Paris – Climate Change v Islamism. Which problem is biggest?

Imagine you are sitting peacefully at home watching a movie with your family. A few terrorists with guns burst in. They start shooting. What is your reaction?

Option A) you tell your family not to do anything but to continue watching TV, because reacting would be giving in to the terrorists – they want you to be angry and try to attack them, but you are the better person, you have the moral superiority and won’t stoop to their level. Anyway, attacking them might anger them more and they might be even more violent. You tell your family they should all stick together and show the terrorists they can’t win and can’t change your way of life by just carrying on as before. You watch as one by one, each of your kids is murdered, determined to occupy the moral high ground until they shoot you too.

Option B) you understand that what the terrorists want is for you and your family to be dead. So you grab whatever you can that might act as some sort of weapon and rush at the terrorists, trying to the end to disarm them and protect your family.  If you survive, you then do all you can to prevent other terrorists from coming into your home. Then you do all you can to identify where they are coming from and root them out.

The above choice is a little simplistic but it highlights the key points of the two streams of current opinion on the ‘right’ response.

Option B recognizes that you have to remain alive to defend your principles. Once you’ve dealt with the threat, then you are free to build as many ivory towers and moral pedestals as you want. Option A simply lets the terrorists win.

There is no third option for discussing it peacefully over a nice cup of tea, no option for peace and love and mutual respect for all. ISIS are not interested in peace and love. They are barbarians with the utmost contempt for civilization who want to destroy everything that doesn’t fit into their perverted interpretation of an Islamic world. However, ISIS is just one Islamist terror group of course and if we are successful in conquering them, and then Al Qaeda and Boko Haram, and so on, other Islamist groups will emerge. Islamism is the problem, ISIS is just the worst current group. We need to deal with it.

I’ll draw out some key points from my previous blogs. If you want more detail on the future of ISIS look at https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/the-future-of-isis/

The situation in Europe shows a few similarities with the IRA conflict, with the advantage today that we are still in the early stages of Islamist violence. In both cases, the terrorists themselves are mostly no-hoper young men with egos out of alignment with their personal reality. Yes there are a few women too. They desperately want to be respected, but with no education and no skills, a huge chip on their shoulder and a bad attitude, ordinary life offers them few opportunities. With both ISIS and the IRA, the terrorists are drawn from a community that considers itself disadvantaged. Add a hefty amount of indoctrination about how terribly unfair the world is, the promise of being a hero, going down in history as a martyr and the promise of 72 virgins to play with in the afterlife, and the offer to pick up a gun or a knife apparently seems attractive to some. The IRA recruited enough fighters even without the promise of the virgins.

The IRA had only about 300 front-line terrorists at any time, but they came from the nationalist community of which an estimated 30% of people declared some sympathy for them. Compare that with a BBC survey earlier this year that found that in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, only 68% of Muslims agreed with the statement “Acts of violence against those who publish images of the Prophet Mohammed can never be justified”. 68% and 70% are pretty close, so I’ll charitably accept that the 68% were being honest and not simply trying to disassociate themselves from the Paris massacre. The overwhelming majority of British Muslims rejecting violence – two thirds in the BBC survey, is entirely consistent with other surveys on Muslim attitudes around the world, and probably a reasonable figure for Muslims across Europe. Is the glass half full or half empty? Your call.

The good news is the low numbers that become actual front-line terrorists. Only 0.122% of the nationalist community in Northern Ireland at any particular time were front-line IRA terrorists. Now that ISIS are asking potential recruits not to go to Syria but to stay where they are and do their thing there, we should consider how many there might be. If we are lucky and the same 0.122% applies to our three million UK Muslims, then about 3600 are potential Islamist terrorists. That’s about 12 times bigger than the IRA problem if ISIS or other Islamist groups get their acts together. With 20 million Muslims in Europe, that would make for potentially 24,000 Islamist terrorists, or 81 IRAs to put it another way. Most can travel freely between countries.

What of immigration then? People genuinely fleeing violence presumably have lower support for it, but they are only a part of the current influx. Many are economic migrants and they probably conform more closely to the norm. We also know that some terrorists are hiding among other migrants, and indeed at least two of those were involved in the latest Paris massacre. Most of the migrants are young men, so that would tend to skew the problem upwards too. With forces acting in both directions, it’s probably not unreasonable as a first guess to assume the same overall support levels. According to the BBC, 750,000 have entered Europe this year, so that means another 900 potential terrorists were likely in their midst. Europe is currently importing 3 IRAs every year.

Meanwhile, it is rather ironic that many of the current migrants are coming because Angela Merkel felt guilty about the Holocaust. Many Jews are now leaving Europe because they no longer feel safe because of the rapidly rising numbers of attacks by the Islamists she has encouraged to come.

So, the first Paris issue is Islamism, already at 81 potential IRAs and growing at 3 IRAs per year, plus a renewed exodus of Jews due to widespread increasing antisemitism.

So, to the other Paris issue, climate change. I am not the only one annoyed by the hijacking of the environment by leftist pressure groups, because the poor quality of analysis and policies resulting from that pressure ultimately harms both the environment and the poor.

The world has warmed since the last ice age. Life has adjusted throughout to that continuing climate change. Over the last century, sea level has steadily increased, and is still increasing at the same rate now. The North Pole ice has shrunk, to 8.5% to 11% below normal at the moment depending whose figures you look at, but it certainly isn’t disappearing any time soon. However, Antarctic sea ice  has grown to 17% to 25% above normal again depending whose figures you look at, so there is more ice than normal overall. Temperature has also increased over the last century, with a few spurts and a few slowdowns. The last spurt was late 70s to late 90s, with a slowdown since. CO2 levels have rocketed up relentlessly, but satellite-measured temperature hasn’t moved at all since 1998. Only when figures are tampered with is any statistically significant rise visible.

Predictions by climate models have almost all been far higher than the empirical data. In any other branch of science, that would mean throwing theories away and formulating better ones. In climate science, numerous adjustments by alleged ‘climate scientists’ show terrible changes ahead; past figures have invariably been adjusted downwards and recent ones upwards to make the rises seem larger. Climate scientists have severely damaged the reputation of science in every field. The public now distrusts all scientists less and disregard for scientific advice in lifestyle, nutrition, exercise and medication will inevitably lead to an increase in deaths.

Everyone agrees that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and increases will have a forcing effect on temperature, but there is strong disagreement about the magnitude of that effect, the mechanisms and magnitudes of the feedback processes throughout the environmental system, and both the mechanisms and magnitudes of a wide range of natural effects. It is increasingly obvious that climate scientists only cover a subset of the processes affecting climate, but they seem contemptuous of science in other disciplines such as astrophysics that cover important factors such as solar cycles. There is a strong correlation between climate and solar cycles historically but the mechanisms are complex and not yet fully understood. It is also increasingly obvious that many climate scientists are less concerned about the scientific integrity of their ‘research’ than maintaining a closed shop, excluding those who disagree with them, getting the next grant or pushing a political agenda.

Empirical data suggests that the forcing factor of CO2 itself is not as high as assumed in most models, and the very many feedbacks are far more complex than assumed in most models.

CO2 is removed from the environment by natural processes of adaptation faster than modeled – e.g. plants and algae grow faster, and other natural processes such as solar or ocean cycles have far greater effects than assumed in the models. Recent research suggests that it has a ‘half-life’ in the atmosphere only of around 40 years, not the 1000 years claimed by ‘climate scientists’. That means that the problem will go away far faster when we fix it than has been stated.

CO2 is certainly a greenhouse gas, and we should not be complacent about generating it, but on current science (before tampering) it seems there is absolutely no cause for urgent action. It is right to look to future energy sources and move away from fossil fuels, which also cause other large environmental problems, not least of which the particulates that kill millions of people every year. Meanwhile, we should expedite movement from coal and oil to low carbon fossil fuels such as shale gas.

As is often observed, sunny regions such as the Sahara could easily produce enough solar energy for all of Europe, but there is no great hurry so we can wait for the technology to become sufficiently cheap and for the political stability in appropriate areas to be addressed so that large solar farms can be safely developed and supply maintained. Meanwhile, southern Europe is reasonably sunny, politically stable and needs cash. Other regions also have sunny deserts to support them. We will also have abundant fusion energy in the 2nd half of the century. So we have no long term energy problem. Solar/fusion energy will eventually be cheap and abundant, and at an equivalent of less than $30 per barrel of oil, we won’t bother using fossil fuels because they will be too expensive compared to alternatives. The problems we do have in energy supply are short term and mostly caused by idiotic green policies that worsen supply, costs and environmental impact. It is hard to think of a ‘green’ policy that actually works.

