Monday, February 01, 2016 

A fundamental lack of imagination.

At the weekend, out-going chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick gave a blistering interview to the Graun.  All but told his services were no longer wanted after he proved to be one of the most critical of inspectors in what has often been a post filled by those of an independent bent, he made clear he was in fact glad to be leaving, fearing that he was at the point of becoming desensitised to the problems of the prison estate.  Levels of self-harm and suicide are at record levels in a system that Hardwick declares has deteriorated further in the 5 years since the coalition government promised a "rehabilitation revolution".  

The only bright spot is Chris Grayling, who Hardwick relates attempted to interfere with his annual report, has since been moved on from his role as justice secretary, replaced by Michael Gove.  Amazingly considering his record as education secretary, Gove is now without doubt the best minister of a very bad lot, if only because he has spent almost the entirety of his time cleaning up the mess left by Grayling.  In little more than six months Gove has lifted the ban on sending parcels to prisoners, scrapped the criminal courts charge, reversed further planned cuts to legal aid, and persuaded David Cameron to put an end to the proposed link up with the Saudi Arabian prison system.

As Hardwick outlines in his interview, there are manifold things wrong with the prison system, but one of the most obvious is that there are still far too many people in jail who either shouldn't be or who would be far better cared for elsewhere.  Policymakers, he says, have two major failings: "lack of imagination and failure of empathy".  This could be expanded from just policymakers to be a criticism of the justice system as a whole, afflicting not just politicians and those who put pressure on them, but also the police, prosecutors and judges.  It affects not just those being processed through the system, but victims too: witness how 20 years after her death the family of Cheryl James have only now managed to obtain a second inquest, thanks to the Human Rights Act the government wants to repeal.

The absurdity of the system as it stands is perhaps best illustrated by the lack of consistency in decisions made by prosecutors.  Approaching a year after they left, the four school girls from Bethnal Green academy who travelled to Syria to join Islamic State will still apparently be treated as victims should they return to the UK, despite it would seem having no intention whatsoever of doing so.  As I've pointed out on a number of occasions, it seems doubly perverse to prosecute the sad sacks who do return home after quickly discovering they are not cut out for life in a war zone, the Mashudr Choudarys, the Nawazses, and now most notably of all, Tareena Shakil, the 26-year-old who travelled to the capital of Islamic State's self-declared caliphate, Raqqa, only to make her escape less than 3 months later.

Shakil it's safe to say is also the most perplexing character of all the jihadis so far charged on their return.  She apparently loved shows like The Only Way is Essex, seems to not always worn the hijab, let alone the full veil that she would have been required to in Raqqa, and it's not disputed that her brief flirtation with the jihadi cause came after the breakdown of her marriage.  Whether she genuinely was radicalised online by contact with individuals who told her she would go to hell if she didn't live under Sharia law, as well as by other notorious online figures Aqsa Mahmood and Sally Anne Jones we can't know, but it seems more realistic a claim than in many similar instances where families have insisted their loved ones were preyed upon.

Also not in dispute is that whatever the reality of how she managed to make it out of Raqqa, bribing a tax driver and then slipping past Islamic State fighters on the border as she told the court after first telling police she had been kidnapped, she did so because she had become disillusioned with life in Syria.  The claim made by the police that she posed a threat to this country has not been substantiated in the slightest by the evidence heard in court, nor by her conviction for being a member of IS and sending messages inciting terrorism.  She genuinely was escaping, not attempting to return without being noticed with the aim of either proselytising for IS once back in the country, or worse, launching an attack.  Some of the case presented against her was downright laughable: a "senior security analyst" insisted that women in Raqqa were only allowed access to weapons if they were members of an IS police unit, as clearly Shakil couldn't of borrowed a gun for the pictures she posed for from one of the other 30 women she was living with.

This is not to overlook how utterly irresponsible it was of Shakil to take her young son with her, nor how shocking and perverse it was to allow him to be photographed by the side of an AK-47, or wearing a hat with IS insignia.  We can't know for certain how much of a choice she had in much of what she did once in Raqqa, especially when like most radical organisations IS is paranoid in the extreme about spies, where refusing to do what is asked of you can soon result in suspicion and potential execution.  Nonetheless, after admitting the truth of her decision to travel to Raqqa, she has also said she doesn't want sympathy.  Nor does she deserve any for that decision.

