It’s comforting, perhaps, to dismiss Anders Behring Breivik as nothing more than a psychotic loner. That was the view of the Conservative London mayor, Boris Johnson, among others. The Norwegian mass killer’s own lawyer has branded him “insane”. It has the advantage of meaning no wider conclusions need to be drawn about the social context of the atrocity.

Had he been a Muslim, as much of the western media concluded he was immediately after the terrorist bloodbath, we can be sure there would have been no such judgments – even though some jihadist attacks have undoubtedly been carried out by individuals operating alone.

In fact, however deranged the bombing and shooting might seem, studies of those identified as terrorists have shown they rarely have mental illness or psychiatric abnormalities. Maybe Breivik will turn out to be an exception. But whether his claim that there are other members of a fascistic Christian terror network still at large turns out to be genuine or not, he has clearly fostered enthusiastic links with violent far-right groups abroad, and in Britain in particular.

Those include multiple contacts with the Islamophobic English Defence League, which has repeatedly staged violent protests against Muslim communities. “You’re a blessing to all in Europe,” Breivik apparently told EDL supporters in an online message, hailing “our common struggle against the Islamofascists”. Whatever Breivik has done, he hasn’t done in isolation.

Of course the Norwegian killer’s ideology, spelled out in mind-numbing detail in his 1,500-page online manifesto, is both repulsive and absurd. Its main focus is hatred of Islam and Muslims — who he wants deported from Europe — rooted in a self-proclaimed Christian conservatism. He declares himself hostile to “cultural Marxism”, while being both pro-Israel and antisemitic, and a champion of anti-Muslim rage from India to the Arctic circle.

The killer has evidently absorbed the far right’s shift from the language of race to the language of culture. But what is most striking is how closely he mirrors the ideas and fixations of transatlantic conservatives that for a decade have been the meat and drink of champions of the war on terror and the claim that Islam and Islamism pose a mortal threat to western civilisation.

It’s all there: the supposed Islamisation of Europe, the classic conspiracism of the “Eurabia” takeover fantasy, the racist hysteria about the Muslim birthrate, the inevitable clash of civilisations, the hatred of “multiculturalism” and the supposed appeasement of Islam by the European elite, which is meant to have fostered a climate where it’s impossible to speak about immigration.

All these themes are of course staples of conservative newspapers, commentators and websites. So naturally, exponents of one or more of these tropes are quoted liberally by Breivik, from Bernard Lewis andMelanie Phillips to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Mark Steyn.

Phillips, a Daily Mail writer, has complained of a “smear”. But an article of hers Breivik cites at length described the former Labour government as guilty of “unalloyed treachery” for using mass immigration to “destroy what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place” – Breivik’s feeling precisely.

None of these writers is of course in any way sympathetic to the carnage carried out in Norway last week. But the continuum between the poisonous nonsense commonplace in the mainstream media in recent years, the street slogans of groups like the EDL and Breivik’s outpourings is unmistakable.

The same phenomenon can be seen across European politics, where the rise of rightwing Islamophobic parties from France and the Netherlands to Norway and Switzerland has encouraged the centre-right establishment to play the Islam card, wrap itself in “Christian” values and declare the chimera of multiculturalism an abject failure.

It’s hardly surprising that some on the parliamentary right have recognised Breivik’s ideas as their own: the Italian Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio described them as “100% good”. But the same neoconservative zealots who have always insisted that non-violent (Muslim) “extremists” must be cast out because they legitimised and provided a “conveyor belt to terrorism” have now been hoist by their own petard.

That is exactly the role many of their own ideologists have been shown to have played in the case of the butcher of Utoya. When David Cameron denounced multiculturalism in February, he also announced – to the delight of the EDL – that the British government would now be taking on the “non-violent extremists” because they influenced those who embraced violence.

Don’t expect the Islamophobic conspiracists to get the same treatment. Breivik is an isolated case, it will be said. In reality, as Europol figures demonstrate, the overwhelming majority of terror attacks in Europe in recent years have been carried out by non-Muslims. In Britain, a string of recent convictions of would-be anti-Muslim terrorists has underlined that Breivik is very far from being just a Norwegian phenomenon.

