British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s just delivered a speech on the problem of Islamist terror that hit many right notes. The address, on December 7, named the ideology driving the extremism, called out Arab dictatorships who are deliberately enabling terror for their own ends and debunked the myth this is all the fault of Western foreign policy.

Here are Clarion’s top five takeaways:

1.He defined the problem

In a line reminiscent of President Trump, Johnson defined the war on terror in stark terms of “winning” against an ideological enemy.

“It is a struggle not against a religion but an idea, a perverse ideology.”

He defined the ideology as a religiously-based idea that offers a powerful emotional solution to feeling alienated, powerless, humiliated and afraid – a violent path of holy redemption.

“It is a very ancient idea, and common to virtually all religions – including Christianity – that any kind of worldly setback (military defeat, political humiliation, even economic decline) must be the mark of some divine disfavour. For thousands of years, human beings have postulated that the correct response must be to propitiate the Gods or God by some act of piety.”

In Islam, this impulse manifests itself in jihadism.

Prospective jihadists “are told that if only they will turn to this extreme and violent theology then all their troubles will be gone and their lives turned upside down. And suddenly the world around them that had previously seemed to be alienating and intimidating now seems itself to be contemptible and corrupt; and deserving of reform by the application of their holy rage,” Johnson said.

2. He underscored that Muslims are the principle victims of terrorism.

“Who are the principal victims of this global disease?” Johnson asked. “It is not Westerners, in spite of the recent increase in terrorist attacks. The number of global terrorist victims has risen from 3,361 in the year 2000 to 25,673 in 2016; and the overwhelming majority of those victims, 98%, were innocent Muslims living in Muslim countries.”

He appealed to all peoples opposed to jihadism to find a sense of shared mission, rather than viewing the conflict as a problem that “the West” has with a faction of Islam.

3.He debunked the idea this is all the West’s fault.

Johnson argued, “If we are going to win, then we need to scrap the idea that Western foreign policy is somehow the principal cause of the problem. It is a fallacy that is at once glib, egotistical and which simply feeds the narrative of the jihadis.”

This doesn’t mean that the West has not made mistakes. “I am with the consensus that the war in Iraq – certainly in the absence of a clear plan – was a mistake,” Johnson said. “But that war did not create the Islamist terrorist threat.”

“Western powers have been bit players in a kaleidoscopic struggle between dynasties and sects and tribes and interests in which, over the last 30 years, Islamist extremism – and in many cases terrorism – has been manipulated in order to serve some political end.”

4. He called out Middle Eastern regimes for manipulating terrorism for their own ends.

Johnson identified three ways through which dictatorships have manipulated and exacerbated Islamist terrorism.

The first manipulation “is simple appeasement, by which some governments – at least in the past – have condoned the financial support of highly dubious mosques or madrasas and turned a blind eye to preaching of hate or violence to buy the domestic support, for instance, of a conservative and reactionary clerisy.”

Pakistan, in particular, has been guilty of this strategy, but it is far from the only culprit.

The second manipulation “is how Islamist extremism has been for decades used as a tool for self-preservation. It’s either me or the maniacs, a regime will say: Which do you prefer? And the world says, well, in that case I suppose we had better hold our noses and have you.”

“The most egregious recent exponent of this false alternative has been Bashar al-Assad,” the president of Syria, Johnson noted.

Explaining why this false dichotomy is so pernicious, he explained, “We end up with a lose-lose situation. If you have a chaotic state, then you have a breeding-ground for terror. If you have a strong but repressive state, then you also have a potential breeding-ground for terror.”

The third manipulation is “whereby a government or its agents will covertly support terrorist groups abroad: Either to weaken that government’s neighbors; or to diffuse any threat from those neighbors – real or imagined, or to export its own jihadi problem outside its borders.”

The most obvious examples of this tactic are Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, both of which fund and arm rival Islamist factions in the Syrian Civil War.

5. He called for an intellectual revolution across the Middle East and called out the Muslim Brotherhood

Winning requires a “powerful and visible third option,” Johnson said, “neither the tyranny and repression of undemocratic governments nor the chaos and backwardness of Islamist regimes, but the real and viable possibility of pluralist, generous and tolerant societies that allow space for free speech and independent non-governmental organisations.”

But he was under no delusions about who is responsible for the current lack of this option.

“There is no tradition of secular political parties in many Muslim countries, and often the biggest, most efficient and most politically savvy competitor for political space are the Islamists. The most effective of all is the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Creating this secular space, he argued, required “backing human rights groups and NGOs,” and ending “the cultural and intellectual repression of women.”

A full transcript of the speech is available on the British Government’s website. Watch the full speech below:

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