The CO2 problem will go away in the long term due to nothing but simple economics and market effects. In the short term, we don’t see a measurable problem due to a happy coincidence of solar cycles and ocean cycles counteracting the presumed warming forcing of the CO2. There is absolutely no need to rush into massively problematic taxes and subsidies for immature technology. The social problems caused by short term panic are far worse than the problem they are meant to fix. Increased food prices have been caused by regulation to enforce use of biofuels. Ludicrously stupid carbon offset programs have led to chopping down of rain forests, draining of peat bogs and forced relocation of local peoples, and after all tat have actually increased CO2 emissions. Lately, carbon taxes in the UK, far higher than elsewhere, have led to collapse of the aluminium and steel industries, while the products have still been produced elsewhere at higher CO2 cost. Those made redundant are made even poorer because they have to pay higher prices for energy thanks to enormous subsidies to rich people who own wind or solar farms. Finally, closing down fossil fuel plants before we have proper substitutes in place and then asking wind farm owners to accept even bigger subsidies to put in diesel generators for use on calm  and dull days is the politics of the asylum. Green policies perform best at transferring money from poor to rich, with environmental damage seemingly a small price to pay for a feel-good factor..

Call me a skeptic or a denier or whatever you want if you like. I am technically ‘luke warm’. There is a problem with CO2, but not a big one, and it will go away all by itself. There is no need for political interference and that which we have seen so far has made far worse problems for both people and the environment than climate change would ever have done. Our politicians would do a far better job if they did nothing at all.

So, Paris then. On one hand we have a minor problem from CO2 emissions that will go away fastest with the fewest problems if our politicians do nothing at all. On the other hand, their previous mistakes have already allowed the Islamist terrorist equivalent of 81 IRAs to enter Europe and the current migrant flux is increasing that by 3 IRAs per year. That does need to be addressed, quickly and effectively.

Perhaps they should all stay in Paris but change the subject.

 

The future of Jihad

Another in my ‘future of’ alphabetic series, finally managed to muster the energy to write something on J. ‘The future of jobs’ is just too dull to bother with, so is justice, but jihad is topical.

From Wikipedia:

Jihad (English pronunciation: /dʒɪˈhɑːd/; Arabic: جهاد jihād [dʒiˈhæːd]) is an Islamic term referring to the religious duty of Muslims to maintain the religion. In Arabic, the word jihād is a noun meaning “to strive, to apply oneself, to struggle, to persevere.”

The common everyday understanding of jihad is associated with holy war, proselytize Islam by peaceful or military means, e.g. Jihadi John and his ISIS colleagues, and that’s what this blog is about.

About 20 years ago or so, Europe decided on a ‘soft warfare’ approach to defense. It seemed quite clever at the time. Here in the UK, we were all watching Neighbours, an Australian soap, scheduled just before evening meal as a wind-down from work (that was before we all worked 8 to 6). As a result, many Brits wanted to emigrate to Oz. Without firing a single shot, Australia managed to get Britain to yearn for its ways of life and treat it with greater respect. If you think about it, that’s what war does. You kill enough of the enemy and cause the rest enough pain and suffering until they finally submit and accept your way of doing things. Neighbours might not have been intended as a soft warfare campaign, but it succeeded tremendously. That idea spread through the Euro-elite which decided that ‘winning hearts and minds’ were the way to go, basically being nice instead of shooting people, using foreign aid to propagate EU ideals of democracy instead of old-style colonization. It has stuck pretty well, and fits especially well with the left-wing mindset that dominates decisions in most of modern Europe. Hawks are out of fashion.

Since then, a few actual wars rather spoiled the purity of soft warfare, but even in the Middle East conflicts, the hearts-and-minds approach has a real presence. It undoubtedly saves a lot of lives on both sides.

However, let’s look at how ISIS and its nouveau jihad is also adopting that same idea.

I wrote recently that Islam is badly in need of modernization:

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/07/13/the-future-of-isis/

Well, ISIS gleefully makes good use of social media to recruit followers around the world, and understands well about influencing hearts and minds as part of their approach. It is ironic that the most medieval, anti-modern-world branch of Islamism is the most comfortable with modern technology and marketing (‘marketing’ is the word we use now for propaganda, when ‘education’ isn’t appropriate).