Lower-level violence and intimidation continues unabated: last week on the day of the Norwegian massacre, in an entirely routine incident, a mosque in Luton was vandalised and spray-painted with a swastikaand EDL slogan. The rise of Islamophobia in Europe and the US is the manipulated product of a toxic blend of economic insecurity, unprotected mass migration and the consequences of a decade of western-sponsored war in the Muslim world: from Afghanistan to Iraq, Pakistan to Libya.

It has become the new acceptable form of racism – far outstripping in opinion polls the level of hatred for any other religious or racial group, and embraced by those who delude themselves that anti-Muslim bigotry has nothing to do with ethnicity – and even represents some sort of defence of liberal values.

For those who failed to deliver decent jobs, wages and housing, and encouraged employers to profit from low-wage migrant labour, how much easier to scapegoat minority Muslim communities than deal with the banks and corporate free-for-all that triggered the crisis? The attempt to pathologise last Friday’s slaughter and separate it from the swamp that spawned it can only ratchet up the danger to all of us.

Blears had been gunning for the MCB, the country’s main Muslim umbrella body, which has shown increasing independence in recent years, particularly in relation to British foreign policy. The pretext was a statement about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza signed by the MCB’s number two, Daud Abdullah, which Blears interpreted as a call for attacks on British ships if they were sent to intercept arms supplies to Hamas. Ten days ago, in a tone more associated with Raj-era colonial governors than democratic politicians addressing independent community bodies, Blears delivered an ultimatum to the MCB: either it sacked its elected deputy general secretary or all contacts would be severed.

Never mind that Gordon Brown’s idea about policing Palestinian waters has been kicked into the long grass of international talks; or that Abdullah, a Caribbean-born veteran of Grenada’s leftwing New Jewel Movement (later overthrown by Ronald Reagan) made clear he was not calling for such attacks – let alone attacks on Jewish communities, as Blears claims in a letter in today’s Guardian. All links have now been suspended. And if there were any doubt that the attempt to isolate Britain’s most significant Muslim body was linked to the new anti-terror policy, the timing of the ultimatum for the eve of the launch made clear that for Blears they were all of a piece.

Not surprisingly, the MCB has rejected the government’s diktat. As it acknowledges, to do anything else would destroy its credibility in the community, which can in fact only be boosted by the confrontation. The point seems to have belatedly dawned on Blears, whose department yesterday appeared to be looking for a way out as it pressed for “further clarity” from the MCB about its attitude to violence in the Middle East.

But the dispute goes to the heart of the fatal flaw in government policy towards the terror threat. Instead of simply aiming to stop indiscriminate attacks, something that unites almost all Muslims as well as non-Muslims, the idea underlying the new strategy is to confront “nonviolent extremism” as well. The definitions of such a catch-all target specified in earlier drafts, including support for armed resistance anywhere in the world, sharia law and a belief that gay sex is sinful, have mercifully been dropped. It became clear to other ministers – reported to include Jack Straw, John Denham and Harriet Harman – that not only would such zealotry brand most of Britain’s 2.4 million Muslims extremist, it could also apply to many Christians, orthodox Jews and atheists as well.

But strong echoes of this folly remain: for example, in the categorisation of those who reject Israel’s legitimacy as extremist. It is a policy that has been driven by neoconservative-leaning thinktanks – such as Policy Exchange, the Centre for Social Cohesion and the government-funded Quilliam Foundation – who believe Islamism, a political trend as broad as socialism or liberalism, is the enemy, rather than the tiny takfiri groups who think it’s a good idea to blow people up on buses and tubes.

That’s a dangerous blind alley, which makes such attacks more, rather than less, likely. Instead of listening to representative groups which can honestly reflect what drives Muslim anger – notably western support for wars of occupation in the Muslim world – the government ends up talking to its own creations and attempting to use cash to buy political docility. It is the same approach which preferred listening to republican defectors than Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, as the former chief of the defence staff Lord Guthrie enthusiastically emphasised this week.