What she does deserve sympathy for is realising the terrible mistake she made.  While it doesn't seem to have been reported what has happened since to her child, one would presume he is either now with his father or in care.  Precisely what benefit the public receives from imprisoning her for six years, of which she will likely serve three, is not immediately obvious.  Is it meant to send a message of deterrence to others in a similar position, thinking of travelling to Syria, when we know full well that such thoughts are often furthest from their minds?  Is it meant to make clear you can't "join" a terrorist organisation and then come back as though nothing has happened, regardless of regrets?  

Would it not make far more sense to let individuals like Shakil tell their story, once it has been confirmed they pose no threat, when the only people those at risk of radicalisation are likely to listen to are those whom for whatever reason felt the same way they did?  Wouldn't it be a far better use of police time and court resources to ensure that those who do pose a threat, like Siddhartha Dhar, aka Abu Rumaysah, the man thought to be in the IS video directly addressing the UK are not able to skip bail?  Shouldn't we have learned at least a few lessons by now about the way Islamic State operates, and that while we must be suspicious about anyone attempting to return, the IS view in general is that to leave is to disassociate yourself, to go back to the land of unbelievers?

Indeed, the other message the sentence sends to others who've travelled to Syria is that there is no escape.  You can leave, try and repudiate what you've done, but you'll still likely go to prison for years.  Life after prison is hard enough for most offenders, let alone those branded for life as a terrorist, needing to report to the police for years afterwards as Shakil will.  Knowing that awaits, it's hardly surprising that few whether still believing in the cause or not have made the journey home.  As Hardwick identified, fundamentally it comes down to a lack of imagination.  Shakil could have been an asset in the fight against IS.  Now she'll rot in a cell.  Terrorism aside, her fate is the same as many others who could have been helped previously, who could still be helped, but won't be until our criminal justice policy is completely re-evaluated.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

2/01/2016 09:46:00 pm | |

Monday, January 18, 2016 

Even when it seems to be a fuck-up, it isn't.

For anyone who missed it, last week saw the release of a video from the Metropolitan police that showed the authorities still don't have the slightest clue about challenging the propaganda narrative from Islamic State.  Aimed at young mothers tempted to travel to Syria, it featured three female refugees from the country telling them to, essentially, stop being so silly.  Why would anyone take babies to a war zone, they essentially ask.  Why indeed?  None of the women show any emotion, it's shot without any flair, as though to allow the message to be the focus, except the message is completely lacking.  If the women are meant to be speaking from experience, none relate for instance what they had to go through in order to leave, friends they left behind or others who might have died.

To be realistic, knowing how to counter-act Islamic State propaganda is really difficult.  One of the few ways that could work is to, sadly, sink to their level.  Respond to their images of death and destruction with images of their dead, especially if the footage showcases a band of apparently confident fighters one day only for the frame to update to the reality of the next, with bodies strewn across the dusty ground.  This approach obviously won't work with those whose whole aim is to give their lives cheaply, but might make others with a few more braincells think again.  Nor is it going to work well with the average female potential recruit, who is far more likely to be drawn to Islamic State by questions of identity, belonging, religion and rebellion than out of simply wanting to die for something, anything, coupled with knowing there will be little better on offer at home.

Of all the things that do not point towards potential extremism, being unable to speak English is pretty much right at the top of the list.  If anything, not being able to speak English is more likely to make someone less susceptible to becoming radicalised, precisely because that individual will inevitably be more reliant on those around them and less liable to venture further outside of what they already know.  Most of the tension around identity and belonging concerns dealing with the contradictions of feeling, being different in a society that treats you as though you are while saying that you're not; speaking English, being English, but not seeing yourself as English, or not feeling English, all are absent when you can't and so your experience is far more narrow.  Integration and extremism can be connected, but they are not interconnected.

David Cameron knows this.  He said as much.  He recognises there is no "casual connection" between not speaking English and radicalisation.  In his article for the Times he was more precise in saying it could be a problem, if say, a teenage boy from Bradford can't communicate with his mother as she came from Pakistan and can't speak English, and doesn't understand his life as she rarely leaves the house.  Leave aside quite how daft this notion is, as he would almost certainly be as fluent in Urdu or Punjabi or whichever language his mother speaks as he would in English, and it's a truth universal that parents just don't understand regardless of where they're from or what they do, and look instead for the announcement rather than the row surrounding it.  £20 million in funding for women who cannot speak English and who are "isolated" to be helped to learn.  In effect, it's the government making a u-turn on the cuts they've made to speaking English as a second language, as everyone has been pointing at.