However, since I wrote that blog just 2 months ago, the world has changed substantially. Europe has shown utter incompetence in dealing with the migrant crisis (refugee crisis if you watch Channel 4 or the BBC). Our leaders totally ignored my advice on what was then merely the Mediterranean Crisis, but then again, it is extremely unlikely that they read my blog: https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2015/04/19/the-mediterranean-crisis/

Instead they made the problem a whole lot worse, greatly amplifying the numbers attempting the journey across the Med and thereby inadvertently causing more deaths by drowning as well as destroying much of the good will between countries that holds the EU together. The idiotic open doors policy advocated by Angela Merkel and Co. has broadcast a loud message to the entire developing world that anyone that would like to be richer but doesn’t want to bother with quaint ideas like law and order or applying for immigration can just pretend to be fleeing something, force their way past a few overwhelmed security guards, and will be given a free home, medical care, education, welfare and generally a life of relative milk and honey in the EU. All they have to do is throw away their papers and say they are from Syria or another war zone. The British approach of focusing on helping actual refugees instead of economic migrants has been widely condemned as utterly uncaring. Estimates vary wildly but anything up to 80% of those entering the EU are economic migrants. Many of the ones fleeing wars or  persecution have passed through perfectly safe countries on their way, so when they left those countries they stopped being asylum seekers or refugees and started being economic migrants. Few can genuinely claim that the EU is the first place of safety they have reached. But if the doors are wide open, why accept less than the best deal around?

ISIS are well aware of this, and have openly stated that they intend to use the mass migration to move ISIS terrorists into Europe, hidden among the crowds. Those terrorists, and those whom they infect with their ideology on arrival, are a direct part of their Jihad. They cause people to flee, and then hide among them. So that’s the first part of the nouveau jihad, the hard jihad, an actual invasion by the back door, with lots of help from useful idiots in government, media and assorted NGOs.

The second part of the Jihad is the Islamification of Europe via cultural aggression, soft warfare, soft Jihad. As often is the case in war, truth is the first casualty, and since Orwell, we know that language is the key to perception of truth. That insight has been harnessed in peacetime every bit as much as in war. By simple verbal inversion of morality that has been achieved in the last two decades, anything West (or Christian) is bad and anything anti-West is good. That has left Europe and America extremely vulnerable to this soft jihad. Moral equivalence and political correctness have eroded confidence in our own morality, even inverted some of it. Even when comparing with the worst atrocities of ISIS, many people will immediately raise anything the West has ever done that wasn’t 100% perfect as if it is absolutely equivalent. Harnessing language as a soft warfare tool, Islamist activists have managed to achieve the victory that to criticize anything coming from Islam is called Islamophobia to make it sound like the person doing the criticism is in the wrong. Furthermore, they have also manipulated the lack of cohesiveness in the Muslim community to conflate Islam and Islamism. The extremists use the whole Muslim population to demand protection for their smaller Islamist subsection, hiding among genuinely peace-loving people, masquerading as part of that ‘overwhelming majority of peace-loving Muslims’ while simultaneously preaching jihad. Even the police are so terrified of being called racist or Islamophobic that they have allowed crimes such as child abuse, rape and violence against women to flourish in some areas, suggesting it is just ‘cultural difference’. By capturing just a few words, Islamists have managed to get a free pass, with the police defending them instead of those they oppress. With a few more words, standards of animal welfare have been sacrificed and many food chains now only stock halal products. With a few more, dress codes in some areas are enforced. Desperate to protect the Muslim community against any retaliation, in London a significant rise of crime against Muslims was widely reported and condemned, whereas a far larger increase in crimes against Jews went almost unreported and unmentioned.

For reasons I don’t understand, media around Europe have tried to help government hide their incompetence in the migrant crisis by conflating the terms migrants and refugees and pretending that every one is deserving of help. Every report seems to use the word ‘desperate’ and every camera seems to be aimed at lovely families with adorable young children in genuine need of help rather than the healthy young men who comprise 80% of the migrants. Every report finds those most deserving of asylum and ignores the rest. Acts of violence by migrants are ignored. This almost universally welcoming message is seen by those everywhere who want a better life, and the fittest compete to get here before the doors close. Anyone wanting to escape justice, or wanting to bring Islamism or criminal enterprise to our countries, can hide in the throng and with many having no papers or false papers, they can be sure of escaping identification. Many that need help most won’t get it because someone less in need has already taken their place.

The jihad effects are already appearing. Germany is reportedly already facing problems, with crowds of young men causing problems, and widespread rape, women abuse and child abuse in migrant camps, with locals being told to cover up so as not to offend the Muslims in case of ‘misunderstandings’. Worse still, the police apparently adopted a policy of attempting to hide these problems, because they don’t want people to turn against Muslims. Even as the first wave has entered Germany, the resident population has been told firmly that it is they who must adapt to Islam, not the migrants who must adopt German values.

