Islamists have failed to divide France. Will they succeed in Britain?

Islamic State will be delighted by what happened outside Finsbury Park mosque in the early hours of Monday morning. In the space of three months they’ve achieved in Britain what they failed to pull off in France during five years, and provoked a retaliatory act.

This is what they want. When the Syrian intellectual, Abu Moussab al-Souri, published his 1600-page manifesto in 2005, ‘The Global Islamic Resistance Call’, his stated goal was to plunge Europe into a war of religion. Describing the continent as the soft underbelly of the West, al-Souri’s first target was France, the country he considered the most susceptible to fracturing along religious lines because it has the largest Muslim population in Europe, many of whom could be manipulated by both the colonial history of France and its strict secularism that outlaws ostentatious displays of religion.

European intelligence services underestimated the impact of Al-Souri’s message to European Muslims. They were channelling their resources into preventing a ‘spectacular’ similar to 9/11 but what they couldn’t know was how social media – particularly YouTube, launched in the same year as al-Souri published his manifesto – would provide extremists with the means to poison the minds of impressionable young men.