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Transformation Through Training Issue No 7 July 2015 25 to foster any degree of confidence in its capacity to reverse the offensive and protect its Muslim and non-Muslim communities. Politically this has been compounded by a lack of pragmatism and experience in the implementation of well- intentioned but ill-thought-out initiatives to counter the threat from identified individuals and as a consequence mistakes that have further exacerbated the situation namely 1 the aggregation and characterization of Muslim community leaders and their moderate forces as quasi- secular politically correct constructs with benign foreign aspirations and complaisant theocratic overtones 2 the failure to see Al Qaedas chrysalis its separatist-insurgent forces and the Caliphate as attractive rational comprehensible and realistic alternatives for many British Muslims and 3 a lack of investment in the Crown the Commonwealth and the human capital of Her Majestys Armed Forces errors that for a large portion of the electorate have allowed state- sponsored terrorism and espionage to eclipse the tentative bonds that had until recently held the remnants of the Muslim communitys allegiance and kept any arguably intrinsic threat if it had hitherto existed at bay. Much of this was due to the fact that the issues surrounding Islam in the United Kingdom have been too controversial too contested and too fast moving for any grounded academic research to effectively engage or parallel i.e. provide any real-time insights to those having to make value judgments based on the given threat. In effect policy has therefore been supplemented with ideological out- dated academic debates that rarely venture beyond the semantics of new terrorism and Islamic radicalisation cyclical and academic discussions that are more often than not void of any new subject based content and bereft of any relevance to the United Kingdom its history its Muslim communities the legacy of their British ancestry and the theologies and philosophies of the Wild Geese and Jackals that reside within them. As such Islam in the United Kingdom has been manipulated and exploited by forces that have to the detriment of their constituents taken issues beyond their mandate and held the historic bonds of traditional allegiances to ransom. In short the identity of British Muslims has been hijacked and the relationships between the United Kingdom and the many Muslim communities that have strong ties to the Crown terrorized. The loyalty of Muslims today is hence presumed by many to be of a de-territorialised nature in which the fraternity of Islam over- rides any allegiance to the Crown and the authentic voice of British Muslims is that of a small highly politicised elite. With the consequences of this being compounded by mass immigration the result has been the generic isolation and public wholesale quarantine of Muslims en masse from their historical milieu their cultural heritage and their British lineage Khudadad Khan VC is testament to this fact. As too are Muhammad Aslam Abdullah Khan Ahmad Khan Muhammad Usman and the many others whose allegiance and bodies lie alongside those who died from Australia Canada India South Africa and the United Kingdom at Ypres. Forgotten are the Red Eagles who despite 4 Victoria Crosses and Wavells insistence that the division would go down as one of the greatest fighting formations in British history few in England can even recall. It is consequently imperative for policy-makers to be aware of not just the strengths and weaknesses of the research upon which knowledge of this global insurgency and those empathetic to it is based but the trans- national nature of the insurgency the lack of opportunities to serve the vulnerability of British Muslims to foreign dogmata and the historical flaws in the arguments and counter arguments for their deference to forces beyond the Crown. The centre of gravity in this war is no longer Iraq or Afghanistan but along with the United Kingdoms belief in herself and her history the Islamic world yet to fall to the insurgents and the continued export of their war to the front-lines of the British home-lands battlefields that are increasingly being shaped by the propaganda of Al Qaeda and the Caliphate. There will be grave consequences for Great Britain should the government fail to take the initiative and continue to misinterpret the perniciousness of these combatants and the trans-national nature of the global insurgency. With the aggregation and mobilisation of British Muslims and non-violent extremists into powerful social and political constructs and the religious resonance and geopolitical significance of Islamic State and Al Qaeda it is with utmost urgency that the initiative is not handed to the enemy and that the threat to Great Britain is finally and formally identified and recognized for what it is - a global core driven insurgency that has rooted itself at different levels on different fronts and at different locations in the minds and hearts of many British citizens. Not only have the Islamists undermined and challenged the British concept they have offered a viable alternative. In tandem with this the interpretation of the phenomenon as the consequence of two Gulf Wars artificially removed from the context of the Wests long standing struggle with Islam and its colonial history has fuelled not only Islamic States quest to manifest prophecies and the lethality