The Contest 2 strategy has one merit, at least. It does for the first time officially acknowledge what the rest of the world has known for most of the past decade: that Muslim “perception” of the west’s support for Israel, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the wider war on terror plays a “key role” in fuelling “radicalisation”. But instead of then getting to grips with the cause of the problem, the response is still to treat the symptoms. Since Israel’s western-backed devastation of Gaza unleashed a new wave of Muslim political activism, for example, the reaction has been heavyhanded policing, attempts to link protest with terrorism and renewed Islamophobic campaigns in the media.

Perhaps Blears thought attacking the MCB would play to the gallery in such a climate. But as the Jewish Chronicle columnist Geoffrey Alderman warned yesterday, not only was her interference a democratic outrage, but a dangerous precedent for other community organisations. Would Blears refuse to engage with a Jewish Board of Deputies leader, he asked, who backed West Bank settlements the government regards as illegal? Muslims are already angered by the double standards that allow Britons to serve with Israeli forces in Gaza and the Zionist Federation to raise charitable funds for occupation troops accused of war crimes, while any parallel moves to support Hamas are treated as involvement in terrorism.

The government preaches globalisation but has failed to face up to the implications of the multiple identities and loyalties that flow from it. The presence of a large population with recent roots in a part of the world where British forces are fighting unpopular wars is one reason why domestic and foreign policy can never again be separated in the way that was possible in colonial times. The government’s counter-terrorism plan talks about Muslims needing to accept Britain’s shared values. Fortunately, they do already. Both Muslims and non-Muslims oppose wars of aggression and want British troops brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan; they both accept people’s right to defend themselves against invasion and occupation; and both mostly sympathise with the Palestinian cause. Now responding to that consensus would be a real counter-terror strategy.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Thursday 26 March 2009.

But despite this gruesome demonstration of its overwhelming power, Israel once again faces the threat of political and military failure, just as it did in Lebanon in 2006. After its most pulverising assault ever on the blockaded territory, Hamas remains standing, its administration intact, its rockets reaching ever further into Israel proper. Far from turning the Gazan population against the Islamist movement, the signs are that Israel’s onslaught is cementing its support.

From what has emerged so far, the deal touted by President Sarkozy and Egypt would trade a full ceasefire for the opening of Gaza’s border crossings – which reflects Hamas’s own terms – combined with an international force on the Egyptian border to police arms-smuggling tunnels. So long as that didn’t challenge Hamas’s authority or involve stationing foreign troops inside Gaza, the Palestinian movement could clearly live with such an arrangement.

The Israeli government yesterday declared it accepted the principles of the plan, while the details had yet to be agreed. But it’s hard to see how a deal that could have been struck without war would be seen as anything other than a Hamas victory. And the domestic electoral boost won by Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak as a result of the firestorm they have unleashed would then be lost. That’s why the logic of what they have started is likely to push the Israeli government to set impossible conditions, blame Hamas for a breakdown and intensify its onslaught still further.

If Israel’s leaders are going to be able to declare the victory they failed to achieve in Lebanon, they can hardly be seen to leave the power and appeal of Hamas intact, let alone strengthened. At the very least, they would want to arrest or kill key Hamas leaders and stage a humiliating parade of captured fighters – combined perhaps with a buffer zone in the north of the strip.

But that would require Israeli troops to take their land invasion into the heart of the strip’s cities and refugee camps, at a certain cost of heavy casualties and public support. They would then face the choice of whether to drive Hamas underground and reimpose a full-blown occupation – or face intensified guerrilla war against sitting targets in a security zone, as happened in Lebanon in the 1990s. No wonder Livni and Barak are divided about what to do.

Whichever choice they make, the war is already cutting the ground from beneath Israeli and western policy across the region. Among Palestinians, it is undermining Mahmoud Abbas – whose presidential term runs out tomorrow – and his Fatah movement, while increasing support for Hamas in the West Bank, where US-trained and EU-financed security forces have now arrested hundreds of activists and banned Hamas demonstrations.

