Address legitimate injustice first, then see if the ideologues need to be bombed

The case of Liam Lyburd, a British teenager currently recovering in a prison cell from his Valium addiction and ideological radicalisation, can teach David Cameron valuable lessons on how to address the problem of Daesh. This young man was found guilty last week of buying a Glock pistol, ninety bullets, CS gas and enough explosives to build five pipe bombs. Aged just nineteen, Lyburd planned to shoot up Newcastle College, from where he had recently been expelled.

The unprecedented power of the internet is staggering. Asked by Nick Dry, prosecuting, why he needed so many rounds of ammunition, Lyburd replied glibly: “I was watching videos on YouTube and the Americans, they have thousands. You can shoot 100 rounds in a few seconds.” Lyburd is aged just nineteen, as young as some of the recruits attracted to Daesh.

America legislators have for decades allowed so many high school shootings to occur that a teenager on the other side of the Atlantic felt inspired to play copy-cat. Has America just exported its first terrorist ideology?

The use of social media in the case of Daesh and Lyburd is telling. America’s pervasive gun lobby is led by establishment organisations like the National Rifle Association and enhanced by grass-roots nationalist militia groups. Together, these quasi-political gun ownership clans have populated entire YouTube channels with educational videos; filled Twitter and Instagram feeds with gun pornography; exploited Reddit pages; and even launched online and printed magazines. The US government is involved in spreading gun culture, with the Pentagon gifting hundreds of millions of dollars each year to Hollywood, an asset that Obama has said he believes is part of American foreign policy.

Finally, there is the role of purist ideology; Second-Amendment-ism is in many ways comparable to Daesh-ism. Second Amendment ideology is rejected by many Americans, just as Daesh ideology is rejected in the Arab world. Daesh slaughters Yazidis or threatens American lives; so too do Second Amendment ideologues allow platoons of American school children to be killed by shooters each year, purely on ideological grounds by preventing the introduction of tougher gun laws. This has led directly to the shooting of tens of thousands of predominantly ethnic minority Americans, caught up in gun crime, every single year.

Yet, censoring Second Amendment ideology, and policing the internet for high-school-shooting training material, is clearly not the way forward in America’s gun crime crisis. The prosecutors of the war on terror might argue, as they have done with Daesh, that the correct approach would be to have drones to blow-up Lyburd and his family in order to prevent a terrifying and fatal attack on British civilians.

For sure, even if you reform gun laws, there would still be high school shootings, but there would be far fewer. Likewise, you could reform British foreign policy completely, and there would still be dangerous radical Islamists, but far, far fewer.

If the British people feel uncomfortable about reforming foreign policy radically at the risk of allowing the Daesh ideology to breed unchecked, remember that Britain had a total of five Communist MPs elected during the nineteen-twenties, the thirties and the forties; despite their best efforts, they could not turn the country towards revolution even from a position of political prominence. The Communist Party endured at a local level for decades more, with Britain’s last Communist local councillor de-selected in West Fife only at the last election. Still no revolution. Ideology, however widely promoted, can be starved of oxygen and wilt away, if only the right approach is taken.

We need an end to the War on Terror as much as America needs an end to its open house on guns. A repeal of antiquated gun laws would save more Americans than Daesh will ever kill, and would sit finely against a commitment to letting the Middle East finally exercise its own agency, free from Western menacing and manipulation. If David Cameron wants to play one small part in that epic re-organisation of justice, he should heed Lyburd’s lesson; if an ideology is filtering into Britain from another country, look to the root causes of that ideology. Don’t try to bomb it, or censor it. Put another way, address legitimate political injustices first, and then see if the ideologues still need to be bombed, censored or locked up. I doubt that they will.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.