Brian Monteith: Corbyn wrong to link terror threat to UK policy

Opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn makes a speech on defence. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

It is even more necessary that such a debate takes place before we cast our votes in a general election. I do not, therefore, rush to criticise the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, for raising the issue, even if I think he could have waited until this week to do so.

I must, however, disagree with his view that it is British foreign policy that has brought this terrorism to our shores. He is wrong because he mistakes the motives of al-Qaeda and Islamic State as the same, and he is wrong because we are facing the violent threat of jihad, not a conventional war over territory or resources. Western life and culture is on the line and IS is intent on bringing the West down. Believing, as Corbyn does, that changing our foreign policy will protect us, is a fundamental misjudgment and that alone would prevent me from voting for him even were all his other policies more soundly based.

When we consider the history of attacks by first al-Qaeda and then IS on ordinary people going about their business in the UK what are the facts?

The history is a follows: al-Qaeda was founded back in 1988, some 15 years before the Iraq war. In 1992 its first attack on the US was blowing up a hotel in Aden, Yemen, that killed two Austrian tourists. In 1993 one of the terrorists al-Qaeda had trained attempted to blow up the World Trade Center in New York and bring down both towers; six innocent people were killed including a pregnant secretary. In 1998 al-Qaeda killed 224 people following simultaneous bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es salaam, Tanzania. The West had not invaded any Arabian country and was trying to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

On 11 September 2001 al-Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center resulting in 2,606 deaths, including 67 Britons, with a further 125 killed at the Pentagon and 265 on the aircraft used in the attacks.

The US and UK invaded Afghanistan on 7 October 2001 in response to the al-Qaeda attacks and then invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003 in the belief that Hussein posed a material threat to peace in the Middle East, including the possible use of chemicals, gas and ballistic missiles against his neighbours and own people. The UK’s involvement therefore also came after that first wave of terrorist attacks in which there were British victims.

Following the invasion of Iraq al- Qaeda did indeed widen its targets; the British Consulate and the HSBC bank were bombed in 2003, with 27 dead, including the deaths of British Consul General Roger Short and his staff member Lisa Hallworth. An al Qaeda-inspired cell then killed 192 people by bombing four commuter trains in Madrid in 2004 and in July 2005 the first Islamist attack in the UK killed 52 people, by the bombing of commuter transport in London. Al-Qaeda was ultimately subdued, however, but ISgrew out of civil wars in Iraq and Syria and takes no account of foreign policy. It is a sectarian and cultural jihad.

Our involvement in wars and our foreign policy was not aimed at attacking Muslims because of their faith or Islam in general, indeed it often sought to protect Muslim communities and remove secular despots that had persecuted Muslims. In 1999 it was Tony Blair that had insisted Nato intervene in Kosovo to protect Albanian Muslims. British Foreign policy has been non-sectarian in general and protective of minorities in general, often Muslim minorities.

When the West, including the UK, supported the Arab Spring of 2010 that removed secular autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya it also resulted in the liberation of suppressed Islamic political forces that then sought to impose stricter Islamic laws in those countries. The result has been the persecution of other religions and murderous attacks on Europeans irrespective of any support for or involvement in wars in Arab countries, such as Syria or Iraq, such as 30 British holidaymakers killed at Sousse, Tunisia, in 2015

What of other countries that have had different foreign policies to ours, how have they fared? Sweden has suffered IS or IS-inspired terrorist attacks in Gothenburg (2010) and Stockholm (2017) despite taking a neutral stance in the Iraq War. Belgium, which was involved in the Iraq War and then the bombing of IS targets in Syria, was still subject to terrorist attacks after it withdrew from the US-led operation in Syria in July 2015 – with an IS bombing killing 32 people in Brussels in 2016. Changing its foreign policy approach brought Belgium no relief from being a target for jihadists.

France, famously, did not involve itself in the Iraq War and helped bring down the secular dictator Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which ironically allowed the ISgroups based there to prosper. Yet despite this different foreign policy some of the most barbarous terrorist assaults have been conducted on the French people including the 130 savagely killed in Paris and 86 killed by a truck in Nice.

And what of other groups of people who have been butchered at the hands of IS in recent years, what did they do to deserve these attacks? For the Coptic Christians in Egypt or the Yazidis and Christians in Syria their mere existence was enough to justify mass murder of the most barbaric style.

While we were naturally focusing on the horrific scenes at Manchester this week in Egypt a coach carrying 33 Coptic Christians was stopped and its passengers told to convert to Islam within a ten minute deadline, when they refused they were executed with 29 deaths including ten children.

Four survived by being mistaken for dead.

Corbyn is wrong. The jihadist terrorists hate us for being Christian, for being agnostic and being atheist, for being Jew, Hindu or Sikh – and they don’t care for Muslims that get in the way; they hate our singing, our dancing and free liberal lifestyles. Our foreign policy is not the problem. Corbyn’s failure to understand this is the problem.

l Brian Monteith is editor of ThinkScotland.org