It is also strengthening those inside Fatah who want to break with the western-enforced schism between the two wings of Palestinian politics. Hussam Khader, a West Bank “Young Guard” Fatah leader, is one of those now demanding direct unity negotiations with Hamas, and for the Fatah-linked Al-Aqsa Brigades to fight alongside Hamas against Israel’s onslaught.

“Israel has made a big mistake,” he told me this week, “because Hamas will become stronger and Fatah weaker as a result of the war, even if Israel re-occupies the Gaza Strip.” Comparing Hamas’s resistance in Gaza to the battle of Karameh that secured Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestinians in 1968, Khader predicted: “After this war, Hamas will lead the PLO.”

The same trend can be seen in the wider Middle East, where Hamas has won powerful new supporters, including democratic Turkey, while western allies, such as the Egyptian and Saudi dictatorships, have lost more credibility by being seen to have tacitly supported Israel’s attempt to crush Hamas at the expense of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Most of those Palestinians are in fact refugees or the families of refugees from the towns of southern Israel, including Ashkelon and Ashdod, which have been targeted by Hamas – and from which they were ethnically cleansed when Israel was established in 1948.

But the bulk of the western media would have us believe that the cause of this war is Hamas’s firing of mostly home-made rockets into Israel – which no state could tolerate without retaliation. In this myopic fantasy land, there is no 61-year national dispossession, no refugee camps, no occupations, no siege, no multiple Israeli violations of UN security council resolutions and the Geneva conventions, no illegal wall, no routine assassinations, no prisoners and no West Bank.

Nor would you have much sense that – as Akiva Eldar, the Israeli Ha’aretz columnist, wrote this week – “Gaza is still, practically and according to international law, occupied territory”, and part of one political entity with the occupied West Bank. Or that the US, Britain and the EU, while paying lip service to ceasefire calls, prepared the ground for this barbarity with money, arms and diplomatic support as hope of a viable two-state solution has disintegrated before our eyes.

Pressure now has to be brought to bear not only on Israel, but on those governments that support it – including Britain’s. That’s why the call by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, for an arms embargo on Israel and the suspension of the EU’s new cooperation agreement with Israel – the first mainstream party leader to do so – is so significant. David Miliband, the foreign secretary, calls it naive. In reality, the naivety lies in imagining that the west can continue to underwrite the injustice and bloodshed inflicted with no respite on the Palestinian people, without paying a price for it.

* This article was first published in The Guardian, Thursday 8 January 2009. Read all articles by Suemas Milne.

Ariel Sharon’s decision to incinerate a 67-year-old blind quadriplegic cleric outside his local mosque will certainly go down as one of the most spectacularly counter-productive acts of violence in the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Quite apart from the morality of assassinating Sheikh Yassin, it is the Israeli people themselves who will suffer from certain retaliation. Israel has the right to defend itself, President Bush declares, while apparently denying the Palestinians the same luxury. But the killing can have no military value at all. Whatever his authority as the founder and figurehead of Hamas, the idea that Yassin was involved in planning armed attacks is preposterous. When Israel rocketed the apartment block he was visiting last September, the ailing sheikh was reported not to have even realised that an attack had taken place. And regardless of the domestic political calculations of the Israeli government, such attempts to destroy a popular movement by decapitation are doomed to failure.

From Algeria to Vietnam, the past century is littered with evidence that such strategies invariably come to nought. Where resistance has deep roots – as Hamas’s undoubtedly has in the occupied territories – it will always re-emerge, however savage the repression. Yassin has been succeeded by Abd al-Aziz Rantissi, and if the Israelis incinerate him, another will take his place. What Monday’s killing has done is simply widen the range of targets on each side, expanding the arena of terror.

The chances of a lasting settlement should in reality be higher than ever before. For the first time, every significant political and armed Palestinian group – including Hamas and Islamic Jihad – is now prepared to accept a de facto end to conflict in return for an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza – just 22% of historic Palestine.

