism is more likely to occur in those places where socioeconomic factors such as high unemployment, a lack of faith in democracy and the media, prevalence of drugs and negative attitudes towards immigration are widespread.⁶⁴

Nowhere in the world is immune from terrorism, but there are places in the world which have low or little impact from terrorism, such as large parts of South America and Central Asia, pockets of Africa, some Eastern European countries, and range from bustling, multi-faith countries such as Singapore to not-very-diverse New Zealand. We should study deeply where terrorism is widespread and where it hardly touches and from that try and understand why.

In reality the majority of terrorism is not targeted at the West. After 9/11 only 0.5 per cent of all terrorist deaths have occurred in western counties. Most terrorist acts committed by those purporting to be Muslim or acting in the name of Islam are against other Muslims.⁶⁵

In the West the lone wolf attacker is the main face of terrorism, accounting for 70 per cent of all terrorist deaths since 2006. Eighty per cent of these lone wolf attacks were not primarily driven by terrorism and violence in the name of Islam but attributed to a mix of right-wing extremists, nationalists, supremacists and other anti-government elements.⁶⁶ In other words, we in the West are neither the main target of terrorism nor its main victims. And terrorism in the name of Islam is not the main cause of deaths from terrorism in the West: we are more likely to be killed at the hands of a terrorist with a far-right, nationalist or supremacist ideology.

Let me refer to another source, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), an open-source database run by the University of Maryland, which provides extensive data on terrorist events around the world from 1970 through to the present day. The database, which is live and is updated from year to year, includes at the time of writing 150,000 terrorist incidents. As such, it is the most comprehensive terrorism database open to the public.⁶⁷ A review conducted by Global Research in 2013 looked at data for the US only and of the approximately 2,400 terrorist attacks on US soil between 1970 and 2012 contained within the database, it appears that approximately 60, or 2.5 per cent, were carried out by Muslims.⁶⁸

According to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) report on terrorism incidents in 2015, almost three-quarters of fatalities from terrorism occurred in the five countries mentioned above, four of which are Muslim-majority and in one of which, Nigeria, Muslims constitute almost half the population. As for perpetrators of terrorist violence, the GTI report shows that only four groups were responsible for 74 per cent of all these deaths; ISIL, Boko Haram, the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Moreover, of the 650 per cent increase in fatalities occurring in the twenty-one OECD countries which suffered at least one terrorist incident, the majority of deaths occurred in two countries, one of which is majority Muslim: Turkey (the other country was France).69

Closer to home, data from EUROPOL, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, support the fact that few of the terrorist attacks carried out in EU countries are related to religious militancy. The specific year-on-year figures, which cover the broad picture by looking at ‘failed, foiled or completed attacks’, make for enlightening reading. In 2010, of 249 terrorist attacks, 3 were considered by Europol to be ‘Islamist’.⁷⁰ In 2011 not one of the 174 failed, foiled or completed terrorist attacks in EU countries was ‘affiliated’ to or ‘inspired’ by Islamic terrorist organizations.⁷¹ In 2012, there were 219 terrorist attacks in EU countries; 6 of them were ‘religiously motivated’.⁷² In 2013, there were 152 attacks, of which 2 were ‘religiously motivated’. The latest figures, reported in 2016, show 211 failed, foiled or completed terrorist attacks of which 17 were ‘religiously motivated’. In fact, in the last five years or so less than 2 per cent of all terrorist attacks in the EU have been ‘religiously motivated’, although these figures pre-date the recent Paris and Brussels killings.⁷³

The data also helpfully provide a figure for failed, foiled or successfully executed terrorist attacks in the EU from 2006 to 2015, which is 3,096, of which 37, just under 1.2 per cent, were ‘religiously motivated’.

In the UK even today the number of deaths attributable to the security situation in Northern Ireland far exceeds deaths occurring because of Islamic or Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism as it is defined in the statistics. Since 7/7 there have been twenty-nine lives lost as a consequence of the security situation in Northern Ireland, compared with two on mainland Britain, of which one has been in the name of Islam or Muslims. The vast majority of incidents have still been Irish-related, and indeed only last year the threat level to mainland Britain from such terrorism was raised to ‘substantial’, meaning that an attack is a strong possibility. For international terrorism, including terrorism in the name of Islam, the threat level is ‘severe’, meaning that an attack is highly likely, the same level applied to Irish-related terrorism in Northern Ireland itself.