Why are they doing so?  One would hope for the reasons that Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West pointed out.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with radicalisation, or the potential for extremism, and everything to do with integration.  However, it seems impossible for government to function, at least without also getting press attention for such a measure to be announced without also making reference to extremism.  Integration on its own is no longer enough.  At the same time, you can't announce a sum, even one as meagre as £20 million to help foreigns learn English without at the same time riling the exact same people who moan precisely because they can't speak English.  So, to placate them you say in fact it's about radicalisation, which shuts them up to an extent but then pisses off everyone else who quite rightly points out how clumsy the whole exercise has been and how it's idiotic that no English = radicalisation.  The whole thing also functions as a dog-whistle - isn't it about time these layabouts learned how to speak English, and why can't they speak English anyway, and why can't they be deported anyway, and aren't Labour to blame for all this anyway?

The positives for the Tories of making such an announcement in such terms have to outweigh the potential negatives.  Yes, they look as though they haven't a clue and are quite nasty with it, but the policy itself suggests they do have a clue and being nasty about it seems to work.  That the sum is £20m suggests, as the 2011 census did, that really very few people can't speak English whatsoever.  It won't help in the slightest with extremism, but then the government and frankly very few have the slightest clue about how to tackle extremism anyway.  For anyone that does, answers on a postcard.

Labels: , , , ,

Share |

1/18/2016 07:39:00 pm | |

Monday, October 19, 2015 

The doublethink of counter extremism.

For those not aware, weeks, sometimes months in advance the government will set out all known upcoming events on a grid, in order to plan how it intends to sell its message of the day to a sometimes cynical, sometimes laughably supine, sometimes actively cooperating media.  It's not then just an unfortunate coincidence that on the same day as Chinese president Xi Jinping lands in the country to be wined, dined and (steady) fawned over for a couple of days by that other bunch of appalling waxworks, the royals, the government is also launching its counter-extremism strategy.  Said strategy is merely the latest document to extol our "distinct, British values" as David Cameron describes them in his foreword, "the liberty we cherish, the rights we enjoy and the democratic institutions that help protect them" (PDF).

Also among our distinct, British values are of course hypocrisy, humbuggery, obsequiousness to foreign despots so long as they are on our side and doublethink, the ability as Orwell described it to "hold two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accept both of them".  Cameron and the Tories do then believe deeply and sincerely in our distinct British values, while at the same time welcoming with open arms a leader who has further cracked down upon freedom of speech and opposition to one-party rule in both China and Hong Kong.  Our relationship is being hailed as going through a "golden era", and any objections from either human rights blitherers or the Americans, concerned as ever about security rather than our economic well-being, can be dismissed out of hand.  You've got to be a realist about these things, is the message being sent, even if ministers themselves cannot be so blunt.

In a similar way, at the very heart of the government's Counter-Extremism Strategy is a contradiction.  According to David Cameron we have built something truly extraordinary in this green and pleasant land: "a successful multi-racial, multi-faith democracy ... more vibrant, buoyant and diverse than ever before in our history."  And yet this successful, vibrant and diverse democracy is threatened more than it has ever been not by a foreign nation state, but by extremism.  Extremism which according to Theresa May is "operating at an unprecedented pace and scale".  Not at such an unprecedented pace and scale that either May or Cameron can point to events in this country itself as proof, as they remain lacking.  Instead, flagged up is Islamic State in Syria, the attacks in Paris in January and the attack in Tunisia in June.

Don't however take my word for it.  Included as evidence to just how popular and pervasive extremist material is are a few stats.  Quoted is a neo-Nazi group which we're told has 1,500 followers on Twitter, and the video of a Syria-based UK terrorist viewed over 55,000 times.  Videos (note the plural) by both far-right groups and Islamist preachers have been viewed more than 5,000 and 59,000 times respectively.  Not included is just how many of these viewers or followers are actually from the UK, but you get the point, or rather don't.  Hate crime since 2010 has risen as overall crime has fallen, but it's not clear whether this is down to better recording and people being more willing to come forward or if there has been a true increase in intolerance, which is not the same thing as extremism in any case.

