U.K.: BATTLE IN OUR MINDS

Battle against extremism is also in our minds
The war on terror is not just confined to the military arena, argues matthew d’ancona

The struggle against Islamic extremism is a war in which the enemy seeks to get inside our heads as much as to mutilate our bodies. The strategic objective is to force democracies, in their rage and panic, to make mistakes and resort to internal squabbling.

At its worst, this tendency to introspection becomes almost wilful. We do not just identify errors, apologise for and learn from them. We strip away the context and, occasionally, let self-scrutiny slip into indulgent self-loathing.

For instance, it is right that the tragedy of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes in Stockwell remains a matter of the highest concern. But how many now recall the death of DC Stephen Oake, killed in an anti-terrorist raid in Manchester three years ago?

When history is moving at this speed, it is hard for the media to keep up. Take the war in Lebanon this summer. Hezbollah's cunning in the conflict was to nurture the impression in the West that it was somehow a romantic maquis, a rag-tag force of noble freedom fighters defending the people of Lebanon against murderous colonialists.

It was almost completely absent from our screens, always one step ahead of the cameras. Never mind that Hezbollah was using Lebanese people as 'human sandbags' - what Jan Egeland, the UN's humanitarian affairs chief, called 'cowardly blending'.

Because Hezbollah maintained such a low profile, there was little sense that what we were witnessing was the first battle in a new war waged by theocratic Iran - vigorously pursuing its nuclear ambitions and supporting Islamist terror around the world - for unchallenged hegemony in this sorely afflicted region. Hezbollah understood better how to manipulate global opinion. And for that reason, it certainly won the media war.


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1) Battle against extremism is also in our minds