Here in the UK, it is a daily occurrence to hear of instances where something has been banned or a speaker refused permission to speak in case it might offend Muslims. The latest is Warwick university Student Union, refusing to allow Maryam Namazie, an ex-Muslim who escaped persecution in Iran, to speak there because she wanted to speak against such oppression. The excuse was because they didn’t want Muslims to be offended. Her own response is worth a read: http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2015/09/27/wsu/

No reverse protection exists for those offended by Islamic values. They must remain quiet or be arrested as Islamophobic, even though, as Namazie clearly points out, it is not the person they hate but the belief.

That is the ‘soft warfare’ jihad. Capture the left, the media, the police, and finally the law. To ensure peace, Islam must be protected from criticism while anything in conflict must be adapted to Islamic values, because Islam won’t change to accommodate host society.

Our culture has a legally enforced Islamic diode. Unless that changes, jihad will be successful.

Soft jihad has already been extremely successful, and will be amplified further via migration, while the migrant crowds will bring the hard jihad hidden in their midst.

Ironically, the worst to suffer from this may be the 68% of Muslims who just want to live in peace and harmony with everyone else. They suffer just as badly from inevitable backlash and prejudice as the 32% who don’t, and often suffer directly from Islamist oppression too.

 

The future of ISIS

I was going to write about the future of intelligence but I just saw a nice graphic by The Economist on the spread of ISIS:

so I’ll write about them instead.

The main Economist article is http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21656690-islamic-state-making-itself-felt-ever-more-countries-how-much-influence

I won’t summarize their article about the current state of affairs; read it yourself. I can add a few comments to highlight the future though.

Surveys on Muslim attitudes to violence consistently show that most Muslims reject violence done in the name of Islam: 65-75%. That is the numeric range that describes the reality of ‘the vast overwhelming majority of peace-loving Muslims’ we see emphasized by politicians and media whenever an Islamic terrorist act occurs, two thirds to three quarters according to when and where the surveys have been done. The last high quality survey in the UK arrived at the figure 68%, comfortably in that range. The other side of the same statistics is that 32% of British Muslims stated some support for violence.

ISIS draws from that quarter or third of Muslims who are comfortable with using violent means to further or defend Islamic interests. Like the IRA in the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, with very similar support statistics, a small number of actual front-line terrorists can rely on about a third of their host population for their support, even though those most of those people will never actually join in the actual violence. The key factors in both situations are that a group feels aggrieved about something, and some people have stepped forward to fight under the banner against that something. For the IRA, it was perceived oppression of the Catholic republican community that wanted to return to a United Ireland. For ISIS, it is initially the perceived war against Islam, even if no-one else has admitted to there being one, amplified by the dream of producing a strict, fully Islamic state that can act as a hub for stricter Islamification of other regions.

Like the IRA, ISIS offers potential glory, a perverted form of status and glamour, excitement, and even a promise of paradise to young people with otherwise few opportunities in life who want to be someone. Picking up a gun and joining jihad compares favorably to some people to standing unemployed on a street corner, surrounded by a nation of people of whom almost all are doing better than you in life.

That lack of hope is abundant and growing, but in the UK at least, it is largely self-inflicted, since immigrant Muslim communities often separate themselves from the rest of their host society and thereby the opportunities otherwise on offer. Muslims who integrate with the rest of society cope happily, but many choose not to integrate and for them, it is a spiral downwards that provides a fertile ground for radicalization. Detecting and subduing radicalization is more difficult if the underlying causes are increasing.

The Middle East has huge problems, and many of them increase hostility to the West as well as between countries in the region. That also will increase. Current income from oil will reduce greatly in the next decades as the world moves away from oil towards shale gas, nuclear and renewables for energy. As income shrinks in an already unstable environment, the number of that third willing to turn to violence will increase. Add to that better communications, growing awareness of western freedoms and lifestyles and potential for new forms of government and those pressures are amplified further.

That will increase the supply for ISIS. it is easy to manipulate attitudes in a community and turn people to violence if an oppressor can be identified and blamed for all the problems, and pretty much the entire West ticks that box if the facts are cherry-picked or omitted, distorted and spun enough in the right way by skilled marketers. ISIS are good marketers.

Extreme violence by a large enough minority can force most peace-loving people into submission. ISIS have shown quite enough barbarity to scare many into compliance, terrifying communities and making them easier to conquer long before their forces’ arrival. Many of the hopeless young people in those newly conquered territories are willing to join in to gain status and rewards for themselves. Many others will join in to avoid punishment for themselves or their families. And so it rolls on.

The West’s approach to holding them back so far has been airstrikes on front lines and drone attacks on leaders. However, ISIS is something of a cloud based leadership. Although they have a somewhat centralized base in Iraq and Syria, they make their appeal to Islamists everywhere, cultivating support and initiating actions even before they enter an area. It is easy enough to kill a few leaders but every extremist preacher everywhere is another potential leader and if there is a steady stream of new recruits, some of those will be good leadership material too.

