Kemi Badenoch says Left's romantic ideas about violence set scene for Manchester atrocity

Left-wingers who believe violence can be justified to tackle injustice are paving the way for terrorists to commit atrocities, Kemi Badenoch has warned. The Conservative leader claims the terror attack on a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur can be traced back to a "wider culture that legitimises violence".

In a blast at the Left, she writes in the foreword to a new report from the Policy Exchange think tank: "When intellectuals and activists romanticise violence, they give licence to those who see bloodshed not as tragedy, but as a political tool. Two years ago, it was this ethos that underlay Hamas' attacks on Israel: the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

"We have also repeatedly seen the deadly results of this mindset here in Britain, most recently in the appalling terrorist attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur. This was not an isolated act of hatred: it flows from a wider culture that legitimises violence in the name of 'justice', cloaking it in the language of resistance."

Drawing on her own experiences, she states: "I speak with some personal knowledge of where this path can lead. Growing up in Nigeria, I witnessed how extremist ideologies, later exemplified in groups like Boko Haram, devastated communities by preaching the false promise of liberation through violence.

"They too claimed to be fighting injustice. The result was indiscriminate slaughter, the silencing of women, and the destruction of lives and futures. "There is nothing 'cleansing' about such violence."

Warning of the influence of postcolonial thinker Frantz Fanon - a psychiatrist who championed Algerian independence - in higher education, she writes: "We cannot allow our universities to remain blind to all this. Universities should, of course, be spaces where ideas can be tested and examined openly.

"Nothing should be off limits and free speech is a critical to their proper functioning. But intellectual rigour demands we examine Fanon not as a prophet, but as a flawed and dangerous thinker whose ideas, if transplanted uncritically into today's context, risk fuelling division and bloodshed.

"The path to justice lies not through the glorification of violence, but through the hard work of building peace, sustaining dialogue, and protecting the dignity of all. That is the lesson we must insist upon today."

Mrs Badenoch is concerned by the slogan "globalise the intifada".

She writes: "When this kind of rhetoric is repeated uncritically, it creates a permissive environment for extremism. It normalises the notion that violence against civilians, even against places of worship, can be rationalised as part of some larger struggle."

The Policy Exchange report, After Gaza, by Sir John Jenkins - a former UK Ambassador to Saudi Arabia - examines the influence of Fanon. He argues that "in the context of the Gaza conflict, his powerful but deeply flawed justification of redemptive anti-colonial violence has found new resonance with both Islamists and progressive western activists".

Sir John says Fanon "stands as a key figure in the development of the fractured ethics of liberation that prevails in many so-called progressive circles in the West" but warns: "The history of all so-called liberation struggles in the modern Middle East and North Africa is one of vast suffering, oppression, repression and harm. Yet here we are again, being asked by some to believe that violence is the answer."