The striking thing about the new ‘fast track' Counter Terrorism Bill that Prime Minister David Cameron has announced in his speech in Australia, where he ventured to take part in the G20 Summit in Brisbane, is that it actually misses the main point.
The Bill is intended to prevent radicalised young Muslims to travel from Britain to joint ISIL and other terrorist groups fighting in Syria. It envisages that passports should be taken away from people suspected of planning to travel to Syria and prevent some of them returning to Britain after taking part in the ‘holy war'. "We must work with the overwhelming majority of Muslims who abhor the twisted narrative that has seduced some of our people," Mr Cameron said while addressing the Australian parliament. "We must continue to celebrate Islam as a great world religion of peace."
The problem is, of course, that Mr Cameron needs to look at the whole issue of the flow of jihadists from Britain to Syria — currently, according to the latest figures, standing at 5 individuals a day — from a totally different perspective, that of a radicalised young Muslim. The crux of the whole matter is that it was the British government that has been insisting for the past several years that President Bashar al-Assad's regime was illegal and criminal and that the anti-government rebels were actually the true representatives of the Syrian people and that their struggle against oppression was just.
So, putting it bluntly, it was the British Big Brother who was indirectly ‘recruiting' the jihadists to go and join the anti-government opposition that was fighting against the regime in Damascus. And it was from within that opposition that the so-called ‘Islamic State' has emerged and by now has infiltrated Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Libya. So the idea that this same British government can now simply shake off all responsibility for helping to create the problem in the first place and to claim that it is confronting it head on does look — how can I put it mildly?— ridiculous.
PM Cameron was instrumental in pushing for the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi, a move that has resulted in Libya becoming ungovernable and run by radical Muslim groups, which were instrumental in helping the opposition in Syria to fight government forces there. Cameron was one of the leading proponents of supporting and arming Syrian rebels to get rid of Assad, a policy course that has now backfired on the West so spectacularly with the emergence of ‘Islamic State' as a powerful force in the region. So it's a bit rich of him to announce that he is now taking on the very people who by his very policies were lured to fight in Syria on the side of the anti-Assad opposition.
So the whole idea of a Counter Terrorism Bill which is being fast-tracked to tackle a problem of the British government's own making shows a spectacular lack of strategic vision and plain common sense.