The threat from far-right extremism too is a growing phenomenon in the UK, as it is in Europe and the US, where a report in 2015 warned that since 9/11 ‘more people have been killed in America by non-Islamic domestic terrorists than jihadists’.74 More people around the world every year die from the consequences of climate change, natural disasters and poverty than terrorism, and thirteen times as many people globally die from homicide than terrorism.⁷⁵

A few years ago in the US the National Counter Terrorism Center released its report into terrorist deaths, which led to a number of light-hearted comparisons to make the point about perspective and to emphasize that an irrational fear of terrorism is both unwarranted and a poor basis for public policy decisions. I found two of these personally interesting.⁷⁶ My dad’s been making beds for over thirty-five years, and we still do it in the old-fashioned way in a factory in Yorkshire. I was surprised to read that Americans are more likely to be crushed to death by their furniture each year or die from falling out of bed than die in a terrorist incident. Not a great advert for the furniture industry but a good context for the scaremongers. In the UK you are more likely to die in your bathtub, in a road accident, at the hands of a current or former partner or even from being stung by ‘hornets, wasps and bees’ than in a terrorist attack.⁷⁷

Or, as my friend and colleague Dan Hannan, MEP, recently said in his own unique style, you’re more likely to die from ‘unprotected’ sex than at the hands of a terrorist.⁷⁸

I cite these examples not to diminish the real threat of terrorism, or to minimize the loss and suffering of the thousands killed and injured around the world, but to set figures in context, to separate fact from fiction so that we can measure whether our response is both accurate and proportionate, a strategy based on statistics not scaremongering.

The terrorist threat we face in the UK is small compared to the rest of the world. Indeed terrorism is far greater in places around the world, where we have intervened in the recent past to bring about peace, places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.

In 2010 the then head of MI6, John Sawers, said we can never guarantee against terrorism. ‘C’, as he was known, in what was the first public speech by a serving head of MI6, also said that there was no single reason or theory to explain terrorism. I will explore this in chapter 4 but I quote ‘C’ because the reality is that we have been subjected to terrorist acts in the past, and sadly it is highly likely we will in the future.⁷⁹

Terrorism is not an end in itself, it’s a means to end. It’s been used throughout history as a way of effecting change, to influence and exert political will upon others. Sometimes it’s been crushed, such as the brutal purge of the Tamil Tigers by the government of Sri Lanka in 2009. Occasionally it’s worked, resulting in the establishment of independent nation states such as Timor Leste in 2002 and South Sudan in 2011. But mostly it’s been part of a process, with violent expressions of viewpoints eventually replaced with clandestine contacts leading to discussion, dialogue, and democratic engagement.

We in the UK today are lucky that our forefathers have been on that journey to democratic engagement and we have inherited the fruits of a mature and established democracy. At least every five years, through general elections, we as a nation are given the right to determine our future. Our revolutionary instinct is channelled through referenda, our dissent is funnelled through the petitions and protests, and our weapon is the pencil with which we mark a cross on a ballot paper. It’s how we are heard. It’s hard for us to imagine what it must be like to live under a dictator, a despotic regime or an occupation where the basic right to live, to work and to determine your own future simply do not exist.

Terrorism as a tool to make a point has no place in democratic nations such as ours, and terrorism thus can never be a tool to make oneself heard.

We are a privileged nation with the space to consider, think and respond. And nowhere is such an approach required more than in the battle against terrorism. Politicians owe it to the people to understand the problem well, as that will be the basis of responding well. But politics unfortunately does not always foster an environment for grown-up conversations. To suggest that we try to understand the history of terrorism, the diverse manifestations of it, to recognize when we have been at the receiving end of it and been accused of supporting, funding and promoting it is in politics unacceptable. To advocate that we speak to the angry young men who could be attracted to terrorism not to condone but to understand how they justify the use of violence is a crazy idea. To state the obvious, that most terrorist causes are eventually resolved at the table of diplomacy, and many terrorists become power brokers and some, like Nelson Mandela, international statesmen, is a novel idea. But these are all facts, a reality.80

It’s an issue Jonathan Powell tries to unpick in his book Talking to Terrorists, a fascinating account of the why, when and how of engaging with terrorism. Powell is a civil servant with decades of experience. As ex chief of staff to Prime Minister Blair in Downing Street, he played a lead role in the Northern Ireland peace negotiations resulting in the Good Friday Agreement and now runs a charity which specializes in mediation and negotiations in complex conflicts.

He refers to a 2008 study which looked at 648 terrorist groups since 1968 and found that 7 per cent were crushed through military means, 10 per cent were successful, 40 per cent ended as a result of policing, but the largest number, 43 per cent, ended in a transition to a political process. These are facts, a reality.⁸¹ Drawing on conflicts around the world, Powell argues that a definition of terrorism still escapes us. The world cannot agree on a set of words to define what are invariably complex, long-running and deeply entrenched positions of anger, grievance and violence. Powell argues that terror is a tool:

used by governments to instil fear at home, or support the enemies of their enemies abroad, and by insurgent and separatist groups to attract attention when they are ignored or see no peaceful political route to achieving their objectives, or to scare the government into giving in to the demands of a minority.⁸²

