{"id":10252,"date":"2015-07-21T06:54:27","date_gmt":"2015-07-21T11:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10252"},"modified":"2015-07-21T06:54:27","modified_gmt":"2015-07-21T11:54:27","slug":"an-open-letter-to-britains-leading-violent-extremist-david-cameron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=10252","title":{"rendered":"An Open Letter to Britain\u2019s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Open Letter to Britain\u2019s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron<\/a><\/h3>\n

Dear Prime Minister David Cameron,<\/p>\n

It is with deep disappointment that I read excerpts of your speech provided by Downing Street to the press, purporting to set out a five-year strategy to tackle fundamentalist terrorism, which\u200a\u2014\u200awhatever its intentions\u200a\u2014\u200ais thoroughly misguided, and destined to plunge this country, as well as the Middle East, into further chaos and misery.<\/p>\n

I am writing this open letter to request you, as a matter of urgency, to abide by your obligations as a human being, a British citizen, a Member of Parliament, and as our Prime Minister: to undertake proper due-diligence in the formulation of Britain\u2019s foreign, counter-terrorism and security policies, based on the vast array of evidence from scientific and academic studies of foreign policy, terrorism and radicalisation, rather than the influence of far-right extremist ideology, and of narrow vested interest groups keen to profit from war and fear.<\/p>\n

Ideology, innit<\/h4>\n

In your speech, you say:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt begins by understanding the threat we face and why we face it. What we are fighting, in Islamist extremism, is an ideology. It is an extreme doctrine. And like any extreme doctrine, it is subversive. At its furthest end it seeks to destroy nation-states to invent its own barbaric realm. And it often backs violence to achieve this aim\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And like so many ideologies that have existed before\u200a\u2014\u200awhether fascist or communist\u200a\u2014\u200amany people, especially young people, are being drawn to it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We need to understand why it is proving so attractive\u2026 The root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But this is already incoherent. You state that the threat is Islamist extremism, an ideology. You then claim that we need to understand why that ideology is so attractive, and you answer the question by claiming that the \u201croot cause\u201d of this threat is the \u201cextremist ideology itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Open Letter to Britain\u2019s Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron Dear Prime Minister David Cameron, It is with deep disappointment that I read excerpts of your speech provided by Downing Street to the press, purporting to set out a five-year strategy to tackle fundamentalist terrorism, which\u200a\u2014\u200awhatever its intentions\u200a\u2014\u200ais thoroughly misguided, and destined to plunge this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[93,1195,1561,6295,6113,522,2092,7423,793],"class_list":["post-10252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-britain","tag-david-cameron","tag-extremism","tag-ideology","tag-insurge-intelligence","tag-middle-east","tag-nafeez-ahmed","tag-root-cause","tag-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10253,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10252\/revisions\/10253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}