The “knife intifada”: Israeli paramedics evacuate a wounded Palestinian teenager to hospital. He was shot after stabbing a security guard (© Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)


“Your values are our values,” intoned a sombre British Prime Minister in solidarité with the people of France on the morning after the bloodbath in Paris last month. Maybe, but until recently the two countries have taken a markedly different approach to trying to prevent such massacres, the second in Paris this year.

The Paris attacks mark the latest in a series of increasingly successful strikes by French jihadists since 2012. Less sensitive to Muslim sentiment than Britain, the French have sought to counter jihadi terrorism with more draconian legislation than us, while expecting the country’s almost 5 million Muslims to assert the robustly secular values of la République française.

The Cameron government, by contrast, has taken a more interventionist approach when it comes to Britain’s “precious” progressive values. Permanent agitation by Islamists to inject ever more of their version of Islam into public life, overpowering more mainstream Muslim voices, means tolerance, freedom of speech, free religion, free thinking, democracy, and gender and sexual equality can no longer be taken for granted.

Even as the IS slaughterers in France were strapping on their suicide belts, that same night on this side of the Channel British values were being dismissed as “junk” at a debate about Islam at the Corn Exchange in Bedford. “Every single one of these speakers is a caliphate-advocating Islamist,” commented Maajid Nawaz, the co-founder and chairman of the counter-terrorism think-tank Quilliam.

Since the Charlie Hebdo attack that led to the murder of 17 French citizens (four of them Jews) last January, the French have followed a counter-terrorism policy that has moved towards the British approach. Like its British counterpart, the French ministry of education now actively promotes the values that underpin French society, in its case the French Enlightenment that laid the foundation of the Republic.

Not before time. Iannis Roder, who teaches history at a school in one of Paris’s deprived banlieues (suburbs), said those killed in January “didn’t mean much” to most of his Muslim pupils. So convinced were they that their co-religionists could not possibly have slaughtered their fellow citizens, they thought the shootings were staged, much as some Muslims were convinced Jews were behind 9/11.

Swallowing fantastical conspiracy theories — especially about Jews — is an early sign of vulnerability to radicalisation, and is symptomatic of the marked grievance narrative that says the West is persecuting Muslims. At its most extreme it ends with the Paris massacres. No slaughter quite satisfies the jihadists’ appetite unless Jews are included in their crosshairs, and so it may have proved with the Paris attack. The Bataclan theatre, which the jihadists turned into a charnel house with 89 dead, had previously been a target. Why? Because it was until recently Jewish-owned.

The grievance narrative that Muslims are the eternal victims of Jews and the West is known to set David Cameron’s eyes rolling and is one of several extreme but non-violent drivers that can lead to radicalisation. Others include disdain for parliamentary democracy, sectarianism, and regressive attitudes to equality. The entire extremist narrative is now the target of the government’s counter-extremism strategy published this autumn, a narrative which Mr Cameron has exhorted the nation to fight “every day at the kitchen table, on the university campus, online and on the airwaves”. So how exactly are we doing on this side of the Channel?