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7 Jul, 2015

British PM missing the lessons of 7/7 | GulfNews.com

Like Blair, the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, is preoccupied with ‘spin’; the main debate exercising the British establishment at the moment is whether or not the media should call Daesh the ‘Islamic State’ or by its Arabic acronym, Daesh. With this extremist entity continuing to expand across Iraq and Syria, and with outposts and branches in numerous Muslim countries, not to mention its ability to strike in three continents simultaneously — as it did last week when operatives or followers attacked a Shiite mosque in Kuwait, a beach in Tunisia and a gas installation in Lyon — one would have thought that the name the group goes by would be of the very least concern. Especially when four surveys last week concluded that 42 million people in the Muslim world actively approve of Daesh.

As in 2005, British (and most Western countries’) foreign policy is largely self-interested and no lessons appear to have been learnt. It is impossible to root out extremism by military means — as ten years in Iraq and longer in Afghanistan have surely demonstrated.

Read the rest: Cameron missing the lessons of 7/7 | GulfNews.com