The recent British Government trend to not refer to "Islamic terrorism" or "Islamist terrorism" - instead referring merely to "criminals" and "criminal acts" - is either supremely clever or depressingly thoughtless depending upon the premise they started from.

Islamist terrorism - a tidier phrase than Islamic terrorism - neatly describes the criminal act of terrorism carried out by Muslims with a political bent. With this phrase, there is no need for the epithet "extreme" before Islamist (meaning "political Muslim") because the word terrorism inherently implies an extremist act - thus proving the mostly watertight axiom that "not all extremists are terrorists but all terrorists are extremists". Yet those in the Government - and the Conservative opposition - consider Islamist terrorism as a term to be insulting to the majority of Muslims who they want to keep onside, though they all agree that Islamic terrorism is Islamist and that all terrorism is unquestionably extreme.

So, what is the government thinking?

Either the government is so bright it has recognised that neither extreme Islamists nor Islamist terrorists are Muslims - they are deviants and, when pushed to terrorism, they are criminals - or the government is falling prey to the Islamist lobby, which tries to ban every phrase related to Islam that might ever come up in a critical context, just as they sought to limit British freedom of expression a few years ago in the Racial & Religious Hatred Bill in its earlier incarnations.  Call me a cynic, but I suspect it's the latter that is happening here - there was no bomb in Britain this summer and so, like the IRA after their ceasefire, there are those, listening perhaps to misinformed policeman Sir Hugh Orde, who think that now's a fine time to negotiate with Al Qaeda.

If the Government falls into the latter camp of appeasement - for just as with Hitler and the Nazis, extreme Islamism (let alone its terrorists) are, en masse, non-negotiable entities - then shame on it. Not only do such non-negotiable entities need to be humiliated, mocked and hammered into the ground so they never rise again, any appeasement of this foe now (while they are relatively weak) is merely going to lead to a tougher battle later on down the road. Worse still, this position shows that political Islamists, either through the bomb, infiltration or mass votes on councils or in swing seats, already have cards they can play in modern day British politics - that the Government is taking their abhorrent views seriously when their views may sit well with some weird medieval ulema in Saudi Arabia or in other lands you'd not even send your mother-in-law to but have no place in civilised Britain.

It is hard to know what the government is thinking, even when you talk to government advisers in this space (who can rarely be sure that their advice is the one that made it through to Cabinet or was adopted in favour of another adviser's point of view). The proof tends to be in the pudding - and the pudding takes a while to set and appear.

If the government starts setting up prisons exclusively for Islamist criminals (and those converted to extreme Islam whilst in prison) then we may be getting some idea of the government's intelligence. Just as mentally ill prisoners are sectioned and placed in jails for the mentally ill, so the mentally ill "criminals" (for that is what they are if they are neither Islamist nor Islamic any more) who smash their heads on the floor repeatedly chanting ought to be sectioned and placed in specialist prisons away from the normal prisoners who they are currently trying to turn to their criminal insanity - losing all Muslim privileges.

When then will the extreme Islamists be taken away by the men in white coats? For they may not be criminals yet but they are most definitely mad.

Dominic Whiteman is the Editor of the Westminster Journal and Director of the Investigative Unit V7

---

Bookmark with: