Focusing on whether the Parsons Green bomber was a refugee is shamelessly Islamophobic, not to mention pointless

We will not stop terrorism by kicking blameless families of refugees out of the country. This only radicalises would-be terrorists into thinking they are defending their own communities

The bomb attack at Parsons Green station has once again elicited a wave of wrong-headed prejudice (AFP)

When I saw the headline “Foster Kid is Bucket Bomber” in The Sun, with similar ones proliferating around the web, my heart sank. A teenage terrorist who may have been a child refugee and taken into foster care is being talked to by the police. It is a godsend to every single foreigner-hating Islamaphobe who will seize on this – our – national tragedy of a narrowly averted mass murder on a packed tube train and say “I told you so”.

It feeds the notion that there are terrorists in the midst of these refugees, including the younger ones, and offers the perfect excuse to ban them from entering this country, no matter how pitiful they appear. Such emotions and hatred are easy to provoke among some. Stop the refugees and other migrants coming in, so that argument runs, and you’ll have less terror. Some will go even further, claiming that if you “deport” the tens of thousands of suspects and individuals surveilled by the authorities you’ll be much closer to solving the problem. The heartbreaking thing is how many people will fall for this false logic and its seductive simplicity. It has to be answered, and not simply ignored or dismissed as casual racism.

Well, if only terrorism was that simple to fight. Since 9/11 and before we have seen how tighter borders and migration controls have done little to prevent terrorists taking their evil work across continents, if they’re intent enough. Terrorists can get visas: they don’t have to hide in lorries. They either enter countries illegally or perfectly legally, in fact, if they are not known to the authorities.

Alternatively, they are citizens born or naturalised in the very communities they attack, in which case immediate migration issues are not relevant. Sometimes their families are as well established as anyone’s, and the shock is as great to the parents as it is to the rest of the world. Terrorists come in many different forms: it is a great mistake to make assumptions about some profile or typical characteristic.

It is certainly true that many currently do what they do in the name of Islam. As has been said many times, but never enough, that this does not make Islam a violent or terrorist creed. It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with power and politics, as terrorism always has been.

The terrorists wish to rule or gain political power objectives under their ideology for their own purposes and will murder and maim in order to do so. They always have in the modern era and always will. Stacking Islam as a peaceful faith followed by hundreds of millions will not catch a single terrorist or stop a single bomb or prevent a single hijack. If we fight these Islamists the same as we fought the IRA, we will have rather more success than if we start victimising our fellow citizens.

I fear that the innocent victims of terror in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan now stranded in squalid freezing cold shanty towns in Europe and Lebanon, or attempting new lives in the West, are to be regarded as potential fifth columnists, terrorists themselves or in the making. They too are the victims of the bombers and the fanatics driving lorries into crowds if they are to suffer fresh persecution. Once again a simple truth needs stating: we will not stop terror in London by kicking blameless families of Syrians out of the country.

Modern terrorism is a security issue, a police issue and a political one – again, it always has been, whether Northern Irish or Palestinian, or carried out by radicals such as the Baader Meinhof and Red Army gangs. If they want to attack Paris or Barcelona or London, they will, wherever they live or are born. When Osama bin Laden was ordering the bombing of US embassies in West Africa in the 1990s and killing Africans, that wasn’t a refugee issue, and it isn’t now. Same as when the IRA bombed pubs in England.

Of course police and border procedures should be there to help prevent known killers moving freely, and arrest people smuggling AK-47s or buckets of chemicals. But even ending all movements across every border – Donald Trump’s “total and complete ban on Muslims” – would not and could not stop someone jumping into a car and mowing people down, whether in London or Baghdad. Or, indeed leaving a simply made concoction of chemicals on a train at Parsons Green. These attacks on Muslims only radicalise would-be terrorists into thinking they are defending their own communities. And so the spiral continues.

The current wave of terrorism is rational and inspired by Bin Laden’s philosophy. They want division leading to violence on a continental scale. He understood he could never get what he wanted just with a few fellow jihadis. The aim was always to provoke peoples and governments of western nations, and hurt them so badly that they lash out and start their own wars on Muslims. Which we did.

Only out of such a clash and conflagration of wars and mass movements of refugees and victims did he succeed. Resisting that by staying calm, living normally and refusing to attack Muslim friends and neighbours is the real way to defeat the terrorists. We should continue to offer shelter to the homeless and starving, victims of wars, young and old. Slowly that seems to be eroding. We are finding ready excuses to allow children to drown in the Mediterranean. That is why my heart is sinking today.