Not one Muslim I know thinks war in Syria is justified

Promises come in thick and fast, as unreliable as all those made before – on Iraq, Libya and the ‘war on terror’

A Damascus refugee camp in 2014 (United Nation Relief and Works Agency via Getty Images)

The Government, hawkish MPs and journos are ready to go. Come Wednesday, the PM will have his legacy: our boys will again take to the skies, drop bombs and watch them go off. Better than any computer game. Isis guerrillas are depraved and evil. Blood is their drug of choice. Massacres induce highs: ecstasy, a sense of power and a craving for more. They are now beyond the reach of reason, morality or virtuous human emotions.

So too, it seems, are many Western leaders. Since the Paris attacks, they have abandoned common sense, in part because they are so caught up in the eddies of vengeance, Western supremacy and rage. They can’t think straight, and are clueless about what they are about to unleash in Syria. Or in Britain. Patrick Cockburn painstakingly describes every week in these pages how Assad’s army, marauding militias and competing foreign interests are despoiling that poor country. Most of the players care little about ordinary Syrians, who for almost five years have been traumatised, terrorised, tortured and slain.

The award-winning photojournalist Kai Wiedenhöfer has taken pictures of injured men, women and children trapped in Syria. There is no drama in these pictures, just acceptance of never-ending pain and grief. Do Cameron and his war cronies care about them? Most certainly not. They just want to show off, to react to a violence they can’t control with more of the same. They have unexpected allies. The novelist Robert Harris is keenly promoting this repugnant cause; so too is Hilary Benn and other Labour grandees who want to back the big guns, whatever the consequences.

Those beating the drum will not lose their children, brothers or sisters in this campaign. But blameless Syrians being forced to share space with Isis will. And Britain will not take any responsibility for the new wave of dispossessed people forced to flee their homes. We care so much about Syrians that we give them no refuge when they come here. Their lives do not matter at all in the calculations being made. Non-Europeans were devalued over many centuries and remain so today. Islamists and Western militaries between them have killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, Asia and the Arab world.

The allies want to obliterate Raqqa because it is an Isis stronghold. Mona, who fled the place, has this to say: “How can I condemn the killing in Paris, but stay silent about the bombings in Syria? Are we cheap and their lives valuable? The locations could be wrong; they could kill civilians. It could be my family.” Yassin Haj Saleh, a writer and intellectual born in Raqqa, is also against Britain going into Syria: “A quarter of a million of my people have been killed. Are they saying British lives are more important than our lives?” Answer these people, Hollande and Cameron, before you go and add to the chaos.

Promises come in thick and fast, as unreliable as all those made before – on Iraq, Libya and the “war on terror”. Every single one of those propagandised military strategies failed and created an ever more unstable Middle East. Cameron’s claim that the bombs will give new courage to 70,000 “moderates” is as fantastical as those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Once again nobody is speaking to Muslims or Arabs at home. I have not heard a single British Muslim or Arab voice calling for this bombing campaign. OK, some Isis expert called Hassan Hassan thinks it would be smart for Britain to get into the fray. “The importance of Britain’s involvement in the US-led international campaign against the Islamic state should not be in doubt,” he says. Well, sir, millions of us are filled with doubt and fear. Isis exploits the idea of a “crusade” and Western governments and commentators are giving them fodder for this dangerous, seductive narrative. Could we not collectively have mourned the poor murdered victims of Isis in Paris without resorting to ugly culture wars? Europe has great art, science and enlightened politics, but also its horrible histories. I do not think the West is responsible for the death cults, the barbarisms and political putrefaction across the Muslim world – but its policies and interventions have only ever made the nations there more unstable and brutal. And migrants from these places feel caught between these forces of darkness.

To my surprise, I find myself agreeing with the maverick columnist Rod Liddle on this: “Whenever we take military action in the Middle East, we make things worse. For them and us.” Radical Islam, now spread across our isles and every nation in the western hemisphere, will only become more appealing and more potent when the bombing starts. Here is what one British Muslim primary school teacher - a woman - tells me: “You know if I was a young Muslim guy, I could get that angry that I would turn away from democracy and all that. This Prime Minister takes no refugees, and is still a friend of Arab dictators. Now bombs. Why? Do they even know? They are encouraging radicalisation. Their de-radicalisation programmes, which I am supposed to push, will fall apart. The UK will get more Isis recruits. I am so worried.” I also fear that some of the most effective programmes which were tackling extremist ideologies will lose all credibility.

Will Cameron heed these voices or does he think Muslims are so stupid and gullible that they will chant the mantras of democratic accountability while not questioning the actions of the Government?

This call to bombs is insane. Drones and missiles will add to the suffering of ordinary Syrian families and increase the death toll immeasurably. And more British Muslims will reject moderation and turn against the state they live in. Is that what gung-ho politicians want?