Questioning Hilary Benn's speech on 2 December 2105
The purpose of debate is to make the obscure clear, and to
come to a good decision based on what is known. Listening and questioning are
important parts, as important as speaking itself. Hilary Benn seems to have
made his mark with a brilliant piece of oratory, which earned him a standing
ovation. It is therefore worth looking at what he said and asking, ‘Is this
true?’
What should we do with others to confront this
threat to our citizens, our nation, other nations and the people who suffer
under the cruel yoke of Daesh? The carnage in Paris brought home to us the
clear and present danger that we face from Daesh. It could just as easily have
been London, Glasgow, Leeds, or Birmingham and it could still be.
There is an assumption that ISIS (I am writing in English so use the
English acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and Sham and because no one seems
to pronounce the Arabic acronym well) organised the Paris attacks from its
headquarters in Raqqa. This needs to be questioned. There have been a number of
jihadist atrocities for decades now, perpetrated by different jihadists who
hold similar views to ISIS, and while some may have been trained in a variety
of Al Qa’eda and other bases, they have tended to be local. After all the Paris
killers were mainly Belgian and French, as far as we know now. Deciding to bomb
Syria because Paris was attacked by French and Belgian terrorists is the same
mistake as was made following the 2001 attacks in New York where most of the
terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, and the others from UAE, Egypt and Lebanon.
Then both Afghanistan and Iraq were attacked. Until there is proof that the
instructions came from Raqqa, this is no reason to launch these attacks. You do
not need a central organisation to be a suicide bomber or a man with a gun.
It needs to be accepted that this sort of Islamic terrorism is a long
term problem. It is mainly spawned from the radical Islamism exported vigorously
from Saudi Arabia and often supported by Deobandi preachers in British mosques.
Bombing some dusty town on the Euphrates will not change people’s minds, unless
to encourage vengeance.
The first part of his argument is simply missing a point. If we want to
stop these terrible attacks, we need to deal with the disturbed young men who
find it all attractive.
Later on he speaks of ISIS planning more terror attacks. If he looks at
where ISIS fighters come from, other than the cannon-fodder, the foolish
British men who end up getting killed, the most effective terrorists have been
fighting these jihads for decades. I met some in Pakistan in 1987 when they
were fighting the Soviets (supported by us, of course); they moved to where
there was jihad and payment. Chechens have moved: different former-Soviet
republics, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and now, of course, Syria. They are
survivors, and will move to Mali or wherever looks promising. They won’t be
ISIS. They will still be the murdering jihadi thugs they are.
No one in the debate doubts the deadly
serious threat that we face from Daesh and what it does, although we sometimes
find it hard to live with the reality. In June, four gay men were thrown off
the fifth storey of a building in the Syrian city of Deir ez-Zor. In August,
the 82-year-old guardian of the antiquities of Palmyra, Professor Khaled
al-Asaad, was beheaded, and his headless body was hung from a traffic light. In
recent weeks, mass graves in Sinjar have been discovered, one said to contain
the bodies of older Yazidi women murdered by Daesh because they were judged too
old to be sold for sex. Daesh has killed 30 British tourists in Tunisia; 224
Russian holidaymakers on a plane; 178 people in suicide bombings in Beirut,
Ankara and Suruç; 130 people in Paris, including those young people in the
Bataclan, whom Daesh, in trying to justify its bloody slaughter, called
apostates engaged in prostitution and vice. If it had happened here they could
have been our children.