By historical standards, the idea that either violent Islamism or the few remaining knuckledraggers on the extreme right pose any sort of threat to the life of the nation is laughable.  If anything, it's an insult to the people who lived through the age of totalitarianisms that are still with us to suggest these are more dangerous times, or that our new enemies are operating at an "unprecedented pace and scale".  Adherents to the "ideology" of extremist Islamism, as though there are a coherent set of beliefs behind the working of Islamic State (to be clear, there very much is a coherent ideology behind al-Qaida style Islamism, just as there is behind the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas Islamism, whereas Islamic State makes it up as it goes along) as opposed instead to what Mao described as all "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", may be operating at such a scale, but that is not by any means the same thing.

This is not to suggest that extremism, racism or other kinds of discrimination are not serious problems.  They are, and will without doubt remain so.  We are however far more resilient than governments and the media almost ever give us credit for.  While there is much to potentially take issue with in the introduction to the document on how we became this successful democracy, the fact is that while true representative parliamentary democracy is a relatively new innovation, it has often been thanks to the people themselves rather than governments that we have arrived at where we are now.  Incidentally, the introduction also states that our values are not exclusive to Britain, which rather puts the whole kibosh on the entire "British values" the government is so determined to bang on about.

Not that such chauvinism is surprising when so many of the proposed solutions to the problem of extremism are to in fact either limit liberty or restrict freedom of speech.  Interestingly, freedom of speech is not mentioned as one of our fundamental values, probably because we have long rejected the wacky Americans and their wacky interpretation of the concept.  Considering also that David Cameron was so keen to flag up in particular the continuing discrimination that Muslims face in his conference speech, it seems somewhat odd that one of the recommendations is a full review of the potential for "entryism" in state institutions.  The "Trojan Horse" affair, where any evidence for pupils being moulded into extremists, let alone radicalised is still lacking, is the justification.  It's not clear why extremists would want to infiltrate the NHS, to pick up on just one other possible example, but we can no doubt rest assured this will not turn into a search for jihadists under the hospital bed.  Also confirmed is that the government will attempt to ban extremist organisations that promote hatred and draw people into extremism but do not break the law, introduce orders on known individual extremists who act similarly and close down premises which are used to support extremism.  It's not explained how any of this will be compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, just that it will most certainly not curtail the right to protest or close down debate.  The law will also be subject to a high level of judicial scrutiny, just in case that doesn't convince you.

The most fundamental problem with the strategy though is the politicians behind it.  Theresa May in her conference speech argued the exact opposite of the document she now seeks to sell: that far from it being our very diversity that is behind our success, too much in fact prevents our society from being cohesive.  The document speaks of "our belief in equality", as though the Conservatives or indeed we as a people have always believed in such things.  The same government that wants to make landlords check the passports of renters on pain of fines in a bid to make the country a hostile environment for illegal immigrants, a move guaranteed to lead to discrimination, wants "everyone" to "enforce our values right across the spectrum".  Extremist groups and individuals, while a threat, if not an unprecedented one, have nothing like the impact that elected politicians and the mainstream media can have on community relations and levels of hate and fear, as Xi Jinping could perhaps attest to.   Being concerned that our values are threatened is one thing; regarding them as so flimsy they can be destroyed by such pitifully weak opponents, at the same time as maintaining they are so universal and strong is quite another.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Share |

10/19/2015 11:15:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 28, 2015 

Preventing "bad boys" from becoming dead boys.

Last week's horrific suicide bombing in Suruc, near to the Turkish-Syria border, looks to have been the last straw for both the Kurds and Turkey alike.  Blamed on Islamic State, although for once the group has not claimed responsibility for the attack, the bomber, believed to have been a 20-year-old Kurd, targeted a press conference being held by the Socialist Party of the Oppressed's youth wing.  The conference had been meant to publicise a trip by some of the group's members to help in the rebuilding of Kobani, the Syrian city Islamic State failed to capture despite it at one point seeming to have been abandoned to its fate by everyone other than the Kurds themselves.

