Conflicting narratives

In the Telegraph, Matthew d'Ancona points out the dangers of playing politics with national security:

More than eight years after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, there are two competing narratives in the West. The first is frightening, difficult and poses a host of deeply unwelcome questions. According to this version of events, we face a global struggle against a new mutation of militant Islamism ready to use all and any means at its disposal, bonded by anti-semitism, hatred of America and a desire to enforce sharia law and to restore the Caliphate. This network plots globally and kills locally. The merit of this is that it happens to be true.

The second narrative dismisses the whole notion of the "war on terror" as an aberration of the Bush-Blair era. According to this version of events, Islamist terror is mostly the consequence of "Western foreign policy" (for example, the Iraq War was directly responsible for 7/7). With Bush and Blair gone, and al-Qaeda supposedly scattered to the winds, it follows that the winding up of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will bring the whole sorry chapter to an end, and we can all get on with life as normal. The only flaw in this comforting narrative is that it happens to be complete nonsense.

Anti-Jihadism and the European Right

Discussion of the positions of Europe's political right and far right, and their interpretation by observers in the United States, continues at Charles Johnson's LGF blog. The focus of attention has centred on U.S. anti-jihadist blogs like Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs and Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch, which take a generous view of European political figures like Geert Wilders and groups such as the Vlaams Belang and the so-called Pro-Köln movement.

The approach adopted by Jihad Watch, in particular, seems at first sight puzzling-- for Spencer is a serious and committed scholar of Islam and global Islamism who has done much to document and analyze the strategies of contemporary Muslim extremism. It appears, however, that for reasons that aren't clear, he has preferred to base important parts of his view of developments in European society on sources that derive not from Western Europe, but from areas further east, like the Russian Federation. In those parts of the world, opposition to Islamism has unfortunately become caught up in the political manoeuvrings of the ruling government elites, where it is used both as a weapon to stifle political dissent, and as a means of deliberately provoking the growth of Islamist violence (as in the North Caucasus) for murky goals that remain to be clarified.There anti-jihadism is closely associated with state-sanctioned attitudes and ideologies that are manifestly in conflict with the demands of a free society. In certain respects they resemble nothing so much as the agenda of Europe's extreme right, and are sometimes aligned with it. This may account for some of the misunderstandings that are currently on display.