Michael Gove: Of course it's good to talk – but not to terrorists

Published on Saturday 29 November 2008 18:52

Terrorists look at the West's willingness to talk and they see fear

WHEN the BBC Question Time panel met in Basildon last week to discuss the horrific terrorist attacks in Mumbai, hostages were still being held at gunpoint and the death toll from this atrocity was still unknown. But there was one thing people were sure of. Rabbi Julia Neuberger, the Liberal Democrat Baroness, Justin King, the chief executive of Sainsbury's, and a majority of the audience all held to one certainty. The answer to this latest terrorist outrage was the answer to previous terrorist outrages. Let's talk.

We had talked in Northern Ireland in the Nineties. Indeed we had talked to terrorists well before that, including those from the Middle East who had been responsible for the spate of murders and hijackings we had to endure in the Seventies. Talking had an effect then – so surely it's time to talk now. That's what we always do in the end. So why endure more misery and slaughter, through a show of false machismo for the cameras, when negotiation can free us from lives lived in the shadow of as yet unknown atrocities? Winston Churchill was hardly a cheese-eating surrender monkey, but even he recognised that jaw-jaw was better than war-war. You don't solve conflicts by talking to your friends. They're not the people doing the bombing. Instead, you secure peace when you talk to your enemies.

The arguments for negotiation are always powerful. Which is why we need to summon up all our residual moral strength to resist them. Because, far from sparing us further slaughter, any sort of negotiation with the people behind the horror of Mumbai will only guarantee yet deeper pain and further loss in the future. For the terrorists, our willingness to negotiate is not an enlightened desire to resolve deep ancestral conflicts by the application of pure reason and open-minded generosity of spirit. It is weakness. To be exploited. Terrorists look at the West's willingness to talk, our readiness to cede ground, to see the merit in causes which have inspired violence, and they see fear. They apply to every opponent the classic Leninist principle – drive in the bayonet, if you encounter steel withdraw, if you encounter mush, push on. And for decades, terrorists everywhere have been able to slip the blade deeper and deeper into soft tissue.

We sometimes worry in the West that it is our Anglo-Saxon swagger and turbo-capitalist confidence which invites attack. But it is the opposite. It is our weakness in the face of assault which is more provocative than our strength. Consider the two great rallying cries of Osama bin Laden. He tells his supporters that, given the choice between following the strong horse or the weak horse, nature says follow the strong horse. And he considers the West to be the stricken beast, enfeebled by softness, consumerism, democracy and liberalism. We are anxious to withdraw from Iraq, worried about staying the course in Afghanistan and even humbled by pirates sailing medieval dhows in Somalia. Against such infirmity he is certain his fanaticism will prevail because, as he argues on behalf of his mujahideen, they love death, while we in the West love life. For his growing band of followers, committed to a creed at once murderous and austere, blood-soaked and yet politically puritan, the most powerful justification for jihad is the knowledge that the West will crumble. It always does in the end.

Against such an enemy, resolution is our best defence. We need to be clear that not only is negotiation a fatal sign of weakness, it would also be wildly, impossibly, futile with al-Qaeda and its confederates. If you are locked in combat with a terrorist enemy which justifies its atrocities in the name of national liberation then there may well be room for a deal. The IRA's goal of a United Ireland was, and is, at odds with the democratic wishes of the people of Ulster. But it became possible, after they had been fought to a standstill, to negotiate with men who were prepared to temper their demands to political realities.

No such option exists with al-Qaeda and its allies. Anyone who takes the trouble to study their beliefs will realise that al-Qaeda wants to fuse every country with a Muslim population into one totalitarian state run on Taliban lines, before securing the submission of the whole globe to their path. The militant Islamism of al-Qaeda, like the totalitarianism of fascism and communism which it so much resembles, is a creed which seeks to build a new world order drenched in martyrs' blood.

The terrorists behind the atrocities in Mumbai, or Madrid, or London on 7/7, are not protesting against a particular turn of American foreign policy or a specific set of decisions taken by the Israeli state or some alleged folly of Tony Blair's. They don't want an end to settlements on the West Bank, they want extinction for the state of Israel. They are driven by a hatred of the West for what it is, not what it does. They hate the freedom and licence of the West, the ideological challenge democracy poses to their violent, oppressive fundamentalism. That is why they target places where cultures meet and mingle, where the young laugh and let their hair down. That is why Mumbai now joins Bali as a place of loss and mourning. Talk? Yes, let's talk. Urgently and intently now about how we beat these people and defeat the evil ideology which drives them to mass murder. Let us talk in language at once controlled and yet defiant, confident in the strength of our values and conscious that if our enemies had their way all talking, save for the words of compliant surrender, would cease.

Michael Gove is shadow secretary of state for children