October 9 2024 - 11:00am
‘MI5 has one hell of a job on its hands.’ That was the warning yesterday from the agency’s Director-General, Ken McCallum, in a speech which touched on everything from Russian espionage to Iranian assassination plots, and from the present competition with China to the violent echoes of last century’s conflict in Northern Ireland.
On counterterrorism, McCallum gave the ‘headline split’ of ‘75% Islamist terrorism, 25% extreme Right-wing.’ Despite delving into the shifting ideological configurations of the violence, McCallum underlined that the threat of most concern is still that posed by al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
It may be surprising to hear that al-Qaeda warrants a mention in 2024, but some of the old guard are indeed still knocking around. We do not yet know the implications of Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban in 2021, while in August an al-Qaeda affiliate slaughtered several hundred civilians in Burkina Faso.
But what of plots in Britain and Europe? In March Islamic State unleashed a Bataclan-style massacre in Moscow, killing over 130 people, while in August a plot to kill audience members at a Taylor Swift concert was intercepted in Vienna. Islamic State’s appetite to unleash mass murder in European capitals has evidently not abated, though most of these cases are linked to IS operatives overseas.
Beneath these more sophisticated plots, there is the ongoing drumbeat of stabbing attacks across Europe, usually perpetrated by lone actors. While reported at the time, these leave little impression on the psyche of the societies they afflict. They are forgotten and moved on from as quickly as they unfolded, largely because of a widespread discomfort about addressing Islamist extremism. It is especially true when such a high proportion of perpetrators are recent arrivals to the continent, with many linked to asylum claims — as was the case of the knifeman who murdered three at a festival in Solingen, Germany in August.
In the face of this brand of violence, public institutions adopt a strategy of avoidance, for fear of empowering a ‘far-Right narrative’, but it should be obvious by now that the failure of liberal institutions to confront Islamist terrorism is what drives the Right-wing narrative.
Another factor behind the muted reaction to the semi-regular stabbings and killings is confusion, by virtue of an undercurrent which confounds the traditional lenses for identifying Islamist terror. What authorities mean by Islamist terror tends to mean Salafi-jihadists: namely al-Qaeda and Islamic State. But closer inspection reveals a relatively new strain of Islamist terrorism in the truest sense of the term: individuals acting out of a perceived irreconcilable clash between their Islamist worldview and the West, or in reaction to the crossing of Islamist moral red lines, without neatly defined ties to the Salafi-jihadist worldview or propaganda consumption to which we have become accustomed.
In 2022 there was the 44-year-old Blackburn man who took hostages at a Texas synagogue while demanding the release of Aafia Siddiqui, an al-Qaeda operative and cause célèbre for British Islamist activists. There was Edward Little, who that same year sought to kill former Muslim-turned-Christian preacher Hatun Tash for her perceived blasphemy, as well as the 2023 murder of a pensioner in Hartlepool in a claimed revenge attack over Gaza. There was the Batley schoolteacher who was forced into hiding in 2021 for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, a chilling reminder of the murder of Samuel Paty by an Islamic terrorist in France the previous year.
When a jihadist attacks and their devices are analysed, Islamic State propaganda may be found. These are clear and quantifiable data points. In the absence of such evidence, the permeation of Islamist ideology throughout society and its acceptance by individuals willing to commit violence on its behalf is less straightforward. So when perpetrators do not fit neatly into the Salafi-jihadist bucket, other angles such as mental health or ‘mixed, unclear, or unstable ideology’ are liable to elbow their way into the analysis.
MI5 is already alert to Russian and Chinese influence operations, but security services have largely been spared tackling another ongoing influence campaign which equally seeks to subvert British democracy and increasingly manifests as violence on the streets of Europe — that of global Islamism. Unfortunately for the already stretched McCallum and his colleagues, the task of protecting British democracy and reducing violence will not be possible until this changes.