One of ISIS’ attractions to the disturbed men it uses to
perpetrate is grim deeds is its grim deeds, and their video footage. This is
not some mystical Sufi movement seeking union with the Divine. It is a
fanatical and apocalyptic organisation which seeks to wreak vengeance on those
it hates in the most violent way. But it understands the West as so many of its
people come from the West or have studied here. Mr Benn, having been part of
the New Labour movement ought to recognise spin when it is in front of his
eyes. Everything that liberals in the west like: pluralism, the arts, nice
holidays, night clubs, ISIS see as an opportunity to gain attention. Asking
people to smoke in private is not going to get headlines; telling gays to be
gay behind closed doors is not going to either; but his examples are exactly
what get the headlines. This appeals to the macho, just as bombs do. The Syrian
government tries to do something different. They target gays, but to blackmail
them and use them as spies. I imagine MI6 does the same. The Syrian government
has tortured and killed thousands more men and women than ISIS not just since
2011, but throughout Baathist rule. Like ISIS it oppresses scholars, sells
antiquities and has enabled jihadists and its own agents to murder,
assassinate, torture, rape and humiliate hundreds and thousands of its own
citizens. Far more than the thugs of ISIS who have killed less than 1% of
victims in the Syrian crisis, compared to the government’s 96%. So Mr Benn
simply ignores the Syrian government and its detestable enormities.
It needs to be said clearly that under both Hafez al Assad
and Bashar al Assad there have been at times policies to use Islamist jihadist
fighters to destabilise Syria’s neighbours. Many of the jihadists who caused
chaos after the 2003 invasion of Iraq were organised and encouraged by the
Syrian government. When it changed its mind, it imprisoned them; but in 2011
when people started demonstrating against the Syrian government they were once
again freed in order to cause the chaos the government wanted so that it could
say that extreme radical Islam is the alternative to Bashar’s ‘just and gentle
rule.’
On the subject of ground troops to defeat
Daesh, there has been much debate about the figure of 70,000, and the
Government must explain that better. But we know that most of those troops are
engaged in fighting President Assad. I will tell Members what else we know:
whatever the number—70,000, 40,000, 80,000—the current size of the opposition
forces means that the longer we leave it to take action, the longer Daesh will
have to decrease that number. So to suggest that airstrikes should not take
place until the Syrian civil war has come to an end is to miss the urgency of
the terrorist threat that Daesh poses to us and others, and to misunderstand
the nature and objectives of the extension to airstrikes that is proposed.
Mr Benn should be careful. ‘Whatever the number’ really is a
foolish thing to say. This isn’t bargaining in the late Aleppo suq: 150,000 committed
would be brilliant, 50 would be useless. The forces about whom he is speaking
as allies to exterminate this disease on the ground are not really interested.
Certainly ISIS is a problem for those rebels, but nothing like the problem which
is the Syrian Army, the Iraqi and Russian forces and Hezbollah who are ranged
against them in all their might. Even if the ‘moderate rebels’ were interested
in Benn’s war, of the supposed 70, 000 there are 25,000 or so in the Hauran,
the south of the country far from ISIS territory and with their own struggle.
The rebels in the Ghouta, the oasis of Damascus are not going to leave their main
prize, any more than will Bashar and his kleptocratic cronies.
He quotes the KRG Representative in London
“Last June, Daesh captured one third of Iraq
overnight and a few months later attacked the Kurdistan Region. Swift
airstrikes by Britain, America and France and the actions of our own Peshmerga
saved us... We now have a border of 650 miles with Daesh. We have pushed them
back and recently captured Sinjar ...Again Western airstrikes were vital. But
the old border between Iraq and Syria does not exist. Daesh fighters come and
go across this fictional boundary.”
If he had bothered to look at the footage of the war in the
north-east, Rojava as the Kurds call it, he would have noticed that the main
effort was by ground forces. They fought against ISIS at Kobane (or ‘Ayn al ‘Arab
as I knew it) and directed the USAF to precision attacks on ISIS targets. The
Kurdish infantry went in, the aeroplanes followed. There are no ground troops
in the Mid-Euphrates. The Kurds are not interested in taking over non-Kurdish
territory, nor are local Arab tribes keen.
As for the Syria-Iraq border, that was a free zone for
jihadists for years under the Syrian government’s attempts to destabilise Iraq.
Which of course, it did.
There is much more in Mr Benn’s speech which I am sure is
questionable. I am sure there is a question of legitimacy. I think his final
paean for ‘our’ anti-fascist glory is wrong, but these are not my area.
It was a Satanic speech, full of half-truths and deception,
and this comfortable man should feel ashamed.
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