As with the civil war in Syria as a whole, conspiracy theories and grievances about the Turkish authorities' seeming connivance with jihadists fighting in Syria have long circled among the Kurds, embittered by how Ankara has continued to see them as more of a threat than Islamic State.  Whether there was any kind of collusion with the Suruc bomber, or more likely a simple failure of intelligence, the PKK, the Kurdish separatist group, responded to the bombing by killing 2 police officers.  In turn, Turkey has launched bombing raids in both Syria and Iraq, attacking both Islamic State targets and those of the Kurds who just happen to be fighting IS.  A deal between Turkey and the Americans for the use of two military bases close to the Syrian border, long previously resisted, has also been struck.  Whether this amounts to an abandonment of the Kurds in favour of more active Turkish involvement as yet remains to be seen.  It does however underline the double games being played by so many of the actors involved, almost always to the detriment of either civilians or the very few groups that have relatively clean hands.

Much comment here has predictably focused on the news that of the five men who travelled together from Portsmouth in October 2013 to fight in Syria, only Mashudur Choudhury, who returned shortly afterwards, unable to adjust to life in a war zone, remains alive.  Just how ideologically inclined the men were really were remains difficult to properly ascertain; Choudhury certainly was less a committed jihadi and more a pathetic man with delusions of religious grandeur, soon brought back down to earth by the reality.  That the rest did stay, and one at least contacted the ubiquitous researcher Shiraz Maher, telling him of the mundane duties required of a lowly fighter with the Islamic State, while still believing in the group's cause, would suggest not just a belief in defending fellow Sunni Muslims, but also in the rest of the IS system.  When you then also think of how such men would have probably delighted in the slaughter in Suruc, where a group that believes in everything Islamic State detests was cut down for wanting to help their victims, it's difficult not to reach the simple conclusion that the only good jihadi is a dead jihadi. 

Except I also can't help but see the tragedy, the utter waste of life, the contradictions contained within those five men, the "Pompey Lads", the "al-Britani Brigade Bangladeshi Bad Boys".  Identity and the search for it is rightly pinpointed as being key to understanding why some British-born Muslims have gone to fight in Syria, and yet these men didn't want to dispense with their identity, they also embraced it.  They didn't call themselves lions, or apply any other self-aggrandising Islamic labels to themselves, but identified as being from a small town, from Britain and as having Bangladeshi heritage.  The "Bad Boys" part meanwhile speaks of their immaturity, as does how apart from Choudhury, who ironically despite being the oldest was the most immature, none of the other four had any real responsibilities.  All they had was either university to come or apparent dead end jobs to exist through.  It's less surprising to learn one craved martyrdom when the only other identifier he had was as a supervisor at Primark.

What they also had was each other, and it's well known how group dynamics and peer pressure play a major role in the reinforcing of thinking that would otherwise be questioned and challenged.  What also has to be remembered is that in October 2013 the myth of a moderate opposition was still being espoused, as was support for the rebels against Assad in general.  Whether the two who were killed in the fighting for Kobani believed in that cause as fervently as the one they travelled for we don't know; what we do know is the longer someone stays, the harder it is to return, especially when they must have known that Choudhury had been prosecuted and jailed for not much more than merely going to Syria.  If the family of Muhammad Mehdi Hassan are to be believed, the youngest of the group at 19 had wanted to come home when he was killed.

Too bad, you might think, and it is hard to have any sympathy for those who fought alongside or may themselves have taken part in mass killings or the almost beyond imaginable abuse of Yazidi women.  At the same time, there has to be some way for those who have gone to Syria and either want to return or have returned to reintegrate into society.  This is in everyone's best interests: not only are returnees potentially the best weapon against the radicalisers, able to argue that the reality is far different from the propaganda, but to exclude, jail and write off only entrenches the problem.  Identifying 3-year-olds as potential terrorists, as is now happening, while either simply monitoring or prosecuting returnees is the anti-extremism of fools, guaranteed to fail.  There has to be an alternative, however much it offends in the short term.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/28/2015 10:30:00 pm | |

Monday, July 20, 2015 

The strategy remains that there is no strategy.

In his speech on extremism today (speech in full), David Cameron said "Our freedom comes from our parliamentary democracy".  He's right.  Parliament can also dilute that freedom, and has within its power the means by which to end it all together.  Parliament can only maintain freedom as long as it is challenged through protest, and held to account by the courts and the press, to name but two institutions that play such a role.

