Israel's genocide makes terrorist mayhem in the West inevitable

Just as the previous Western bloodbaths of the 21st century - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya - spurred on terrorist mayhem, Israel's genocide is the biggest mass radicalisation event yet

It is inevitable that Israel’s genocide will lead to terrorist mayhem on the streets of Western cities - and lead to the violent targeting of Westerners elsewhere in the world.

Discussion of this has been practically non-existent: as I’ll discuss, the apologists and architects of a quarter of a century of Western bloodbaths will smear anyone who raises it.

Bu it needs to be talked about given the obvious risk to the lives and security of citizens in the West. Our priority, of course, should be the victims of Israel’s genocide. That doesn’t mean this threat should be erased.

The Iraq war offers obvious lessons. Back in 2010, in testimony to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller - the former head of MI5 - said the following:

"Our involvement in Iraq radicalised, for want of a better word, a whole generation of young people – not a whole generation, a few among a generation – who saw our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as being an attack upon Islam."

She was then asked by an inquiry member to what extent the invasion of Iraq exacerbated the threat posed by international terrorism to the UK, and replied: “Substantially.”

She added she was not surprised that UK citizens were behind the 7/7 terrorist attack of 2005, or that growing numbers in Britain were "attracted to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and saw the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan as threatening their co-religionists and the Muslim world".

A year earlier, she revealed that she had warned ministers and officials in advance that invading Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to Britain.

Indeed, there were many such prior warnings. As The Intercept noted in 2017, a month before the Iraq war, the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee issued a white paper entitled ‘International Terrorism: War With Iraq’, which began:

“The threat from Al Qaida will increase at the onset of any military action against Iraq. They will target Coalition forces and other Western interests in the Middle East. Attacks against Western interests elsewhere are also likely, especially in the US and UK, for maximum impact. The worldwide threat from other Islamist terrorist groups and individuals will increase significantly.”

And went on to conclude:

“Al Qaida and associated groups will continue to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat will be heightened by military action against Iraq. The broader threat from Islamist terrorists will also increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”

There was such warnings in the US, too. Two months before the invasion of Iraq, the National Intelligence Council - which links together the US intelligence community and policy makers - reported there was

“A significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other and that rogue Saddam loyalists would wage guerrilla warfare either by themselves or in alliance with terrorists.”

They added “many angry young recruits” would boost the ranks of Islamist extremism, a prediction the administration of George W. Bush ignored.

And a paper written by CIA analysts in August 2022 was titled: ‘The Perfect Storm: Planning for the Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.’ It offered worse case scenarios which included “A surge of global terrorism against US interests fuelled by (militant) Islamism”.

And these warnings were not just in private. 5 days before the invasion began with ‘Shock and Awe’, an article in the Washington Post (which otherwise, alas, used its sizeable influence to sell a catastrophic war to the American people) was headlined ‘Striking Iraq Could Fuel Further Attacks on U.S.’ It cited bogus claims about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but noted ‘Experts warn that war and occupation could also have the opposite effect by emboldening radical Islamic groups and adding to their grievances.’ Daniel Benjamin - cited as a ‘Clinton administration specialist’, said:

"It's a gamble and a very significant one. On the terrorism side of the ledger, there will be costs. I haven't heard a plausible explanation about how those costs will be avoided or how this will be a net plus on the terrorism side."

Other experts cited came to similar conclusions, with Robert B. Oakley, a former State Department counter-terrorism coordinator, declared the outcome would be unlikely to more valuable than:

"the propaganda gains the jihadists will make in pointing to this as America attacking Islam. That will give them a big boost in recruiting and fundraising. There are millions and millions of people whose hearts and minds are in play."

What happened next? Claimed links between al-Qaeda were proven to be nonsense. Instead, Iraq became a murderous playground for al-Qaeda. And then, in a truly gruesome twist, al-Qaeda became supplanted by an even more extreme movement - ISIS - which took over much of Iraq and Syria, at vast cost. Huge numbers of US and other Western troops were killed by insurgents. There was a spate of terrorist attacks across the Western world, like the March 2004 Madrid bombing and the aforementioned 7/7 attacks in the UK, as well as a spate of attacks in 2017: at the Palace of Westminster in March, the Manchester Arena bombing in May, and the London Bridge attack in June.

