Black Flag Down E-Book

Liam Byrne

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The West is facing a terror threat unprecedented since the Cold War: a revolution in the accessibility of violence as ISIS, al Qaeda and their allies set out to build a 21st-century theocracy of seventh-century values, stretching from Portugal to Pakistan. We need to dramatically step up the fightback - yet we're at risk of plunging into our enemies' trap of divide and rule. At home, we risk becoming a suspicious society, scarred by Islamophobia, where British Muslims fear being seen as the enemy within. Online, we're fighting extremist recruiters on the digital battlefront with one hand tied behind our back. And in the Middle East, we lack the strategy or grand coalition needed to isolate and undermine our enemy in the battle of ideas. From Iraq to the streets of inner-city Birmingham, Liam Byrne MP brings together two years of fresh research with young British Muslims, frank interviews with intelligence and police officers, and frontline reports from the Middle East to answer the critical question: how do we defeat the new empire of intolerance? In this timely examination of the rise of ISIS, Byrne offers bold new answers for handling one of the biggest challenges of our time: bringing down the black flag of extremism.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title PageAbout the Author Acknowledgements CHAPTER 1: The Surge of the Century CHAPTER 2: The Clash of Civilisations? CHAPTER 3: Winning the Battle of Ideas CHAPTER 4: The Fork in the Road CHAPTER 5: The Home We Build Together CHAPTER 6: The Digital Danger Slide CHAPTER 7: Peace in the Poisoned Cauldron CHAPTER 8: The New Silk Road CONCLUSION: Self-Confident Idealism Copyright

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rt Hon. Liam Byrne MP is a writer, reformer and campaigner. A former Cabinet minister, he did some of the toughest jobs in government in the Home Office, 10 Downing Street and Her Majesty’s Treasury, where he was Chief Secretary. Before entering politics, Liam was a Fulbright Scholar at the Harvard Business School and a technology entrepreneur. He gave up a successful business career in 2004 to serve one of the poorest communities in Britain, his constituency of Hodge Hill in East Birmingham, where five generations of his family lived and worked. He has doubled his majority at every election.

Liam is the author of Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain (Head of Zeus, 2016), Robbins Rebooted (SMF, 2014), the critically acclaimed Turning to Face the East (Guardian Books, 2013), Reinventing Government Again (SMF, 2004) and Local Government Transformed (Baseline, 1996). He guest lectures at Oxford University.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This short book brings together years of research in my own constituency and across the Middle East. There are scores of peoples who have helped but who, because of the positions they hold, I cannot name. My debt to them, however, is immense.

I am glad to pay tribute to many others who have helped me so much – in particular, Chris Doyle, Chief Executive of CAABU (Council for Arab–British Understanding), which hosted my visits to Qatar and the Palestinian Authority (along with Medical Aid to Palestine); Gary Kent, director of the All Party Group on Kurdistan; and the Kurdistan Regional Government, which hosted me in Iraq. Prof. Linda Colley (Princeton University); Dr Karen Armstrong; Dr Shahid Maher at King’s College; HMA Vincent Fean; HMA Ajay Sharma; officials at the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB); Sir Trevor Chinn; Harvey Redgrave; Louise Casey; Ed Hussain, and the UK Embassy team in Qatar were all kind enough to discuss ideas and questions as they have taken shape over the years. Prof. James Arthur at Birmingham University has been a long-standing influence. In particular, I’d like to thank Chris Doyle, Nick Lowles at Hope Not Hate, Jamie Bartlett at Demos, and Talha Ahmad from the MCB for joining colleagues at the House of Commons for an extended discussion of narratives. I would especially like to thank Stephen Timms MP, Stephen Doughty MP, and my neighbour, Shabana Mahmood MP, for the discussions we’ve had. I want to thank Rt Hon. Stephen Timms and Gary Kent for detailed comments on the manuscript.

Most of all, though, the ideas here have been shaped by the constituents I serve and work with in Birmingham, in particular the leaders, parents and students at Waverley School, Saltley School, Rockwood Academy, Washwood Heath Academy, Hodge Hill Girls School, Hodge Hill Academy and International School. Profound thanks go to Cllr Ansar Ali Khan; Aftab Chugtai MBE; Dr Iqtidar Karamat Cheema, Director, Institute for Leadership and Community Development; and the participants in our Hodge Hill Faith Leaders Roundtable along with Jonnie Turpie and the team at Maverick Television.

I’m hugely grateful to my fabulous agent, Georgina Capel, and Iain Dale for supporting the project, along with his team, Olivia Beattie and my superb editor Laurie De Decker. Finally, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my parliamentary and constituency team: James Pignon, who prepared important research papers for this project, along with Gill Beddows and Sarish Jabeen. The errors are all my own.

CHAPTER 1

THE SURGE OF THE CENTURY

It was supposed to be ‘mission accomplished’.

On Thursday 1 May 2003, a pink and sweaty President George W. Bush gently lowered his S-3B Viking fighter plane onto the vast deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and, with the braggadocio of a cowboy, stepped out in his Top Gun fatigues to the salute of the flight-deck crew. A few hours later, he swapped the uniform of an airman for the uniform of a statesman, stepped up to a podium set before the smart ranks of marines, and boldly announced the end of combat operations in Iraq. ‘The war on terror is not over,’ he warned. ‘We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide.’ The giant banner behind him told a simpler, two-word story for the cameras: ‘Mission Accomplished.’

Standing on the high mocca-brown ramparts bulldozed into the oil fields of Kirkuk, it didn’t feel like ‘Mission Accomplished’ to me.

Here, on the ‘Kirkuk field’, oil has burned in the Eternal Fire known as Baba Gurgur since the Book of Daniel. Here, for millennia, shepherds have warmed their flocks on the plain’s warm rocks, and the armies of the ancient east – Arabs and Assyrians, Greeks and Gutians, Christians and Kurds, Medes and Mongols, Hurrians, Parthians, Turkmen – have criss-crossed the giant flatness that stretches to the horizons. Here was the largest known oil field in the world until 1947, and here, today, the battlefront is still a continuous line of fire. The sun was beginning to set over the vast earthy-tan plain, burning the colour of the ground to copper. The hot air was thick with the smell of oil. On the horizon behind us, the great refineries were shooting burning gas into an ocean-blue sky. And through our binoculars, we could see, two miles in the distance, hanging limp on tall poles in the windless late afternoon, the black flags of the Islamic State.