The UK historically has both been on the receiving end of, and accused of engaging in, terrorism. We have termed many an anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, nationalist movement terrorist and we’ve subsequently sat around the table with the terrorists as they became political leaders and statesmen. Powell quotes Hugh Gaitskell, the former leader of the Labour Party, who said, ‘All terrorists, at the invitation of the Government, end up with drinks at the Dorchester.’⁸³ I had the fascinating experience of seeing up close attempts by us and our allies to bring the Taliban in from the cold as we withdrew our troops from Afghanistan. And yet despite this politics does not foster an environment for us to have these discussions. And from a practical perspective how can we start to fix a problem if as policy-makers we haven’t given enough attention to unpicking the problem? Surely the fact that the world is struggling to find an agreed definition for terrorism suggests to us that this is a complex issue which merits a thorough analysis before we reach quickly for the solution.

Terrorism has been with us for centuries. Sometimes defined as virtuous, sometimes considered necessary, used both by the state and those fighting the state and almost always resulting in harming the innocent. During my lifetime the term terrorism in the UK has had two main faces, nationalist and religious. Irish terrorism encompassed both. The attacks on the twin towers on 9/11 brought Al Qaeda and its particular brand of terrorism to the attention of the world in shocking fashion. This was not the first Al Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack. An attack on a hotel in Yemen in 1992 which targeted US soldiers killed two civilians, the targeting of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 killed hundreds and injured thousands; and the bombing of a US Navy ship in 2000 killed seventeen sailors.84 But it was on 11 September 2001, when they struck at the heart of ‘western civilization’, that the world finally took notice. Al Qaeda became the new enemy, and the ‘war on terror’ began.

Terrorism and violence in the name of Islam had arrived in the consciousness of us all. I felt the rules of the game changed overnight. The sense of unease between my faith and the West started to show, and the abstract and somewhat wild-eyed musings of the neo-conservatives who spoke of a clash of civilizations and a new world order suddenly gained mainstream traction.

It was the point at which I left Britain. Within a year of the attack, much to my family’s horror, I had sold my legal practice and checked out of the UK. A disintegrating first marriage and an early midlife crisis made 2002 my very late gap year. I travelled to Pakistan, took up home in the capital, Islamabad, and travelled the length and breadth of the country. I spent time in Karachi and Peshawar on the India–Pakistan border in Kashmir, areas which today are considered too dangerous for westerners, and I even passed a few lazy days in Abbotabad, the place where they eventually found Osama Bin Laden.

(Now if at this point a few of you are vexed by this ‘year’ I disappeared from Britain, concerned about what exactly I was doing out there, unsure that I wasn’t being radicalized, not convinced it wasn’t my training time, my jihadi jaunt, the start of my life as a sleeper cell, the placing of me as an enemy within, to you I say: stop watching Fox News!)

By the time terror hit our shores on 7/7, I was back from Pakistan and knee-deep in politics.

Today terrorism presents itself in the consciousness of Brits as ISIS, the abhorrent death cult who torture, rape, pillage and murder their way to creating their version of an Islamic state. It’s a terrorist organization condemned by Muslims across the world – even fellow terrorists Al Qaeda have distanced themselves from ISIS. It preys on the young and vulnerable and uses them as cannon fodder; a young man from Dewsbury, Talha Asmal, was one who brutally lost his life and took others’ lives in Baghdad. Many around the world including Muslims in public life have been put on their ‘hit list’, including Congressman Keith Ellison and Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s political adviser. My own inclusion on that list last year was a stark personal reminder that ‘they’, the terrorists, abhor ‘us Muslims’ as much as they do the rest of Brits. They are the brutal thugs who lay claim to my faith, who claim to fight in the name of Islam by overwhelmingly targeting fellow Muslims.

There is much that has gone wrong in the war on terror, mistakes made and wrong turnings taken both by policy-makers and communities, but before we can analyse where we went wrong with the solution it’s important that we analyse where we went wrong in understanding the problem.

The pursuit of security is a difficult balancing act between necessary measures to minimize risk of harm with sufficient individual liberty and open space to allow for the continued development of a free society in which dissent and disagreement is accommodated. In defeating terrorism we mustn’t undermine the very freedoms and liberties that define us as a nation.

Understanding terrorism, its history, its manifestations, where it occurs and where it doesn’t, when it rears its ugly head and when it disappears, and the stats and figures which separate media headlines from facts and myth from reality, and above all acknowledging the ability of terrorism to mean different things to different people at different times in history is the start of tackling and eventually defeating terrorism.

To defeat terrorism we must first define terrorism. We must learn the lessons of what worked and what did not when we faced these challenges in the past and be deeply aware of the nature and extent of the threat we face today.

Terrorism comes in many forms, and terrorists come from many communities, races and faiths, but to understand better the journey of British Muslims we must understand what makes a tiny minority of them terrorists.