Patrick Mercer MP, is absolutely right to call for a government enquiry into how al-Qaeda sympathisers, who had attended training camps in Pakistan, were recruited to the security services – and more importantly whether any similar infiltration attempts have gone undetected.
In their recruitment of new staff after the 7/7 London bombings the security services have been potentially vulnerable to infiltration because they appear to have used an inaccurate and far to narrow a definition of what an Islamist extremist actually is. No matter how rigorous the security services' vetting procedures have been, if their fundamental definition of what constitutes an extremist is wrong, then potentially at least, security may have been compromised and the organisation infiltrated.
Time after time following 9/11, 7/7 and later terrorist plots, government statements about ‘extremists’ clearly indicate that the government have meant ‘extreme’ in relation to what they have sometimes openly called ‘mainstream Islam’, rather than meaning ‘extreme’ in terms of the distance of these views from mainstream British values. This in turn has led to a frequently repeated assertion by government ministers and others that ‘Islam has nothing to do with terrorism’. The latter led to the government’s official narrative report on the 7/7 London bombings presenting the most extraordinary conclusion, namely that the security services simply didn’t know what motivated four British young men to commit a major terrorist atrocity in London.
This was a conclusion that frankly shocked a number of us who had undertaken detailed academic study of Islam and pointed to a dangerous unawareness of the way the Qur’an and Hadith have been interpreted since the earliest times of Islamic history. Since its earliest days Islam has had a very strong doctrine of political domination of non Muslims i.e. imposing Islamic government and law on them, which is to be achieved by means of military jihad where non Muslims refuse to submit to it. (See for example Q9:29, which urges Muslims to fight those who do not believe in Islam until they submit and pay the jizya tax imposed on non Muslims in an Islamic state, a text which is interpreted in both classical i.e. medieval, Islamic commentaries and by modern Islamist writers such as Mawdudi as being a command to either engage in or support military jihad to impose Islamic government). Had the security services understood that this teaching is deeply embedded in Islamic history and theology, they would not have been at a loss to understand what motivated four British young men to bomb London in the summer of 2005. Of course, it must also be said that throughout Islamic history many other Muslims have instead emphasised a range of much more peaceful and devotional interpretations of Islam. These include the vast majority of British Muslims who have family origins in the Indian subcontinent. There, following the failure of military jihad against the British in 1856 (aka ‘the Indian mutiny’), Indian ulema (Islamic leaders) made a conscious decision to abandon jihad and instead concentrate on the devotional aspects of Islam. This stance led to a longstanding tradition of peaceful, devotional Islam among British Muslims, until the radicalisation of a significant minority of Muslim youth following the Rushdie affair.
The existence of these twin paths throughout Islamic history, both the violent and the peaceful, means that one can be well within the bounds of historical ‘mainstream Islam’ and still advocate support for violent jihad against non Muslims. So, when the government and the security services have defined Islamic extremists as people who are ‘extreme’ or even ‘deviant’ from ‘mainstream’ Islamic teaching – then their very definition of ‘extremism’ potentially excludes a significant number of those who claim that they only follow ‘mainstream Islam’ as taught in major Islamic centres such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt etc.
Consequently, when after the 7/7 London bombings the security services actively sought to recruit intelligence officers from among young people in the British Muslim community, they had a huge potential security blindspot. Basically, if the security services’ fundamental definition of what constitutes an Islamist extremist was flawed, as the official report into the 7/7 London bombings suggests that it was, then no matter how rigorous the vetting procedures may have been, there is a real possibility that Britain’s security services may well have been infiltrated by Islamists.
That is why these 6 cases highlighted by Patrick Mercer are likely to have occurred. It is also the most likely reason why in 2007 8 police officers and civilian staff working for the Met and other forces were discovered by MI5 to have suspected links to Islamist extremist groups.
This is why it is so absolutely important that the government investigation Patrick Mercer has called for, into potential infiltration of the security services, does actually happen. The Home Secretary MUST instigate an immediate enquiry and it must not only investigate whether infiltration has happened, it must also investigate why it has happened.