When the will of parliament is then ignored by the government of the day, as it clearly has been in the case of British servicemen embedded with allied military forces carrying out air strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria, it does rather put into perspective the Tories' continuing obsession with promoting our supposedly indivisible British values as a counterweight against Islamic extremism.  Prime ministers have of course long wielded the royal prerogative, enabling them to make war without bothering to seek the will of parliament, but it's clearly bad form to engage in semantics when there has not been just one, but two votes directly related to Syria.  The first was defeated, while the second did not come close to providing authorisation to attack Islamic State in Syria as well as Iraq.  In truth, it's likely that British special forces have long been operating in Syria, but such are the activities of the secret state: for ordinary soldiers to be taking part in military operations in the country is something else.

One of the best, or at least most inventive defences of the government's fuck you, we bomb what we want attitude came from perennial fan of liberal interventionism James Bloodworth.  Apparently those upset at parliament being ignored are "clinging to the outdated idea that Syria still exists as a state".  Bloodworth might have more of a point if the government wasn't itself clinging to that "outdated idea"; lest we forget, according to David Cameron, Islamic State is neither "Islamic nor a state".  The reality probably is that the rise of Islamic State has torn up Sykes-Picot, and that neither Syria or Iraq can return to their borders as previously recognised.  That is however the intention of all the state actors involved, with the exception of the Kurds, if anyone's counting them.  If we're going to ignore state borders because IS ignores them, it needs to be voted on.  It's not a hard concept to get your head round, unless of course you're being wilfully obtuse, something liberal interventionists can never be accused of being.

It might also be an idea to have a strategy for dealing with Islamic State that runs alongside the one for dealing with homegrown extremism, as the two things while not inextricably linkedcould just have a connection.  Launching Hellfire missiles at Toyota Land Cruisers, whether in Iraq or Syria, is not a strategy.  One such strategy worth noting was set out on Left Foot Forward (edited by Bloodworth), Kyle Orton arguing the only way forward was to commit to regime change in Syria, which would convince all the non-ISIS rebel forces just how serial we are, and therefore result in an uprising against IS in both Syria and Iraq.  This naturally wouldn't lead to the other jihadist rebels gaining power, or Syria descending even further into the abyss, just as regime change in Iraq and Libya didn't.  There are times when describing something as insane doesn't quite cut it, although in fairness to Orton he is at least proposing something other than maintaining a murderous, bloody stalemate.  It would be a murderous, bloody victory for the very forces behind the ideology of Islamic State, and result in years more of bloody insecurity in the most dangerous region in the world, but hey, you've got to start somewhere.

To give David Cameron some credit also, his anti-extremism strategy for here in the UK is not all bad by any stretch of the imagination.  If anything, it's probably the most enlightened we've had post-7/7, although that's hardly saying much.  Cameron did nonetheless get remarkably confused, if not express outright contradictions in multiple places in the speech.  He again insisted that Islamic State is not Islamic, or rather isn't true Islam, and yet at the same time it cannot be denied that err, the extremists are Muslims, and clearly do follow Islamic practices.  You realise that Cameron is trying his best to not to fall into the trap of either making this a war on Islam, or to give succour to those who try to paint all Muslims as extremists, but this really isn't working.  Islamic State is Islamic, there's no getting away from it, just as jihadists are Muslims; they follow a twisted, perverse interpretation of the Wahhabi-Salafi tradition, which is in fact a relatively modern tradition, but it's still Islam.  Islamism, or political Islam, is not inherently violent, nor is it necessarily incompatible with democracy; the Islamism of Hamas is very different from that of al-Qaida and IS despite descending from the same source.  Recognising the Islamic State is Islamic surely isn't that difficult a step, or too hard to explain.

Within a couple of paragraphs Cameron is then at it again.  It's only the extremists who divide people into good and bad Muslims he says.  Except, err, the whole basis of his strategy is to do just that, as he then says in the next line, as this new approach is designed around isolating the extremists from everyone else.  Either these extremists are Muslims or they're not; can we possibly make up our minds, please?  He then immediately goes on to lecturing broadcasters about recognising the huge power they have in shaping the debate, apparently oblivious, or rather not, to how this speech will have more effect than anything they produce.

All this distracts from the good, which is the section on why people are being attracted to the extremist cause.  You can quibble with Cameron's declaration that extremist voices overwhelm those of other Muslims, which I don't think is true at all, but his follow-up, that it's ridiculous the debate when the young have gone to join IS has turned into whether or not the security services are to blame is sound.  If anything, Cameron doesn't ask the hardest of questions: whether or not some Muslims are in fact in denial of where their interpretation of Islam can lead.  Radicalisation, as Cameron says, has to start somewhere, and for some it can be nothing more than ordinary religious observance.  This is not to say they are to blame, that their interpretation is wrong, or that Islam always lead to extremism; it does not, and all religions and political ideologies have their extremists.  There is however no getting away from how some are more susceptible than others, and the more conservative the interpretation of Islam, the higher the chances tend to be.  It's not a coincidence that converts tend to be over-represented among the extremists, for instance.

