So entwined have the English Defence League and radical Islam become, they might as well be married
With the predictability of acne spreading on a teenager's face, the British right and left used the ritual slaughter of Lee Rigby to confirm what they already knew. The security establishment called for the revival of its pet project to allow spies to engage in blanket web surveillance without saying why it would have helped. For the "anti-imperialist" left and Greens, who have never wanted to look clerical fascism in the eye for fear of what they may see, the attack told them that the west was to blame – as it always must be.
Neither could accept that political violence is mutating in ways that give past cliches a musty smell. For the first time since 9/11, the similarities between violent movements in the west are more important than their differences. They replicate and feed off each other. So entwined have the English Defence League and radical Islam become, they might as well be married.
The security services are not saying whether the Woolwich suspects had links with international terrorism. Perhaps they did, but no one would be surprised if they spent their days in Britain listening to Anjem Choudray and surfing the web. This is not the way it used to be. We still have cases where terrorists follow the traditional pattern. The courts convicted Richard Dart in March after he had gone to Pakistan to work on a plot to blow up families mourning the army's dead at Royal Wootton Bassett. But in most instances, with Osama bin Laden dead, and his associates blown apart by drone strikes, we are now reduced to talking about the once fearsome al-Qaida as "a franchise", a phrase that trips too easily off the tongue.
The best response to those who argue that the "root cause" of the terror is western foreign policy is to reply that it may be in some cases. But when you face a psychopathic movement, it says more about you than it if all you can see is a protest against whatever you happen to dislike about your government.
The Pakistani Taliban attacks girls who want a decent education. (And some elements of the British left ought to show more pride that Drummer Rigby and his comrades fought in Afghanistan to stop the Afghan Taliban doing the same.) It also murders Shia Muslims, Christians, Ahmadis and Pakistani liberals.
In Timbuktu, the Ansar Dine destroyed beautiful mosques, which did not accord with their ultra-puritanical version of Islam, an act that to my mind seemed truly Islamophobic. Meanwhile, Boko Haram terrorises northern Nigeria and al-Shabaab terrorises Somalia. None of these organisations is terrorising because they want to make a legitimate if regrettably bloody critique of "the west". They terrorise because they want to establish a misogynist and inquisitorial theocracy.
Though they share much of the al-Qaida ideology, and in the case of elements within al-Shabaab, proclaim allegiance to al-Qaida, they cannot reasonably be described as "franchises". Unlike al-Qaida in Iraq in the 2000s, they do not take orders from a central command. Indeed, the US military has ensured there is no central command to take orders from.
The uncertainty applies to the experience of far luckier countries in the rich world. Rather than the mass murders of 9/11 and 7/7, we are seeing small and vicious attacks that are rarely planned in the hills of Waziristan.
As one security source put it to me: "For the time being, terrorists threaten fewer people but are harder for the security services to monitor and infiltrate."
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation has chartered the change by analysing the writings of al-Qaida leaders since the "high point" of 9/11. After Nato had driven al-Qaida out of Afghanistan, Anwar al-Awlaki, al-Qaida's most effective propagandist, could no longer dream of a global insurrection. Instead, he saw hope in the web. He wanted violence certainly. But his "44 Ways to Support Jihad" or al-Qaida's Inspire magazine, which al-Awlaki edited until the Americans killed him, shows the limitations of his approved methods of "individual jihad".
Supporters should attach "butcher blades" to the front of a pick-up truck, so that "the blades strike your targets at the torso level or higher", and drive into crowds, ran one idea. Brutal though the suggestion was, it was not a way to bring a government to its knees, as Bin Laden may have realised
His British followers were as violent and as vacuous. After Trey Parker and Matt Stone said they wanted to show Muhammad in South Park, a British Salafi website quoted al-Alwaki with approval and said: "We have warned Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh if they do air this show."
Parker and Scott later created an irreligious musical for Broadway and the West End. But what with one thing and another, the religion they decided to go for was Mormonism. It is shameful to live in a society where it is easier for satirists to mock the Prophet Brigham Young rather than the Prophet Muhammed, but these are not signs that a global counter-revolution is on the march.
The attacks by radical Islamists in the west today are not very different from the attacks on mosques that followed the murder of Drummer Rigby or the bombings organised by the "dissident" IRA: small scale, mean in every sense of the word and pointless.
The similarities do not stop there. The founders of the English Defence League were inspired by Islamists who disparaged British troops. The EDL has in turn produced the Muslim Defence League. David Anderson, Britain's independent reviewer of terrorist legislation, is so concerned by the reciprocal relationship between certain religious groups and the white far right, he is thinking of investigating whether the police are treating both partners in this ugly waltz equally.
I am not trying to belittle today's violence. It is easy to imagine a one-off Islamist attack such as the stabbing of Stephen Timms or the bombing of the Boston marathon, leading to an attack on a mosque that claims lives.
I am simply saying that yet more powers for the police are not going to stop small groups of men acting almost on impulse.
It would be better if right and left in Britain could do what they have failed to do to date and condemn violence without regard for the colour or creed of the perpetrators, and without displaying an ounce of respect for the life-denying ideologies that motivate them.