As the Economist says, ISIS have limited success so far outside of Iraq and Syria, but that could change swiftly if critical mass can be achieved in countries already showing some support. Worldwide, Muslim communities feel a strong disconnect from other cultures, which skilled manipulators can easily turn into a feeling of oppression. Without major modernization from within Islam, and of which there is little sign so far, that disconnect will greatly increase as the rest of the world’s population sees accelerating change technologically, economically, socially, culturally and politically. With so much apparently incompatible with Islamic doctrines as interpreted and presented by many of today’s Islamic leaders, it is hard to see how it could be otherwise from increasing disconnect. The gap between Islam and non-Islam won’t close, it will widen.

ISIS welcomes and encourages that growing gap. It provides much of the increasing pressure needed to convert a discontented young person into an Islamic extremist and potential recruit. It pushes a community closer to the critical mass or resentment and anger they need.

The rest of the world can’t change Islam. No matter how much politicians try to appease Islamists, offer concessions to Muslim communities, or indeed to repeatedly assert that Islamic violence has ‘nothing to do with Islam’, the gap will grow between strict Islamic values and everyone else’s. ISIS will be guaranteed a stream of enthusiastic recruits. Those Muslims to whom stricter interpretations of their religion appeal are diluted throughout Muslim populations, they are not separate groups that live apart, that can easily be identified and addressed with outreach campaigns or surveillance. Only by reducing advocacy of strict Islamic values can the gap stop widening and begin to close. That obviously can only be done by Muslim communities themselves. Any attempt to do so by those outside of Islam would simply add to perceived oppression and act as justification towards extremism. Furthermore, that reduction of advocacy of extremist interpretations of Islam would have to be global. If it persists anywhere, then that region will act as a source of violence and a draw to wannabe terrorists.

So like most other observers, it seems obvious to me that the solution to ISIS or any other extremist Islamic groups yet to emerge has to come from within Islam. Muslims will eventually have to adapt to the 21st century. They will have to modernize. That won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly, but ISIS and its variants will thrive and multiply until that happens.

Limits of ISIS terrorism in the UK

This is the 3rd article in my short series trying to figure out the level of terrorist danger ISIS poses in the UK, again comparing them with the IRA in the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’. (ISIS = Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. IRA = Irish Republican Army). I don’t predict the level it will actually get to, which depends on too many factors, only the limits if everything goes their way.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/06/22/isis-comparison-with-the-ira-conflict/ discussed the key difference, that ISIS is a religious group and the IRA was a nationalist one.

https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/a-pc-roost-for-terrorist-chickens/ then discusses the increased vulnerability in the UK now thanks to ongoing political correctness.

IRA

Wikipedia says: The Provisional IRA’s armed campaign, primarily in Northern Ireland but also in England and mainland Europe, caused the deaths of approximately 1,800 people. The dead included around 1,100 members of the British security forces, and about 640 civilians.

It also gives a plausible estimate of the number of its members :

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was estimated that in the late 1980s the IRA had roughly 300 members in Active Service Units and about another 450 serving in supporting roles [such as “policing” nationalist areas, intelligence gathering, and hiding weapons.]

Sinn Fein, (which was often called the IRA’s ‘political wing’) managed to get 43% support from the nationalist community at its peak in 1981 after the hunger strikes. Provisional IRA approval ratings sat at around 30%. Supporting violence is not the same as supporting use of political means – some want to fight for a cause but won’t do so using violence. That 30% yields an IRA supporter population of around 75,000 from 245,000 nationalist voters. So, from a supporter population of 75,000, only 300 were in IRA active service units and 450 in supporting roles at any particular time, although thousands were involved over the whole troubles. That is a total of only 1% of the relevant population from which they were drawn – those who supported violent campaigns. Only 0.4% were in active service units, i.e actual terrorists. That is an encouragingly small percentage.

ISIS

Government estimate of the number of young men from the UK that went overseas to fight with ISIS is around 500. According to a former head of MI6, 300 have returned already. Some of those will be a problem and some will have lost sympathy with the cause, just as some men joined the IRA and later left, all the way through the troubles. Some will not have gone overseas and therefore can’t be identified and tracked the same way. Over time, ISIS will attempt to recruit more to the cause, and some will drop out. I can’t find official estimates of numbers but there are ways of making such estimates.

