Shiraz Maher

The arrest of two men last week on terrorism charges relating to Syria reveals just how serious the issue of foreign fighters has become. Estimates suggest that up to 366 young Muslims from the UK might now be participating in the Syrian conflict. There is a multiplicity of problems here. Aside from the obvious fears about young men training with terrorist organisations, the global jihadist movement is currently enjoying an unprecedented rebirth. Its membership is being replenished and it is not overstating the case to suggest al-Qaeda affiliates now control greater territory than they ever have in the past. It is tempting to turn a Nelsonian eye to the phenomenon. There is a view in some parts that radicalised young men should simply be allowed to leave the country and die in Syria.

Not so long ago politicians were hailing the end of al-Qaeda and the global jihad movement. By the middle of 2011, key ideologues like Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki were dead. Arab Street also appeared to have embraced peaceful protest, with popular uprisings unseating seemingly entrenched regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. A new dawn, we were told, was breaking. The weekend’s events have brought that hopeless optimism into sharp relief. The terrorist siege of the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya continues, with around 70 people dead so far. Elsewhere, at least 80 Christians were killed in a suicide attack outside a church in the Pakistani city of Peshawar yesterday.

There has been lots of debate about our impending intervention in the Syrian conflict today. Many of my Coffee House colleagues have counselled against intervention, arguing against Danny Finkelstein’s piece in the Times yesterday. I’m in broad agreement with the general sentiment of the piece, but some of its subtexts need greater illumination. Leave aside Finkelstein’s argument about omission bias. For a moment, forget the ‘complexities’ of the conflict, imbibed as it is with sectarian differences, confessional rivalries, and great power posturing. Even the discussion of what should happen next in Syria can wait for another day. The use of chemical weapons against civilians is an affront to the very idea of civilisation itself.

You don’t have to be a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood’s clerical fashion to recoil at the draconian treatment of its members yesterday. Indeed, some reports now suggest that more than 500 people were killed with thousands more injured. By conspiring against it the army has inadvertently handed the Muslim Brotherhood a remarkable victory. Before he was forced from office, Mohammed Muris’s administration was failing in almost every respect. That is why ordinary Egyptians railed against it with the slogan ‘bread not beards.’ Even when those protests intensified there was value in letting Mursi’s administration run a little longer, if only to illuminate the full extent of its shortcomings.

When General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, appeared before the Senate Armed Services committee last Thursday an intemperate exchange threatened to derail his bid for reappointment in the post. When Dempsey repeatedly declined to say what advice he had given President Obama on Syria, John McCain threatened to block the nomination. McCain later sent Dempsey a letter asking him to clarify what military options the Pentagon has considered in Syria. ‘The decision over whether to introduce military force is a political one that our Nation entrusts to its civilian leaders,’ Dempsey replied. ‘I also understand that you deserve my best military advice on how military force could be used in order to decide whether it should be used.

There’s a joke doing the rounds in Tahrir Square which goes like this: ‘Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak all tried to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood, but only Mursi succeeded’. As protests against the world’s oldest Islamist party intensify, the Brotherhood is now learning the price of power after decades of being confined to the political wilderness. On the one hand there are very obvious reasons for the current discontent. Egypt’s fortunes have tanked since the revolution with its economy stagnating, rising inflation, increased corruption, and the near disappearance of its tourist industry. For all those invested in the revolution that swept away Hosni Mubarak it was never meant to be like this.

Douglas Murray has an important piece in this week’s Spectator looking at the stultifying political culture around counterterrorism. Civil servants frequently thwart ministers wanting to adopt a harder line against extremists while a number of radical groups remain legal despite repeated pledges to ban them. This cultural stasis is not confined to mandarins in Whitehall. Ever since 9/11 the police and Security Service have pursued a disastrous policy of cultivating ‘clerical honeypots’. The thinking behind it seems reasonable enough at first glance: leave extremist clerics to preach in the open and then you can easily identify the network around them, and the various actors within it.

Two Bishops carrying out relief work in northern Syria appear to have been kidnapped by rebels, underscoring the increasingly sectarian dimension of the conflict. Syria’s minorities have long worried about their future if Assad falls, fearing a similar fate to that of their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle East. Indeed, of all the Arab Spring’s various let-downs the failure to protect minorities is perhaps the most glaring. The attacks on Christians in Egypt earlier this month which resulted in two deaths and left close to 100 people hospitalised epitomises the decay of any pluralistic promise the Arab revolutions may have once offered. Those attacks followed the effective eradication of Jewish life from Egypt last year.

There’s an interesting battle shaping up on university campuses over Islamic societies segregating their events. Today’s Guardian highlights the most recent example of this at the University of Leicester where men and women were directed to separate entrances for a lecture entitled 'Does God exist?' The speaker, Hamza Tzortis, is a member of the Islamic Education and Research Academy, a group which was itself banned from UCL last month after trying to segregate an event. This trend of segregating events in this country is a bizarre one. Even at Islam’s most holy site, the Grand Mosque in Makkah, entrances are not segregated nor is the pilgrimage performed inside.