I come from London. Growing up, I didn’t need anyone to explain terrorism to me. I saw it on my doorstep.
I had been in places in London that were later bombed. And I saw almost weekly news reports of more terrorist attacks elsewhere in the UK, usually Northern Ireland.
I come from an Anglo-Irish family – parents from Ireland, children brought up in England. So, in some small way, I had the conflicted background that can – thankfully rarely – lead some to see their own country as the enemy.
While I was able to see both sides of the Northern Ireland story, there are others who are blinkered into seeing just one side’s view.
This is what happened in London on 7/7.
The men who committed that atrocity were British. But elements of their background, culture and religious extremism made them see Britain (and the West in general) as the enemy.
I come from London. Growing up, I didn’t need anyone to explain terrorism to me. I saw it on my doorstep.
I had been in places in London that were later bombed. And I saw almost weekly news reports of more terrorist attacks elsewhere in the UK, usually Northern Ireland.
I come from an Anglo-Irish family – parents from Ireland, children brought up in England. So, in some small way, I had the conflicted background that can – thankfully rarely – lead some to see their own country as the enemy.
While I was able to see both sides of the Northern Ireland story, there are others who are blinkered into seeing just one side’s view.
This is what happened in London on 7/7.
The men who committed that atrocity were British. But elements of their background, culture and religious extremism made them see Britain (and the West in general) as the enemy.
For them, attacking their countrymen was an act showing their religion was more important than their country. And, ultimately, more important than their own lives.
These ‘homegrown’ terrorists are not in the mould of their predecessors. Their zeal, for example, is not just confined to their cause. It extends to dying for that cause.
As I prepared for this edition on homegrown terrorism, there was a flood of information in the news about whether we should be more or less worried about homegrown terrorists.
The head of Britain’s MI5 agency claimed that the Arab Spring would provide new breeding grounds for British terrorists. As new Arab countries opened up, he argued, there was evidence that British jihadis had travelled to them for training.
On the same day as I write this, a white British Muslim convert – Richard Dart – was arrested by British police for allegedly planning a terror attack in the UK.
But balancing all of this out with perhaps the most interesting facts of all was a report by the UK’s reviewer of terror laws, David Anderson. He pointed out that there had not been a single al Qaida attack in Europe in 2011, that nobody in the UK has even been injured by such an attack for over two years and concluded that the threat is ‘sometimes exaggerated for political or commercial purposes’.
He finished by pointing out that the annual average of five deaths from terrorism in Britain during this century was the same number who had died each year from bee stings.
And it is with this question of perspective that our excellent contributors outline how they see the subject in this edition of NATO Review.