The problem then is that Cameron's proposed solutions are so woefully lacking.   There isn't really much point in once again going through why the emphasis on British values is chuckleheaded: suffice to say that when the leader of a party that has still has major problems with sexual equality, having so recently been converted to the cause, repeatedly insists that we all believe in such things and always have, the only reasonable reaction is to reach for the sick bag.  Cameron protests that the new Prevent duty for schools is not about criminalising or spying on Muslim children, and yet what else is putting that duty on both nurseries and primary schools about if not spying on Muslim children, then spying on their parents and what they might be teaching them by proxy?  It's certainly not seriously about protecting wider society from child jihadists.  He talks about the effect "passive tolerance" could have on young British Muslim girls, when if anything we've now reached the stage where those brought up here are imposing their traditions on their own children.  The "power and liberating force" of our values, and let's not pretend we haven't been debating these questions of identity for decades, don't seem to have had much effect.

Which is rather the point.  Traditions are ingrained in all our little subcultures.  Cameron boasts about the new diverse face of his party, and then within a couple of paragraphs is on to "It cannot be right, for example, that people can grow up and go to school and hardly ever come into meaningful contact with people from other backgrounds and faiths".  Well, no, it's not Dave, but then what does the rest of your cabinet of private school attending mates have to do with this?  Perhaps we finally get to where this is all leading when Dave suggests "the government needs to start asking searching questions about social housing" and also ask "how we can move away from segregated schooling in our most divided communities".  One answer might be the new lower benefit cap, which research for the Graun suggests will lead to an exodus from the south and cities in general.  Ah yes, it's all fitting into place.

The biggest hole by far in the strategy is on identity.  The Tories don't truly believe in the nonsense they're spouting about British values, but it's the only thing they can think of in a world where identity is becoming ever more fragmented.  This hardly affects just Muslims; in the face of seeming constant change it's natural to cling on to an ever more exaggerated sense of self, as we're seeing in the debate in the US over the Confederate flag.  Young people brought up in an austere religious environment see the world as it is and react in different ways: some might abandon their faith and rebel against their parents that way; others might go in entirely the opposite direction.  Identity has never been so fluid, exaggerated by mass immigration and access to wider culture unimaginable even 20 years ago.  Little wonder that some people, and I can include myself in this, don't feel like they belong anywhere.  Tackling alienation when individualism, or rather the marketed sense of individualism, is so prevalent is all but impossible.  Harping on about British values while not actually following those values, especially at the same time as preaching myths such as how this is a country "where in one or two generations people can come with nothing and rise as high as their talent allows" and that our "success is achieved not in spite of our diversity, but because of our diversity" is about as idiotic as you can get.  The strategy remains that there is no strategy.  That there probably isn't one anyway doesn't diminish that.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

7/20/2015 09:48:00 pm | |

Wednesday, June 17, 2015 

Syrian trilogy in Yorkshire pottery.

All American trilogy, the future's dead fundamentally / It's so fucking funny, it's absurd

Did you see the statement put out by the family of Tahla Asmal, the 17-year-old who now carries the distinction of being the youngest Britisher to become a suicide bomber?  “Talha was a loving, kind, caring and affable teenager,” it begins, before going on to firmly place the blame for his decision elsewhere.  "Talha’s tender years and naivety were, it seems however, exploited by persons unknown, who, hiding behind the anonymity of the worldwide web, targeted and befriended Talha and engaged in a process of deliberate and calculated grooming of him."

Perhaps Talha was all of these things.  Perhaps his tender years and naivety were indeed exploited.  Plenty of 17-year-olds think about killing themselves, if not necessarily other people at the same time; I certainly did.  Perhaps he was targeted and befriended, even groomed, although frankly this transferral of the terminology of sexual exploitation and abuse to that of comprehensively changing someone's outlook on life as a whole in a very short space of time doesn't really cut it.

