The problem with ex-communists is that they always need new certainties against which to rail.

Mark Seddon

Alan Johnson has taken me to task on this site. Not the Alan Johnson I once knew as the combative leader of the Post Office Workers Union, now turned Blairista, but an Alan Johnson I have never met, but whose biography is honest to admit time spent in the Trotskyite Socialist Organizer. Not that this invalidates his arguments on the threat that terrorism poses, but that most of the ex-Trostskyites and ex-communists I have come across, invariably still see the world in black and white. The imminent collapse of capitalism for them has been replaced by new certainties against which to rail.

In Alan's case it is a "pathological mass movement", a "death cult" courtesy of "totalitarian militant Islam". Hear this from the clearly excitable academic: "The Islamist threat is not that some hundreds of people will be killed, or even once every so often that they will get 'lucky' and kill thousands. In the Muslim world, the victims of totalitarian movements have been in their millions". By extension, the ever pessimistic Alan, believes that there could be "millions of victims" from Islamist terror in Europe. Give me an Avian flu pandemic any day!

But here's the thing, as Americans are wont to say; what evidence does our academic friend have that "millions" have been victims of totalitarian movements in the Islamic world? Over what period of time? From which "movements"? Does he include secular Baathists in his monstrous equation? Are we really to believe such nonsense, because if we do, this collective crime against humanity could mirror the millions slaughtered by the Nazis in Europe and the Khmer Rouge in Indo China. It would be a crime against humanity parallel perhaps to the four million people we know for certain who have perished in the world's most serious - but seemingly unimportant conflict - in the Congo basin.

Unlike Alan, I suspect, I have lived in a country plagued by terrorist attacks. The height of the "troubles" in Northern Ireland were informative for a young boy growing up in a British military garrison. Terrorist attacks in the north of Ireland were almost a daily reality, and terrorism's recruiting sergeant came in many different guises. Partly rooted in religion, but also in injustice, nationalist terrorism sometimes brought a Loyalist terrorist response and vice versa. In the past decade, the swamp began to be drained - not by carpet bombing the Creggan and the Bogside, but by moving towards a political solution. It also meant that the terrorists supply lines had to be cut - in the case of the IRA, that meant halting the flow of funds from Noraid, an organization based in the United States that successive administrations seemed incapable of controlling.

Unlike Alan, I suspect, I have spent a good deal of time in the Middle East. This does not give me any particular expertise in understanding the dastardly mechanics of terrorism, a failing I imagine that Alan would have to acknowledge on his part too. But having met Muslims from all walks of life, I am convinced that the vast majority do not support terrorism and would give anything to avoid living in the sort of miserable caliphate that the mediaeval obscurantists surrounding Bin Laden and co, would like to see imposed. In fact the excitement around the reform movements in Iran and Syria was huge, until the Iraq war, when the reform movements were forced to dive for cover. The old Arabists who once held sway in the British Foreign Office know full well that political solutions in Israel/Palestine hold the key for draining the fanatics' swamp. They also know that the Iraq imbroglio has set back real reform in the region for a very long time indeed.

And then Alan becomes very silly indeed. He reverts to the certainties of his own, fundamentalist political youth. He writes; "Seddon hopes that you will not notice that he has used the deadly threat of Islamist terror to demonize John Reid". The Home Secretary seems to have dealt with his own demons quite capably. In fact I remember offering him a cigarette days after he had stopped his heavy smoking habit, only to have the offer summarily dismissed. John Reid can look after himself. However there is every chance that he would move to take away civil liberties that have withstood two world wars, the London blitz, British counter-terrorist campaigns in Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya and Aden, IRA mainland bombing campaigns, and more besides. Oh, and this is forgetting an earlier time, when the British took on religious fundamentalists in Sudan and Somaliland, when Victorian papers were full of stories of the "mad Mahdi" and "whirling dervishes", or another time when the British tried - and failed to take Afghanistan for the Raj. At least then there was no minister of the Crown claiming that British soldiers wouldn't have "to fire a single shot".

Alan does of course offer a solution to the madness emanating from religious fundamentalists from the Middle East to north America, encapsulated in his suggestion of a "long term battle of ideas", but then miserably fails to outline a single one.

The trouble with our Professor of Doom, is that he has stumbled across some self-fulfilling prophecies, but only if the United States continues to disengage from shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East and is reluctant to commit to successive UN security resolutions that recognize the 1967 boundaries in Israel and Palestine. Or if the US administration continues to use military might, instead of a smart hearts and minds campaigns and the intelligent counter insurgency measures that the British made work in Malaya. That is that the Taliban could one day become as popular as Hamas, and that secular, moderate and nationalist forces are forced into headlong retreat.

This does not shift the onus from those in the Middle East who mount pulpits to denounce America, give tacit support to acts of terror, or as state governments turn a blind eye to terrorist activity. If the Middle East doesn't want the US to police it, much as it didn't like the British or the Ottomans before, then the Middle East has to police itself.

Can west meet east ? is the biq question of our time. How we go about answering that question may define the sort of world we live in for the next quarter century. Now let's move on to attempting at least to answer that, instead of dropping ill-informed incendiaries.

Source: The Guardian, October 2, 2006