ISIL in Britain

By: Nicolas Luongo

October 10, 2014

Last week’s news of the murder of British volunteer aid worker Alan Henning makes this a difficult time to write about world peace. Perhaps the most troubling fact of the former taxi driver’s death, Henning was slain by a so-called Islamic State jihadist who is believed to be British himself.

In a video released by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Henning’s killer, known as Jihadi John, addresses Prime Minister David Cameron and claims that the victim’s “blood is on the hands of the British parliament.” In an article published in the Telegraph, Cameron called ISIL “a poisonous and extremist ideology.”

But Jihadi John not unique. In June, one member of Parliament estimated that Islamic State extremists have recruited as many as 1,500 young British nationals. The volume of British Muslims radicalized by ISIL suggests a systemic problem. What could explain how these youths fell prey to such a warped and abhorrent doctrine, so directly contravening the values of Islam and Britain alike? How were they lost by both their faith and country?

Karl Marx presented a view of human nature in which man has an essential need for community. However, highly individuated in our daily lives, we typically look to two institutions to overcome our isolation: religion and the state.

In the United States, we feel a sense of unity and shared identity, despite having a great diversity of ethnic and religious background. Indeed, the diversity is itself a defining feature of the American national identity. This allows even second-generation and mixed-race youth such as myself to enjoy and fully participate in the state surrogate community.

The British state also seeks to fulfill this role, but it does so in a manner very different from that of the United States. Typical of European countries, which not coincidentally tend to have more specific ethnic identities than the United States, the British state creates a sense of community primarily through the provision of welfare and social services. While this method provides substantive benefits, it suffers from the drawback of material inaccessibility in a way that the American patriotic ideology does not.

What this means in practice is that those who are materially underserved by the state do not enjoy its benefits of community. Such is the scenario I see playing out in Britain today. Black and minority ethnic participation in social care has diminished over the past 20 years, while mainstream user participation in the same services has risen. Disparities exist in surveys of voter registration as well: while 90 percent of white British are registered to vote, only 78 percent of Indian and Pakistanis and only 59 percent of black Africans who are eligible to vote in Britain are registered to do so.

What happens when the state fails to enfranchise these groups? Members fall back into alienation. Seeking to fulfill their fundamental need for community, disaffected youths become susceptible to extremist appeals based on the other traditional community institution, religion. The key to ISIL’s radicalization of British youths, therefore, lies not in Islam, but instead in the failure of the British state, in the words of David Cameron, “to provide a vision of society to which they feel they […] belong.”

Opens in a new window