Shaker Aamer is right - jihadis should leave the UK, and it's up to Muslims to say so

Shaker Aamer was held in Guantanamo Bay for 14 years and never charged with any offence. American interrogators “hogtied” him: pushed him down, bound his wrists and ankles together. He told the investigative journalist David Rose about this torture: “It kills you, man. You cry, the pain is so bad.”

His youngest boy was born on the day he was taken to Guantanamo. His head was repeatedly banged against a wall. Ahmed claims British intelligence officers were present when he was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques”. He was finally released in October.

I can’t begin to imagine the wreckage, the shards lodged inside him. The most powerful democratic nation on earth sanctioned the grave injustice and brutality suffered by him and others in this concentration camp.

And yet, he smiles broadly, seems overjoyed to be alive, to be free at last. This prisoner managed to keep his spirit, generosity, humanity and morality through all those years of relentless torment. Verily, this is a story of miraculous rebirth.

Most remarkable of all is Aamer’s refusal to condone or make excuses for the Mad Max jihadis terrorising Britain and other nations. “Even if there is a war you cannot just kill anybody, you cannot kill kids, you cannot kill chaplains, you cannot get a knife and start stabbing people,” he says. “If you are that angry about this country, you can get the hell out.” Coming from him, these words are potent and profound.

Many taciturn as well as vocal Muslims will applaud him for this. We disagree vehemently with many of the foreign and domestic policies of Western governments; we fight daily against prejudices and state oppression too, but we also know this country is where we belong.

An old Muslim scholar, now retired, spoke at a function I attended recently. In the audience were young and old, all expecting some kind of wise sermon on Koranic ideals. Instead the old chap shuffled up and let rip: “We are the luckiest Muslims in the world. Where can we live like this? Nobody comes and burns your homes, rapes your daughters or kills you because you are a Shia or Sunni. We can get education, a job if we try hard. Parents, are you telling the children this thing? That they should stop complaining and start appreciating?

“These Saudi-trained imams are leading you the wrong way. It is not easy – sometimes we face discrimination. When I came in 1965, it was really bad. But I made my life with God’s help. Tell me how many of you would like to move to Pakistan or Somalia or Saudi Arabia?”

Few clapped for him at the end. Instead they looked cross and murmured disapprovingly. They didn’t like the message or the messenger. I did, because he, like Aamer, was prepared to break the thick and unthinking consensus that sees all Muslims as victims of the West and Western values. Those spurned “Western values” include equality; democracy; the rights of children, women, gay people and minorities; the right to dissent and free expression. This is why Sharia courts have sprung up all around us and why unregulated schools mould impressionable young Muslim children and turn them into introverted, anti-modernist, obedient, unquestioning vassals.

The contempt and regression has been evident only in the past 15 years or so. I believe the Saudis have systematically taken over and pushed Muslim minds into these mental ghettos where thoughts are interbred and become fetid. Apartheid, intolerance, ignorance and backwardness fester. Those who live within those walls do not connect with those on the outside. They can’t even find common cause with other minorities who also struggle for fair deals and respect.

Last Friday some friends invited us to dinner. One of the guests, a young, professional Sikh woman, said she had had enough of uncontrollably angry and murderous Muslims. Other migrants and their kids had a hard time too, she said, “but they don’t turn into terrorists and go around massacring fellow citizens”.

When she was starting out, or indeed when I was, racism was overt. Prejudices can still bring down people of colour. But you find ways to survive and break down barriers. And you make alliances and join campaigns to try to change the world for the better.

Voluble, narcissistic Muslims today don’t even understand what such campaigning alliances are or how their identity politics has disabled the wider anti-racist struggle. They have sucked up all the oxygen of protest, care nothing about the discrimination suffered by others and, worst of all, will not join non-Muslims in the long, arduous walk towards decent human rights for all.

I know blameless Muslims face odium around the world and millions of them live in fear. I was in India last week where anti-Muslim attitudes are encouraged by elected politicians and where Hindu mobs frequently turn on their Muslim neighbours. Donald Trump’s repellent “policy” to keep Muslims out of America will win him many votes. After the Paris attacks, the Front National is predicted to gain unprecedented popular support.

We have never been so unpopular or unwelcome. Unless good Muslims speak up and take on Islamicists, the future will only get bleaker. Let’s follow Shaker Aamer and say out loud: Jihadis who hate this country and Europe, get the hell out of here. Then diverse citizens can find common cause and maybe try to make a better future for us all.