It’s Us Against Them on London Bridge, But Not Yet in the Killing Fields of Syria

The murder most foul of two fine young Cambridge University people by Khan last week has been rightly condemned by all strata of British society.

The knifeman is surely facing eternal punishment for the clearest possible example of evil. The twisted cause Khan was representing, however, makes no exceptions amongst its victims. It is a Death Cult and blood is all that matters. That’s what makes it different from irregulars from ETA, the IRA, etc.

There can be no negotiation with ISIS because they have no demands that we could meet even if we wanted to. Their demand is our suicide – the end of our countries, our cultures, our religions, our way of life.

As we cannot agree to go quietly into that goodnight, this challenge becomes existential.

It’s us or them. They kill us or we kill them. This is the brutal dichotomy which still faces us even after the final defeat of the Islamist alphabet soup in Idlib – still not yet achieved in any case.

I have been using the term ‘us and them’ quite deliberately, but it masks a terrible truth. While there is a ‘them’ there is not yet an ‘us’. 

Not even in and over Idlib where quite literally Al-Qaeda rule!

Western governments and media continue to proselytize on behalf of the throat-cutters in Idlib. They slander the Syrian and Russian liberators of these last yards of the Caliphate. The airwaves are full of propaganda, the “last hospital in Idlib” will shortly be on your television screen staffed by Oscar-winning ‘White Helmets’ filming – I’ve no doubt – another ‘chemical attack’.

Ineluctably therefore, we must conclude that our governments oppose ISIS on London Bridge but support them in the black holes they have created in Syria.

I was once trapped in a lift at Westminster with the then-foreign secretary, William Hague. He had just returned from Jordan where he had announced the start of a British push for the ‘rebels’.

In the time that I had his undivided attention, I told him this:

“William, you’ve been wrong before, in fact you’ve been wrong all your life. But you’ve never been insane before. What you’re doing in Syria is literally insane. Either these head-choppers win and the black flags fly over Damascus, next door to Israel, and on the Mediterranean Sea with Europe beyond. Or they lose and they come back here – still clutching the knives you gave them – looking for ordinary British people to cut.”

Portentously I added, “They will end up in this parliament building, looking for you and looking for me.”

All of this has come to pass.

Usman Khan may not have made it to Syria, but his brothers did, in their thousands. And his heart and mind were there.

His knives may not literally have been given to him by successive British governments. But his murderous intentions were.

Ironically, the now-prime minister, Boris Johnson, then a humble newspaper columnist, once knew all of this, indeed, albeit more expensively, could easily have written this article.

If he does stay in office after December 12, he is going to need to read his own articles again. There is no time to lose.

The only good ISIS and Al-Qaeda fanatic is a dead one. On London Bridge or in Aleppo.