Manchester bomber Salman Abedi

There’s one question about the Manchester atrocity infinitely more pressing than any other. Why did a young man brought up in the city murder 22 of his fellow citizens in cold blood, many of them children, who had breathed the same air and walked the same streets?

It is curious how people skirt around this conundrum when offering an answer. Many partial explanations are given — many of them fine as far as they go, but incomplete, and therefore inadequate.

Donald Trump says terrorists such as Salman Abedi are ‘losers’ worthy of our contempt. So they are. Many of them are pathetic types, often with histories of petty crime. Yet there are lots of such people in the world, and most of them don’t contemplate mass murder.

Barbarity

Others reasonably point out many terrorists are drug takers, as Abedi is alleged to have been. They rightly say repeated drug abuse warps minds and can induce paranoia. All true, but it still does not take us to the heart of the matter.

Still others spread the net of blame wider, and cite the failures of recent British foreign policy, and in particular the destabilisation by Western forces of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, which has led to the rise of Islamic fundamentalists who may have nurtured Salman Abedi.

And so it goes on. One explanation comes hard on the heels of another. Each sounds plausible. Each is part of the truth. But without one crucial factor they would not, even in combination, have led to the barbarity of the Manchester attack.

No, the point we must address squarely is Abedi was an Islamic fanatic. Not only that. All recent attacks — in Paris, Nice, Brussels, Stockholm and anywhere else you care to think of — were done in the name of Islam.

Perhaps the point that the perpetrators have all been Muslim is such an obvious one that commentators don’t feel it worth mentioning. But I rather think most prefer not to grapple with an uncomfortable truth which is hard to make sense of.

Let’s be honest and admit that none of these outrages has been committed by Sikhs or Hindus or Christians, though it is perfectly true that some members of the IRA who planted bombs over 20 years ago regarded themselves as devout Roman Catholics.

To illustrate the problem, one only had to listen to Andy Burnham, the newly elected Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, on Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday morning. He is, I’ve no doubt, a decent and generally sensible man.

Yet he did all he could to represent Salman Abedi as a one-man band acting on his own account or with a handful of similarly deluded accomplices. Burnham said he disapproved of the term ‘Islamic terrorism’. Abedi was ‘a terrorist, an extremist, not a Muslim’.

The newly elected Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham

According to Burnham, the Manchester bomber ‘no more represented the Muslim community’ in that city than the killer of the Labour MP Jo Cox last June represented the ‘white Christian community’.

If only he were right! Thomas Mair, who murdered Jo Cox, was a lunatic who spoke for virtually no one and enjoyed no support from his community. I’m afraid the same can’t be said of Salman Abedi.

It now transpires that his father is suspected of having links to an Al-Qaeda-related group in Libya, while his younger brother was arrested in Tripoli last night over alleged support for ISIS.

Needless to say, I accept that almost every Muslim in this country will be as appalled by the bombing as everyone else. I believe the many Muslims in Manchester and elsewhere who say they are shocked. It has been cheering to see them condemning the outrage. But I fear there is a small minority which feels a degree of sympathy with Abedi, and an even tinier one which actively supports him, and wants this country to be a Caliphate under Sharia law. However misguidedly, they find in parts of the Koran and some Islamic teaching a justification for violent action.

How can I say this? There can be little dispute as to the existence of a hardcore of Islamic extremists. The almost weekly uncovering of terror plots by the authorities, and the exodus of up to 1,000 British Muslims to fight with ISIS in Syria, is proof enough.

The size of a larger (though, numerically, relatively small) group of sympathisers is harder to gauge. After the July 2005 bombing in London which killed 52 people, a YouGov poll found that 6 per cent of British Muslims supported the bombing. That equates to around 100,000 people.

In 2015, a BBC poll found that just over a quarter of Muslims in this country had ‘some sympathy’ with the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris in which 12 people died, after the satirical magazine published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. This was a disturbing finding.

Sympathy

Of course, tacit support doesn’t amount to active engagement. But unless there has been an inexplicable shift in sentiment, there may be thousands of Muslims (most of them probably young) in this country with at least some sympathy for what Salman Abedi did on Monday night.

If this is the case, what should the Government do? It’s absolutely right to distinguish between decent, moderate Muslims and violent extremists. Ordinary, peace-loving Muslims must be kept on side, not least because the security services depend on them for much of the intelligence they receive about terrorist plots.

Some reasonably point out many terrorists are drug takers, as Abedi is alleged to have been

The nightmare scenario would be to provoke a hardening of opinion so that the mainstream actively supported terrorism. This happened with a sizeable number of Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland, who provided succour to, and cover for, the IRA. Such an outcome in the Muslim community would be a disaster.

But the authorities should nonetheless continue to do what they can to identify extremists under the so-called Prevent counter-terror programme, which seeks to combat radicalisation. Burnham has criticised it in the past, and did so again yesterday, on the basis that the requirement on Muslims to report extremism is ‘discriminatory’.

Reality

That’s nonsense. If I discovered a terrorist cell in my Anglican church (hardly very likely, I admit) I would unhesitatingly inform the police. Why can’t Muslims be expected to do the same?

And didn’t Sheikh Mohammed Saeed, a local imam in Manchester, have a moral obligation to alert the police two years ago, after he had seen Abedi show ‘the face of hate’ when he delivered an anti-ISIS speech in his mosque?

'The reluctance of intelligent politicians such as Andy Burnham, and some Muslim leaders, to admit there is problem peculiar to the Muslim community is alarming'

It’s not a form of persecution, but a reflection of reality, to admit the presence of extremists in some Muslim communities. I repeat: such people are not usually found among Christians, Hindus or Sikhs.

Only yesterday, I heard a Muslim chaplain on Radio 5 who had visited Albert Square in Manchester to offer his respects. Yet in the same breath he complained about Prevent, which he described as ‘toxic’.

When pressed, however, he wouldn’t come up with an alternative. Good for the Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who says the scheme will be expanded if the Tories win on June 8.

The reluctance of intelligent politicians such as Andy Burnham, and some Muslim leaders, to admit there is problem peculiar to the Muslim community is alarming. How can this enormous challenge ever be met if there is a widespread pretence that it doesn’t exist?