Building on Paddy Ashdown’s analogy with the IRA, the same kinds of young men will join ISIS as those who joined the IRA – those with no hope of status or fame or glory from their normal lives who want to be respected and be seen as heroic rebel fighters by holding a weapon, who are easy prey for charismatic leaders with exciting recruitment campaigns. The UK Muslim young men community faces high unemployment.

ISIS draws its support from the non-peace-loving minority of the Muslim community. Citing Wikipedia again, a Pew Research Centre poll showed 72% of Muslims worldwide said violence against civilians is never justified, surprisingly similar to the equivalent 70% found in the Nationalist community in Northern Ireland. They also found in the US and UK that over 1 in 4 Muslims think suicide bombing is sometimes justified, not very different from the world-wide level. (A 2006 survey by NOP found that only 9% of UK Muslims supported violence. Whether attitudes have changed or it is just the way questions are asked is anyone’s guess; for now, I’ll run with both, the calculations are easy.

The 25-30% figures are similar to the situation in Northern Ireland in spite of quite different causes. I lived a third of my life in Belfast and I don’t think the people there generally are any less civilized than people here in England. Maybe it’s just human nature that when faced with a common grievance, 25-30% of us will consider that violence is somewhat acceptable against civilians and support a sub-population of 0.4% terrorists fighting on our behalf.

On the other hand, the vast majority of 70%+ of us are peace-loving. A glass half full or half empty, take your pick.

The UK Muslim community is around 3 million, similar to the USA in fact. 28% of that yields a potential supporter population of  840,000. The potential terrorist 1% of that is 8,400 and 0.4% is 3,360.  If we’re optimistic and take NOP’s 2006 figure of 9% supporting violence, then 270,000 people would be supporting 1080 terrorists if the right terrorist group were to appear in the right circumstances with the right cause and the right leaders and good marketing and were to succeed in its campaigning. That puts an upper limit for extreme Islamist terrorism in the UK at between 3 and 11 times as big as the IRA was at its peak if everything goes its way.

However, neither is the actual number of UK ISIS terrorists, only the potential number of terrorists available if the cause/motivation is right, if the community buys into it, if the ISIS leaders are charismatic, and if they do their marketing well in their catchment communities. So far, 500 have emerged and actually gone off to fight with ISIS, 300 have returned. We don’t know how many stayed here or are only thinking of joining up, or aren’t even thinking of it but might, and we don’t know what will happen that might aggravate the situation and increase recruitment. We don’t know how many will try to come here that aren’t from the UK. There are plenty of ‘known unknowns’.

Some of the known unknowns  are good ones though – it isn’t all scary. In the Middle East, ISIS has clear objectives and controls cities, arms and finance. They say they want to cause problems here too, but they’re a bit busy right now, they don’t have a clear battle to fight here, and most of all our Muslim community doesn’t want to be the source of large scale terrorism so isn’t likely to be cooperative with such an extremist and barbaric group as ISIS. Their particular style of barbarism and particularly extremist views are likely to put off many who might consider supporting another extremist Islamist group. There also isn’t an easy supply of weapons here. All these work in our favor and will dampen ISIS efforts.

So the magnitude of the problem will come down to the relative efforts of our security forces, the efforts of the peace-loving Muslim majority to prevent young men being drawn towards extremism, and the success of ISIS marketing and recruitment. We do know that we do not want 3,360 home-grown ISIS terrorists wandering around the UK, or a similar number in the USA.

Finally, there are two sides to every conflict. ISIS terrorism would likely lead to opposing paramilitary groups. As far as their potential support base goes, ‘Far right’ parties add up to about 2%, about 1.25 million, but I would guess that a much higher proportion of an extremist group supports violence than the general population, so some hand-waving suggests that a similarly sized opposition supporter population terrorist group is not unlikely. We know from elsewhere in Ireland and other EU countries that that 2% could grow to the 25-30% we saw earlier if our government really loses control. In the USA, the catchment group on the ISIS side is still only the same size as the UK, but the potential armed resistance to them is far greater.

In summary, ISIS is potentially a big problem, with 300 home grown potential ISIS terrorists already here in the UK and trained, hundreds being trained overseas and an unknown quantity not yet on the radar. If all goes badly, that could grow to between 1000 and over 3000 active terrorists, compared to the IRA which typically only had 300 active terrorists at a time. Some recent trends have made us much more vulnerable, but there are also many other that lean against ISIS success.

I have a lot of confidence in our intelligence and security forces, who have already prevented a great many potential terrorist acts. The potential magnitude of the problem will keep them well-motivated for quite a while. There is a lot at stake, and ISIS must not get UK terrorism off the ground.

 

ISIS. Comparison with the IRA conflict

Paddy Ashdown just tweeted:

Young UK Muslims joining ISIS; no more typical of islam than young Catholic men joining the IRA, was typical of Catholocism.

It is very rare for me to tweet at politicians, but I think he is partly wrong this time (ignoring the twittery typos). So I responded, to the wrong bit.

IRA was drawn from IRISH Catholics for whom Ireland, not religion was their banner. ISIS is religious not geographic campaign.

I’ll also pick up on where he was right later. Paddy Ashdown is a brave ex-soldier, one of the elite. I normally listen carefully to what he says on TV, and he often makes a very good case, but he makes errors just like the rest of us, and has tinted glasses just like the rest of us. Occasionally he changes my mind on something, which is fine. However, it is a common misunderstanding among the British that the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ were about religion. It was certainly a tribal conflict but it had mixed motivations. As an English Catholic living there through the troubles, changing religion and marrying across the divide, I got flak occasionally on both religion and nationality, but never any serious harm.

The IRA was fighting for a United Ireland, and drew its members and supporters from the Irish nationalist community, almost 100% of whom were Roman Catholic. Doubtless a few of the boys who joined up thought they were doing so to defend Catholics against protestants, but that wasn’t actually what the IRA stood for. The UDA and UVF drew their support from the protestant community, again with a mixed and variable brief of defending Protestantism, defending Ulster and keeping Northern Ireland British. The protestant community mostly descended from Scottish Presbyterians. The troubles were part sectarian and part about nationality, sovereignty and tribal descent. Because there was so much commonality of religious affiliation and being British or Irish, it often did degenerate into simple sectarianism, but that was never its primary driving force, which was whether Northern Ireland should remain British or revert to being part of a united Ireland. That is where Ashdown is wrong. ISIS may have its roots and some major goals in a geographic region but fundamentally it wants to further its cause of extreme Islamism as globally as it can, drawing its members from as wide an area as it can and to fight globally as far as it can. It is religious, not nationalist in its primary motivation.

Now to where Ashdown is right. The IRA and ISIS both draw their members from young men, easy to influence, and both organisations were good at marketing, motivating those young men to recruit and instilling fervor when they did. In both cases also, the young men came from a diverse cross section of the community. There were the intellectual types who had analysed it all and strongly bought in to the cause, and there were the less intellectual types who understood a more simplified message but really just wanted to be somebody, coming from areas offering little or no chance of life success or and chance of status, for whom picking up an Armalite of Kalashnikov rifle would make them someone, create at least the illusion of having respect and status.

The sorts of young men joining ISIS are probably doing so for diverse reasons too, but in their case, even the simplified messages are religious. A few will have fully understood and internalized the cause, many will have understood a very simplified message of doing their bit to defend Islam or Allah and becoming a martyr, but most probably just want to be someone, to have some status and respect. Sadly, very many of the young men joining ISIS will not fully understand what they are getting into or what they are meant to be fighting for. In that sense they are like the few young men who joined the IRA to defend Catholics against Protestants.

We may see this conflict coming to the UK. Our security forces expect people to try hard to make that happen, so they are on the case. Whether and to what degree they succeed we will see. If ISIS do manage to achieve some UK terrorism, we’re likely to see opposing paramilitary groups develop and grow. We’re already seeing a few contenders eager to size that role. If it gets badly out of control, it is possible that a Northern Ireland style conflict could result with extremist groups fighting against each other. The civilian population would be in the line of fire from both sides. Deaths would encourage young people to join up to have the chance to be heroes, and views can harden quickly, increasing the support base and the size of the community from which recruits can be drawn. In Northern Ireland, only a small number of men joined up to fight in the IRA, INLA, UDA or UVF, but there was a large community support behind them, which was occasionally estimated at around the 30% mark.

Our security forces know this risk and are doing their best to avoid it, taking down recruitment sites as fast as they can and trying to police movement across our borders. ISIS have also shown that they are good at the marketing side, managing to get lengthy adverts for their recruitment messages almost nightly on alarmingly cooperative national TV news programs. These news programs are helping to make it as seemingly cool and heroic to join ISIS as it ever was to join the IRA or its opposition. Terrorism can’t flourish without publicity, but these channels seem determined to give them it.

There’s another difference from the conflict in Northern Ireland. The paramilitaries in Northern Ireland didn’t normally decapitate their victims, and normally they would issue warnings before a bombing. ISIS make them look almost civilized.

As an after-thought, has the war on terrorism just mutated into a war on horrorism?