I normally have a lot of respect for Larry Johnson’s work but I think today that he’s suffering from an excessively Western – in the sense of the US/European conventional wisdom – framing of the issues.

Following up on a piece in the Daily Mail by Butt, an avowed ex-radical Islamist, he claims that:

They do not hate us because we love freedom. They do not hate us because we have stupid policies. They hate us, and other Muslims, because we are sinners. Butt’s analysis is spot on.

Firstly, let’s note that we’re talking here about someone whose judgement led him, by his own admission, into a close encounter with terrorism and is now writing pieces for the Daily Mail, a paper perfectly happy to encourage anti-Islamic feeling and to exculpate the West: neither are good character references.

I’m sure it suits many to believe that the motivation for terrorism is something as simple and pathological as religious belief is the basic drive behind the violent extremists. In fact, it displays an almost touching naivety to believe that the West bears no responsibility for the situation in which the world finds itself. Violent extremism thrives in an environment of injustice, which is precisely what our policies have helped build in the Middle East and much of the rest of the world where the Islamic branch of the Abhramaic Religion is dominant.

Islam is, as I understand it, a religion that believes that justice on Earth will follow from a righteous government and that the appalling situation of the Muslim world demonstrates that the Islamic people are not following the path set down by Allah. It is this horror that provides the context in which people like Butt can be drawn into a religiously based extremist movement. It is this injustice that provides the petri dish that violent theology grows in. And this has been largely caused and fed by Western policies over the last hundred and fifty years.

Of course they don’t hate us for our freedoms (whatever the hell that means) or even directly our policies, which they may well consider a punishment for the wrong type of Muslims, but they couldn’t sell their bat-shit crazy beliefs or ideology in an environment where the Islamic world was progressing, where social justice existed and where oppressive Western supported or enabled governments weren’t the rule.
Terrorism, like crime, doesn’t exist without a context: poverty and deprivation doesn’t cause crime – criminals do – but it allows criminals to develop more easily and to justify their acts to themselves. Likewise with terrorism.

Want to stop it? We need both the police and military action in which Larry is expert and we need to adopt a diplomatic and development policy that will drain the swamp so that this war can be won.

Butt makes the point himself in his piece:

And though many British extremists are angered by the deaths of fellow Muslim across the world, what drove me and many others to plot acts of extreme terror within Britain and abroad was a sense that we were fighting for the creation of a revolutionary worldwide Islamic state that would dispense Islamic justice.

If justice was available, this justification falls apart. And as a minor side benefit, we would be adopting a policy that is in line with our own claimed values. Respect democratic decisions. Allow countries to act in their own interests. Stop supporting repressive regimes because they’re compliant with us and stop pretending that ethical behaviour has no place in international relations.