Richard Watson: The voice of the Muslim majority still goes unheard

Not all Islamists are terrorists, but all Muslim terrorists are Islamists. This fact must lie at the heart of new thinking about how to take on the terrorist threat at home and abroad. There is a growing but belated recognition by Western intelligence agencies and governments that the ideological and theological support structure for extreme Islamism must be tackled if the so-called war on terror is to be won. This is, in effect, a battle of ideas.

The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has called for a celebration of British values. He even suggested deploying propaganda, as in the Cold War. But former Islamists I have spoken with believe this is missing the point.

Propagandising about democracy and justice will cut no ice with Islamists who have been groomed to hate those values. This is not a polite debate with people with open minds. The battle of ideas is more about the flip side of Brown's coin - challenging theological justifications for terrorism, which are based on highly selective quotations and interpretations from the Koran.

During my work for Newsnight over the past six years, I have interviewed many Islamist extremists and terrorist sympathisers. Most have been involved with supporting terrorism verbally and financially. A few have mixed in the same close circles as people who have gone on to mount terrorist attacks in the UK.

So what do they want and what drives them to plan terrorist acts? We can dispel a few myths. The first one is that the major motivation is foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The deaths of innocent Muslims in these conflicts are powerful recruiting sergeants for sure. My investigations for Newsnight have shown how supporters of political Islamist groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun have used propaganda videos from Iraq to whip new recruits into a frenzy. But other factors are needed to create a suicide bomber.

The next myth is that poverty and lack of opportunity are the bedfellows of radicalisation. This has been disproved time and again. The leader of the London bombers, Mohammed Siddique Khan, was intelligent and well-educated. Most terrorists in British prisons are university graduates.

Then there is the other suggestions that religious fundamentalism and the social exclusion of Muslim families are to be blamed. Nonsense, virtually all terrorists prosecuted so far have been born in Britain, speak English and are far more religiously extreme than their parents, who often despair about the radical preachers who have been brain-washing their children. Before he joined Al-Muhajiroun, the leader of the fertiliser bomb plot enjoyed music and fast cars.

None of these explanations is satisfactory. Instead, former jihadists I have interviewed believe that extreme political Islam - which feeds terrorism - is a seductive cult based on a radical but superficially coherent interpretation of the Koran. They say it mirrors extreme interpretations of the Bible in medieval times, and I think they are right.

The Islamist view of the world is one divided into an Islamic Caliphate and the land of the Kuffar or non-believers, who are worthless in the eyes of God. More extreme proponents of this theory - the jihadists - argue that Islam is already engaged in a legitimate war with the West and that cannot stop until the armies of Islam rise up to create a Caliphate once again. Jihadists truly believe that this is God's will and it can be justified in Islam to kill innocent civilians to achieve this aim.

With such a ready supply of indoctrinated young minds, public safety becomes a roll of the dice. Will increasingly stretched intelligence services have the potential attackers in their sights or will they slip through? Western society cannot be sure of winning this bet. We can limit the risk by making it difficult for extremists and terrorists to operate, but there will always be the cell that escapes detection, as so nearly happened last week.

The best approach would be to choke off the supply of ready recruits. Those on the left frequently suggest that solving the crisis is the Middle East would help, as would pulling the troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan. But this would not address the supremacist stance of some groups of jihadists who want nothing less than to dismantle democracy and establish a new world order.

For many years now, the Government has relied on bodies such as the Muslim Council of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain to urge the Muslim community to expose the extremists in their midst. It has not worked. In my experience, neither organisation is particularly liked or respected by the majority of Muslims in the UK. And there is little trust between the Muslim community and the police. Both the MCB and the MAB have close links with political Islamic groups, albeit of the more peaceful kind. But much of their work has focused on injustices in the Middle East - not community relations and home-grown terrorism over here.

New leaders must be found who genuinely represent the British Muslim community on the issues that affect us all: education, health, employment and, yes, counter-terrorism. But these voices have been stifled because the Government has been backing the wrong horse. The Home Office has wrongly assumed that political bodies like the MCB truly represent the aspirations of British Muslims. The resulting vacuum in the debate on extremism has been filled by the jihadists to devastating effect. For more than 20 years, the Government and security services have stood back while extremist preachers such as Abu Hamza and Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed twisted generations of recruits. It is now clear this was a very grave mistake.

If you have any doubt about the importance of a new grass-roots approach, then consider the following. A suicide bomber is about to attack. A combination of peer pressure and false religious conviction has led him to this point. His cell leader has convinced him that because Muslims are dying in Iraq, Britain must know the same pain. He has been groomed to champion Islamist supremacy. He has slipped through the security net. Propaganda about British values have failed to touch his heart. He dons the vest and prepares to attack.

At this stage, there is just one thing that will stop him - doubt about whether killing innocent civilians is theologically justified, doubt about whether his place in heaven is assured.

Richard Watson reports for BBC 2's 'Newsnight', specialising in counter-terrorism and radicalisation

Further reading: Take a look at Ed Husain's 'The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain ...'