RICHARD DAWKINS, the famous atheist, and Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller may
have little in common. I do not know whether the Director-General of MI5
believes in God and nor am I certain that Richard Dawkins believes in Dame
Eliza Manningham-Buller.
But I do. And whether or not she was thinking in these terms when she spoke to
the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, in East London, on Thursday, it strikes me
that at the heart of her discreetly bellowed talk (nothing carries like a
lowered voice) was an idea that Professor Dawkins has done much to
popularise: what he has called the concept of the meme.
Just as a gene is a heritable unit, a sequence of DNA that may be passed from
body to body through reproduction, so a meme is a unit of cultural
information, transferable from one mind to another. Genes are transmitted by
mating. Memes are transmitted by talking, writing, performing. Successful
memes take root, “chiming” with the minds they inhabit and inviting
repetition and dissemination. Phobias, conventional wisdoms, ruling notions
are memes, and cultures have dalliances with ideas as boys have dalliances
with girls. Beliefs that “catch on” are as potent examples of the spread of
a meme as are crazes for kipper ties, no ties or the colour purple.
At Queen Mary the head of MI5 spoke of the alarming multiplication and spread
of would-be Islamist terrorists within Britain. The consequence may be
bombs; but the cause is a meme: the jihadist meme.
Of course Dame Eliza’s speech must be taken with caveats. Her organisation
wants enhanced respect and extra resources. It is true, further, that some
politicians and most of the news media have been guilty of conflating
terrorist aspirations with terrorist plots. There may be any number of
delusional saddos in any number of Bradford or North London bedsits writing
e-mails about how cool it would be to detonate a small nuclear device on the
concourse of Waterloo station in the middle of rush hour or poison
Sheffield’s entire water supply but before heading for the underground
bunkers we do need to ask what might be the practical likelihood of these
dreamers ever realising their dreams.
But Dame Eliza and her colleagues have already received a massive new dollop
of resources and manpower and we should not hear her speech as a crude bid
for more, even if it was a shrewd bid for public support. Nor are she and
her colleagues unable to distinguish between hopeless wannabe terrorists and
serious professionals. I expect the 1,600 suspects, the 200 groups and the
30-odd plots she mentioned include a fair number of posturing fantasists,
but not all of them will be lightweights; and, besides, it is worth keeping
an eye on the big-mouths and dreamers, for who knows what they may become,
or where they may lead you.
I think we should take what she said very seriously. Among the
near-obsessively antiwar brigade (of whom I count myself one) there has been
an unwise tendency to think that because much of the terror talk in the
political and media world has been hot air, all of it has been.
Instead we should understand that one or two of these Islamist villains may be
in deadly earnest, and it only takes one or two. If we peaceniks are to
oppose the occupation of foreign countries as passionately as we do, we
should think twice before disparaging the alternative. That alternative is
patient, unremitting, painstaking and well-resourced undercover work abroad
and within our own societies, and this is what Dame Eliza in MI5 and her MI6
counterparts are about.
I have often worried that our respect (and especially MPs’ and journalists’
respect) for the quality of British Intelligence was exaggerated. When I was
young, the public-school duffer quotient in MI6 was a noticeable feature.
But today we have to believe standards are improving and that the effort is
worthwhile. Blocking our ears and thumbing our noses at everything called
Intelligence is lazy, and (speaking for myself) one must curb the instinct
to assume that something is hollow just because Tony Blair has asserted it.
Those of us who have been yelling ourselves hoarse over Iraq these past five
years would do well this month to notice that we have won the argument.
Short of signed confessions and public show trials, we shall not get much
closer than last week’s US mid-term elections, and a gathering hush among
media neocons, to a resolution of this debate.
Maybe we should stop shouting now and, with those who initially supported the
war, think calmly about how to deal with its consequences, not just in Iraq
but for us at home in the West. We know that the growing fashionability of
violent Islamism among a minority of British Muslims is one of them. From
Dame Eliza’s remarks, that comes through loud and clear.
Which brings me back to Professor Dawkins’s memes. So far from pooh-poohing
news of the growing number of delusional or incompetent terrorist
conspirators and conspiracies in Britain, we should understand that a rapid
expansion in the volume of “aspirational” terrorism is likely, in time, to
be a penumbra at whose centre will be a slimmer, darker shadow, a small
number of real terrorists, and around whose perimeters will be a larger
number of individuals who vaguely sympathise without actively participating:
the very cover that terrorists need.
The fact is that the jihadist meme is thriving, multiplying and jumping from
young mind to young mind in those parts of urban Britain where large numbers
of Asian Muslims live; and that a regular traffic of family visits to and
from Pakistan in particular (another point Dame Eliza made) is helping it to
do so. Treating the meme as a kind of virus, we should perhaps be asking how
best to contain and retard its growth. This does raise questions about state
aid for Islamic “faith” schools, and Britain’s very generous rules (unlike
Denmark’s or Norway’s, for instance) governing arranged marriages — rules
resulting in the reinjection, on a massive scale into each new generation in
Britain, of mothers literate in neither the language, the values nor the
culture of the adoptive country.
The jihadist ideal is not new; it long predates the attack on the World Trade
Centre; you could say that it was dormant within its host religion from the
start; but, like Japanese knot-weed, it has rather unexpectedly started to
thrive and spread. So what changed in the world, making the environment
comfortable for its replication? Answers will be various. Beside two
suggested above, I would add this:at the turn of the century a version of
America gained sway that played directly to the distorted stereotype of the
United States peddled by jihadists. Bushite Republicanism was a great gift
to the jihadist meme. This was a cartoon America. Iraq has been meat and
drink to it.
Some of us, however, recall an America that defied the paranoid propaganda of
her enemies: a nation and culture associated with liberal internationalist
ideas, the United Nations, the end of the Old World empires. This is an
America that the Bangladeshi youths I talk to in Tower Hamlets do not even
remember.
It is too early to say that the week behind us marked the beginning of the
refreshment of that ideal, or that new Democrats or new Republicans are
capable of rediscovering and reinvigorating what John and Bobby Kennedy once
seemed to stand for. Perhaps they could — and perhaps America could extract
herself from Iraq with all deliberate speed. If so, then Gerard Baker, the
US Editor of The Times, is precisely wrong, in his article here
yesterday, to say that this would feed the jihadist idea.
It would starve it.
