OPINION

       Prime Minister Keir Starmer (Image: Getty)

       On the twentieth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, Sir Keir Starmer issued a statement commemorating the ‘lives lost’ on that tragic day and the courage shown by the emergency services. While rightly honouring the victims of that heinous crime, the words were ill chosen. The lives of 52 people were not lost, as if they had been victims of a natural disaster or a disease. They were deliberately taken in appalling acts of mass murder.

       Worse, he said nothing about the perpetrators and their motivations, instead declaring that ‘those who tried to divide us failed’. But the four Islamist killers did not try to divide Londoners, as if they were merely hot headed members of a debating society. They sought to slaughter as many of the ‘infidels’ as possible and to terrorise the rest of society into submission.

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       That warped aim has galvanised all those who have gone on to commit Islamist atrocities in the years since 7/7. The 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, the 2017 Westminster attack and the ISIS inspired London Bridge rampage, to name but three, were all carried out by fanatics with a burning hatred for their victims.

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       Each time these savages pull their trigger or knife, they have no interest in merely ‘dividing’ opinion. They want to impose their own twisted opinion with lethal force. Their murderous spree will not abate until the societies we inhabit, which they consider irredeemably sick and a grotesque insult to their faith, are violently replaced by a new order based on Sharia law. In their religious ‘utopia’, non-Muslims become subservient members of a society run on Islamist principles and women and sexual minorities face intense repression. Their bleak vision of submission and slavery is like the Handmaid’s Tale on steroids.

       Most of the Muslim community rejects this interpretation of their religion and rightly cleaves to British values and identity. In so many cases, Muslims are model citizens who contribute to the good of their nation and serve patriotically in our police and armed forces. They all fully deserve protection from the scourge of extremism, prejudice and discrimination.

       At the same time, the impulse for radical jihad does arise from within Muslim societies and from the interpretations given to holy verses, and it is important to acknowledge that. While it would be wrong to conflate Muslims with Islamism, it would equally be na？ve to deny the connection between Islamist ideology and the faith from which it emerges.

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       The problem is that the establishment in this country, as in many western countries, refuses to accept this. They will not state publicly that what needs tackling is a religious ideology, not just extremism or ‘terror’. It is unlikely that Sir Keir Starmer’s government, desperate as it is to court Muslim groups after being accused of complicity in Gaza’s ‘genocide’, will arrive at any such moral clarity. Indeed, there are fears that the government may soon adopt a definition of Islamophobia which stifles criticism of Islam as a faith and thus has a chilling effect on free speech.

       All of this should leave us distinctly queasy when we consider that the jihadist threat is very much alive in 2025. We are told that Islamist extremism makes up 75% of MI5’s caseload and a similar percentage of police counter terror investigations. Yet in the year ending March 2024, only 13% of referrals to Prevent were concerned with potentially radicalised Muslims. As former Home Secretary Suella Braverman said in 2023, this frightening discrepancy likely reflects ‘cultural timidity and an institutional hesitancy to tackle Islamism for fear of charges of Islamophobia’. There are echoes of the Rochdale scandal here.

       Our prisons are also said to be awash with Islamist gangs who intimidate others into converting to their cause. According to a recent report in The Times, HMP Frankland, one of Britain’s highest security jails, has become so overrun with these gangs that terrorist separation centres which are designed to prevent radicalisation are largely redundant. Barrister Tony Wyatt observed that inmates were being placed in isolation units to protect them from these gangs, a truly appalling indication that the authorities had lost control. The breakdown in order was further highlighted this April when Hashem Abedi, planner of the Manchester Arena atrocity, launched a savage attack on prison officers with boiling oil and homemade weapons.

       Our political system too is under threat, both from Islamist extremists who target MPs and from anti-Israel extremists who ally with them. In May 2010, Sir Stephen Timms was stabbed and nearly killed by Roshonara Choudhry, a 21 year old student who had been influenced by the sermons of Yemen based cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. A decade later, Sir David Amess was murdered by Ali Harbi Ali, a British man who was deeply influenced by Islamic State propaganda.

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       The former MP Mike Freer, who had been on Ali’s radar, was forced to resign after years of intimidation and death threats. On one occasion, the group ‘Muslims against Crusades’ forced their way into a mosque where Freer was meeting constituents and called him a ‘Jewish homosexual pig’. Yet some of our political figures face condemnation for pointing out the poisonous nature of these terror groups. Only last year, Lord Austin was suspended as a housing association chair after he wrote, not unreasonably, that Hamas were ‘Islamist rapists and murderers’. It seems that public bodies cannot handle basic truths about the terror threat.

       Finally, there are the regular anti-Israel marches which have become a convenient vehicle for radical Islamist expression. Marchers enunciate their chilling calls for a ‘global intifada’ and for ‘jihad’ on our streets, words that resonate with murderous intent and strike fear into the hearts of British Jews. Meanwhile, successive governments have failed to stop the annual Al Quds Day march in London, an anti-Israel event that serves the purposes of a hostile Iranian government and its various terror proxies.

       So, twenty years on from 7/7, the Islamist threat is real and the UK remains highly vulnerable. One can only hope that the security services continue to intercept plots in good time and stay one step ahead of their Islamist foes. The government must continue to keep hate preachers out, close down websites that promote violence and work with Muslim scholars and think tanks to promote more positive messages from within Islam. But for this to work, the government must acknowledge the scale of the problem we are up against and end its insidious culture of appeasement.