HOW much does Western foreign policy contribute to Islamist terrorism?

It’s been a pressing question since the start of the “war on terror” that gets new attention after the current rash of terrorist acts.

To be clear: the responsibility for terrorism lies with terrorists. The people who blow themselves up, killing innocent kids in the Manchester Arena or who murder people with bombs or guns or lorries, vans and cheap knives are responsible for murder. 

They are also motivated by their own “Islamist” politics, which tries to build a narrow ideology out of a broad religion.

But does Western foreign policy make it easier for them? 

The case is strong: interventions like the Iraq war give Islamist extremists a chance to make their case for a violence-meets-violence argument. 

They also give actual territory to Islamist terrorists: al-Qaida in Iraq’s al-Zarqawi and Isis’s al-Baghdadi were given room to build in the post-war chaos of Iraq. 

They were gifted territory, recruits and weapons by the war which they used to build their forces. 

It is quite likely that the Manchester Arena bomber, Salman Abedi, may also have had training and support in the chaos of Libya, exacerbated by the 2011 Western intervention. 

Even “establishment” figures argue this case. In 2010, former MI5 head Elizabeth Manningham-Buller said: “Our involvement in Iraq, for want of a better word, radicalised a whole generation of young people, some of them British citizens who saw our involvement in Iraq, on top of our involvement in Afghanistan, as being an attack on Islam.”

However, there was what looked like a powerful counter-argument in 2007, when a “former jihadi” from Luton called Hassan Butt wrote an article in the Observer. 

Butt said that when among British terrorists “I remember how much we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings, and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the ‘Blair’s bombs’ line did our propaganda work for us. 

“More importantly they helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.”

Butt’s statement was widely quoted in the media by British and US “war on terror” enthusiasts, “laptop bombardiers” and neocons. 

But there was a problem: it was one more fake from the war on terror. Butt was a fantasist, not an “ex-jihadi” or “reformed terrorist.” 

He made up his “jihadi” background so he could sell stories to the press.

The story is revisited by Shiv Malik, the journalist who did most to promote Butt, in his book, The Messenger, published last year by Faber. 

Malik describes what it is like to be a journalist who gets taken in by a trickster and it is painful as a fellow journalist to read how Butt “told me what I wanted to hear, and I swallowed it whole.”

Butt had been public spokesman of British Islamist group al-Muhajiroun, but never became involved in terrorism, as he had claimed. 

Butt was exposed when Manchester Police arrested him in 2008. The police were irked by his claims of former terrorism and released their interview notes where Butt admitted none of it was true. 

Butt says his attitude to stories about terrorism was “why not try and make some money out of this?”

He told the police that Malik had wanted him to admit involvement in terrorism, saying: “I’m thinking this guy [Malik] isn’t satisfied. It’s still not enough for him, he still wants more, and he wants more, and he wants more.” 

Butt was reduced to researching possible terrorism he could pretend to have been involved in via the internet — “I’m thinking, how can I fit everything into my timeline?”

He admitted he had not, as previously claimed, met key British terrorists or been to a terrorist camp, saying: “I made up an elaborate story about being privately trained [but] I’ve never fired a gun.” 

Butt says he was just “adding spice to flavour the whole story.”

He tried to justify this, saying: “You see, the press are going to print things anyway, and they were printing things before I was saying things. And basically, if I wasn’t going to cash up on it, somebody else was going to.”

The fakery had a comic side. Butt claimed to have been attacked and stabbed by his former jihadi friends, as “some proof” that he had left dangerous terrorist circles, but admits “God, this is embarrassing … basically I stabbed myself … inside my house with a small penknife … the knife was sterilised.” This was “just part of the whole scam.”

Butt’s fake story was just one of the minor entirely fake stories of the “war on terror.” 

It is much smaller than the many, elaborate and entirely false tales of Saddam Hussein backing al-Qaida and owning WMD. 

It still has two things in common. First, journalists wanted the story to be true. A lot of media wanted a former jihadi who attacked both jihadis and the left. 

Second, there were warnings, but they were ignored. As early as 2001 the Muslim Council of Britain described Butt as “a clown and someone who wants to make himself important” who made “wild claims.”

Malik, while admitting he was badly fooled, argues that Butt was also “recruited as an informant for MI5” who then “encouraged” Butt “to interact with journalists and take to the airwaves as readily as he could.” 

Malik suggests MI5 wanted him to play this false role partly to “move the political class into supporting new laws and sacrificing extra resources for the fight against terrorism.”

If Butt was a fake jihadi encouraged by MI5 to talk loudly about terrorism so they could win new “anti-terror” powers, that would be very serious, though personally I treat this claim with some scepticism. 

I think the press were capable of helping to create their own fake jihadi without the need for help from the spies.