An open society can always defeat this warped savagery

Instead of an obscene execution video on the internet with a soundtrack of ritual anathemas, the two young men who killed Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich on Wednesday produced a blood-spattered tableau vivant - the almost ritual slaughter of another human being in broad daylight on a London street. This was followed by a public rant, meat cleaver and carving knife in hand, for anybody who would listen to or film them - or indeed subsequently devote entire front pages to their febrile claims.

If terrorism is a targeted act of violence designed to have a random and multiplying effect, then this hideously deranged behaviour fits the definition. It certainly got our attention, even if it will fail in its aim, ostensibly to spark a clash of civilisations on British soil.

Its delirious ambitions and close-up horror aside, the Woolwich attack seems also to fit into a phenomenon we know something about: homegrown, Islamist radicalisation that needs little organisational stimulus or assistance. This is in some respects a similar story to that of the London bombers of July 2005 - one of whom, the Jamaican-born Germaine Lindsay, was a convert to Islam like Michael Adebolajo, the British-born man of Nigerian descent whose face glared out from newsstands this week - even if the scale of the casualties was different.

A common ingredient in the homegrown jihadi phenomenon is a process of cultural alienation, a sort of emptiness and drift marooning the children and grandchildren of immigrants, separated from their culture of origin but not yet integrated in their adopted country. Big countries built on immigration, such as the US, Australia or Canada, rely on the melting pot of opportunity to overcome this. Older, European countries appear to find it harder. Neither France, with its Jacobin insistence that all citizens must become fully-fledged French men and women, nor Britain, with its laisser-faire approach to immigration - in which many originally foreign communities live parallel lives - has come up with a wholly successful formula for integration.

But when some offspring of Muslim immigrants succumb to this kind of alienation, akin to becoming foreigners everywhere, they can fall prey to jihadis and bigoted clerics expert at transforming their Islamic affiliation into the bedrock of the identity for which they long. In cases such as Mr Adebolajo and Lindsay, there may in addition be that extra turbocharge of zealotry that converts sometimes bring to their new beliefs.

For Islamist extremists who trade in cultural despair and the cult of death, identity is invaluably synonymous with their violent take on Islam, a religion they portray as everywhere under infidel assault. The widespread perception among Muslims of a western war against Islam in Afghanistan and Iraq - which they have been able to watch almost live from television to YouTube - makes the job easier for jihadis, even if in their fanaticism they are responsible for many thousands of Muslim deaths.

The sense of a religion under siege is not new. Muslim thinkers and leaders have for the past two centuries been trying to tease out why their once glorious civilisation was overtaken by the west, as well as devise effective resistance to the malign intrusion of the west, first as empires and then to maintain a network of dictatorial allies in Arab and Muslim lands.

The end of the cold war, furthermore, has tended to replace ideological division with divisions based on identity - the wars in former Yugoslavia being but one example. By a geopolitical fluke, this came about just as digital technology developed unique power to propagate identity politics and encourage global tribes.

The jihadist sub-tribe in western lands, built around a warped liberation theology and lumpen-terrorism, is hard to track.

Alert security agencies have become adept at picking up the traces of relatively large-scale plots, but spotting a so-called lone wolf with only tangential links to any group is another matter. The US has found this with the recent Boston bombs, or the 2009 killing spree at Fort Hood, by a Muslim army major radicalised over the internet by Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemen-based jihadist killed in a US drone attack in 2011. Fort Hood, and the Woolwich attack, are similar to the case three years ago when Roshonara Choudhry stabbed Labour MP Stephen Timms, also after listening to Awlaki's online preaching.

Mr Adebolajo was in the past associated with the banned al-Muhajiroun group, and listened to the jihadist preacher, Omar Bakri Mohammed, banned from the UK. His accomplice Michael Adebowale, another convert, had been seen at extremist rallies. Both crossed the radar of Britain's security services.

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But how is it possible to detect when radicals have reached that pitch of rage and determination that they will jump in a car, run down a soldier and then butcher him, as they did in Woolwich? The police and security services have to sift through not just information and rhetoric but a complex socio-political pathology, and yet stay within the frontiers of the freedoms they are expected to protect; crossing that line during the "war on terror" was a boomerang that still keeps coming back. Omar Bakri, for instance, was presumably proscribed for his serial advocacy of terrorist and sectarian outrages, not because he once bragged that his followers could make bombs out of pizzas.

An open society, and its guardians, needs to engage with as well as monitor this seething milieu, and try to observe the distinction between debate and gathering intelligence. One might otherwise just as well leap into the dystopia of Steven Spielberg's film Minority Report, with its PreCrime unit and precognitive psychics fingering future criminals. It would also help to unpick the jihadis' narrative if all the issues were out in the open, exposed to rigorous debate.

Ideologically, that might help expose them as sanguinary cousins of late-19th-century anarchists, aping violent mystics such as Georges Sorel, who would influence Mussolini. One might even see their ideas as the jihadi take on Newton's Third Law of Motion - Action-Reaction-Action. They are not Islam.

david.gardner@ft.com

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