The Iraq wasn’t the only catalyst. Overall the so-called ‘War on Terror’ was a total disaster on its own terms. The atrocities committed by Western forces in Afghanistan were largely kept from Western audiences, but they were recognised as such by many others. Guantanamo Bay and the Bagram Theater Internment facility became emblematic of the nonsense Western claims to moral supremacy. The war in Libya drove a surge of terrorism, too. Indeed, the latter specifically played a key role in the radicalisation of the Manchester Arena bombing.

A graph published by ‘OurWorldInData’ vividly underlines the surge of terrorism which followed the dawn of the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

So what of Israel’s Western-armed and facilitated genocide in Gaza? The scale of this crime is, proportionately speaking, far more obscene. Israeli leaders and officials have repeatedly publicly announced their intentions to commit war crimes in lurid detail, and indeed relentlessly voiced their genocidal motives with unapologetic abandon. Gaza has been all but wiped from the face of the earth, its population subjected, variously, to the destruction of their homes, ethnic cleansing, torture, de facto kidnapping, rape, starvation and mass slaughter. Israeli soldiers boast about and rejoice in their crimes in videos posted on social media. The Western media has sought to cover up the abominable reality of what is happening, but the internet makes that impossible, and much of the world is extremely familiar with the gravity of the crime being committed. Western leaders are both accomplices and facilitators, from their apologism for Israeli war crimes to the weapons which make them possible. Above all else, the message transmitted to the world by Western politicians and media outlets - that some lives do not matter at all - has been extremely loudly received.

That surely makes the consequences potentially of a much graver order than the other Western crimes of the 21st century.

Indeed, as early as this January - Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Matt Jukes - Britain’s most senior counter-terrorism officer declared there had been an “unprecedented” rise in the threat from terrorism because of Gaza, which had become a “radicalisation moment”, citing a 25% increase in intelligence coming to counter-terror police.

In March, Avril Haines, the US director of national intelligence - the highest ranking US intelligence official - warned:

“The crisis has galvanized violence by a range of actors around the world. And while it is too early to tell, it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.”

You can bet everything you have that the dashboards of Western intelligence services are currently flashing red. Their currently classified conclusions - Israel’s Western-facilitated depravity is causing mass radicalisation and the threat of terrorism has consequently surged - will be published in the future. We can easily guess the gist in advance.

This is surely the biggest radicalisation event in history. The consequences will be absolutely devastating, and given the scale of the crime, we will suffer them for plausibly generations.

To be clear: when these atrocities are committed, they will be morally indefensible crimes. That doesn’t mean we should not state the obvious, that they are now inevitable, which any vaguely competent intelligence official knows to be true. Indeed, we have a responsibility to spell out the hideous consequences of the crimes committed and facilitated in our name.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena Bombing - which took place during the 2017 general election campaign - then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn delivered a speech which struck exactly the right tone:

“Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.

“That assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children. Those terrorists will forever be reviled and held to account for their actions. But an informed understanding of the causes of terrorism is an essential part of an effective response that will protect the security of our people that fights rather than fuels terrorism.”

This caused an immediate outcry from the British media, the Tories and indeed Corbyn’s Labour opponents, all of whom had invested so much in portraying the Leader of the Opposition as a stooge of terrorism anyway. When I went on TV to defend Corbyn’s position, Labour MPs sent me furious text messages.

But the polling showed this position reflected the commonsense of the British public. After his speech, a poll by YouGov found that 53% agreed that “that wars the UK has supported or fought are responsible, at least in part, for terror attacks against our country”. Just 24% disagreed.

When the inevitable hideous terrorist attacks happen, and we make the same argument again, we will be viciously denounced and smeared by the guilty men and women who cheered on and facilitated violent turmoil with predictable - and indeed predicted - consequences. So be it. We are right, as we were right about all these catastrophes, just as our detractors have been criminally wrong about every single bloodbath.

How should we answer? Personally I would favour some choice expletives, followed by: Why are you still here? You are, in many cases at least, the cheerleaders of military adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, all of which led to death and destruction on a biblical scale, as well as strategic defeat. That your reputations and careers have not been ruined and that you are instead still presented as respectable, learned and moderate is indicative of a world turned on its head. That you have voluntarily chosen to be apologists for the Israeli state as it commits some of the most depraved atrocities of our age leaves you with the same moral authority as other defenders of barbarism throughout history: that is, less than zero. You have helped export bloody pandemonium across the globe, just as you have spurred it on in Western cities. That you still even appear in public speaks to your total absence of shame.

We should have confidence to say: we are dealing here with extremists, themselves radicalised zealots who promote terrorism on a mass scale. They must be held to account, for the sake of their victims in Gaza and beyond, and for own sakes, too.