by Simon Diggins, Spectator
The recent horrific attack in Golders Green has generated much anger and despair at this latest in a series of concerted, violent assaults currently aimed primarily at the Jewish community, but with a clear lineage to earlier Islamist outrages such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby and the London Bridge attacks of 2017 and 2019. The UK terrorism threat level was raised to “severe” following the attack on Thursday. But terrorism, “an action or threat designed to influence the government or intimidate the public,” is an inadequate descriptor of what we face in Britain. Instead, I believe we face a different problem: a full-blown insurgency.
Correct diagnoses are important: “If you define the problem correctly,” Steve Jobs is supposed to have said, “you almost have the solution”; some psychologists would agree, “Name it to tame it.” But if a doctor gets a diagnosis wrong, then at the least it is less likely that a patient will recover well, to put it mildly: that is where we are in dealing with Islamist extremism.
While terror and terrorism are elements of an insurgency, they are but part; definitions of insurgency are numerous and as slippery as the beast itself, but the British Army’s definition, albeit from 2001, seems a good start point: “the actions of a minority group within a state who are intent on forcing political change by means of a mixture of subversion, propaganda and military pressure, aiming to persuade or intimidate the broad mass of people to accept such a change. It is an organized armed political struggle, the goals of which may be diverse.”
From organized “Globalize the Intifada” hate marches, terror attacks and online trolling, through to the de-platforming of “heterodox” speakers, we are facing what seems to be almost a dictionary definition of an insurgency. And it has not been unsuccessful politically: the government’s recognition of Palestinian statehood, judicial tolerance of attacks on supposedly Israeli-linked firms, the unwillingness of the government to join or even support the US and Israeli assault on the Iranian terror regime, the promotion of Islamophobia definitions, the reluctance to proscribe the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – all could be attributed to the “success” of the insurgency and the electoral calculus of a Labour government that can see the Muslim vote, hitherto one of its two pillars of support (the other being public sector workers), slipping through its fingers.