The sharp-tongued Rantissi is widely regarded as more hardline than Yassin. But, as he told me in Gaza a couple of months back, Hamas is ready to call a ceasefire that “should be seen in terms of years” in exchange for full Israeli withdrawal from the territories it has illegally occupied for the past 37 years. On another occasion, referring to the Hamas dream of Islamist rule throughout Palestine, he has said: “We can accept a truce … live side by side and refer all the issues to the coming generations.” And the organisation’s new number two in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, confirmed its commitment to a West Bank/Gaza state in yesterday’s interview with the Guardian.

But instead of seizing the opportunity for peace offered by such political signals, the Sharon government is deliberately undermining the basis for a two-state solution by carving up the occupied territories with its electrified fences, closed zones and ever-expanding settlements. At the same time, it is planning a partial withdrawal from the most heavily populated areas, while effectively annexing other areas of the West Bank and confining Palestinians to walled bantustans that can never form the basis of a viable state.

Such a rearrangement of the occupation will clearly not resolve the conflict. And considering that the US arms and funds Israel to a greater degree than any other state on the planet, such leverage might be seen as an ideal opportunity for the much-vaunted project of western humanitarian intervention. But instead of applying pressure to achieve a just settlement, the US and its friends refuse to talk to the elected Palestinian leadership, while insisting that no end to occupation is possible unless it stamps out resistance.

After September 11 2001, Tony Blair promised hope to the slums of Gaza and convinced his supporters that he would deliver US commitment to a Middle East peace deal in exchange for backing the invasion of Iraq. Now his main contribution appears to be extra funding for Palestinian police and prisons to provide security to the occupier – while Gordon Brown’s response yesterday to the killing of Sheikh Yassin was to announce the freezing not of Sharon’s, but of Rantissi’s, (probably non-existent) assets in Britain.

None of this, of course, justifies the targeting of civilians by Hamas and others – defended by Rantissi as a “deterrent” to the killing of Palestinian civilians. If deterrence is the intention, it appears to be a failure, as Palestinian civilian and military deaths outstrip the Israeli toll by more than three to one (and five to one when it comes to children). In any event, the offer by Hamas last year of a mutual commitment to avoid civilian deaths was rebuffed by Israel.

The killing of Yassin, along with the wider bloodletting in the occupied territories, will further heighten the Arab and Muslim anger that is fuelling Islamist terror attacks. Justice for the Palestinians should self-evidently be pursued on its own merits. But given the extent to which Palestine has become a focus of global Muslim grievance, it has also become a necessity for international security. And the failure of western leaders to confront the crisis in a remotely even-handed way is now a threat to their own people.

The most dangerous delusion of our time must surely be the notion – trotted out by all manner of public figures, from George Bush to Clive James – that Islamist terror is motivated by hostility to freedom and the western way of life. As anyone who is familiar with the Arab and Muslim world, or even bothered to read successive statements by al-Qaida leaders, it is in fact overwhelmingly driven by hostility to foreign, and especially west ern, domination and occupation of Arab and Muslim countries. Of course, there are other factors in play. But from the start of his campaign in the 1990s, Bin Laden’s call to arms focused above all on US foreign policy in the Middle East: its troops in Saudi Arabia, backing for pro-western dictatorships like Egypt, sanctions against Iraq and support for Israel against the Palestinians – along with the subjection of Muslim populations in Kashmir and Chechnya. Since September 11, US interference in the region has gone much further, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The result is an arc of foreign occupation across the Middle East, unmatched anywhere else the world.

That has in turn spawned an arc of resistance, while anti-US feeling among Muslims has reached unprecedented levels, as demonstrated in this week’s Pew opinion survey. Muslims now find themselves in perilously unequal conflict with the world’s military powers: the US, Russia, India, China and Israel. There are also dangers that the boundaries between nationally based mass resistance movements against occupation and socially disconnected (though widely supported) terror networks of the al-Qaida type become blurred. But to address the swelling and legitimate grievances that underlie both is now a global imperative. Unless and until the occupying powers – notably the US, Britain and Israel – do that, they will be fuelling, not fighting, terror.