The insistence that Asmal's decision to not only go and join Islamic State, but also take part in a "martyrdom operation", as they're called by jihadists, was all down to faceless individuals on the internet does though take a knock when you learn his best friend, next-door neighbour and and fellow emigree to IS was Hassan Munshi, brother of Hammad Munshi, convicted back in 2008 at the age of 18 for possessing documents useful to terrorists.  Munshi's defence at the time was, uncannily, that he was groomed by the two older men involved in the plot.

Again, perhaps he was.  You might though have thought it would have alerted his parents, and especially his grandfather, Yakub Munshi, president of the Islamic Research Institute of Great Britain at the Markazi Mosque in Dewsbury to the potential for Hammad's younger brother to become subject to the same pressures.  Perhaps they were and it made no difference.  Surely though Asmal's family, devastated and heartbroken, must have been aware of all this.  Could it really be that not one, but two Munshis, as well as Amsal were targeted by these calculated and cunning groomers, without anyone becoming aware as to what was going on?

One thing is for sure: we seem to be stuck in the same old groove when it comes to radicalisation.  It's still about foreign policy, Islamophobia, alienation, cries one section; it's about an austere and intolerant interpretation of Islam that either doesn't condemn the likes of IS enough or is outright sympathetic to their purity says another; no, it's actually to do with identity and belonging, insists someone else.  To which the obvious response is: doesn't all of the above play a role?

To start with, you have to see what Islamic State for what it is, which is the answer to all things.  It's a fundamentally teenage organisation in every sense; just look at the old jihadi grey beards Abu Qatada and Abu ­Muhammad al-Maqdisi bemoaning how what they helped bring into being has grown into.  Who knew that if you gave religious backing to one group allowing them to kill whoever they feel like that eventually another group would used it to kill whoever they feel like?  Islamic State's response to al-Maqdisi's attempts to free the captured Jordanian pilot was the equivalent of a step-child telling their mother's new partner you're not my real dad, only with the added son of a whore insult just to rub it in.

IS then not only appeals to those who no longer accept that establishing the caliphate now is illegitimate, as al-Qaida does, to those who see it as their religious duty to fight against the kuffar, whether they be Alawites, the Shia or anyone else they don't agree with, but also to to the most base desires.  IS not only promises fighting, but fucking as well, to male and female alike, so long as the woman is perfectly happy with playing the role of the dutiful wife to someone with a potentially short life expectancy.  While you'd think this would appeal more to the recruits from other Arab countries, never underestimate the pressures on young Muslim men as well as women in the west to follow the strictures set down by their parents.

This doesn't of course begin to explain the appeal of IS to the women from Bradford, assumed to have made the journey to Syria.  It's not many happily married women with young families who would decide to up sticks to a war zone leaving their husbands behind.  Something on that level doesn't ring true.  That said, why Syria rather than attempt to stay in Saudi Arabia, unless their very brand of Islam is compatible with that of IS?  Their brother having gone to fight doesn't on its own lead to them fleeing to join him, not least taking their children with them to a place of such danger.

The entire case of the Dawoods raises those questions of belonging, identity and integration.  It also though makes clear that even among those who adhere to a highly conservative brand of Sunni Islam, the numbers who are so taken with the IS vision of life and the world that they'll join it are tiny.  When you then have the government's utterly cack-handed overreaction, first to the Trojan Horse plot, which was nothing of the sort, and where there was no evidence that unpleasant, oppressive and wrong as it was, the conservative Islamic ethos adopted by those Birmingham schools was breeding extremists, combined with the continuing stupidity of the Prevent programme, which has never prevented anything, there is the potential to push those on the edge over into doing something they otherwise wouldn't have.  Shiraz Maher is right on almost everything in his piece except for his bizarre invocation of how the colonies fought for Britain in WW1 and WW2 means instilling "British values" is the answer today.  The Conservatives don't have the slightest idea what British values are, but they do know how to make more work for schools, or indeed nurseries, lest there be any 5-year-old terrorists already being groomed for action.

The rise of IS and eclipse of al-Qaida also highlights the way the nature of the threat from terrorism is changing, and just how little recognition there has been from all concerned to that effect.  The big, major plots of the past have not entirely gone away, but have been superseded by the danger of the lone or working in pairs attacks we've seen.  More difficult as these are to prevent, they are just as likely to result in failure, or rather than indiscriminately targeting the public, they focus on the police or specific groups.  Spectacular attacks on multiple targets have fallen from favour.  With the focus on the jihad in Syria and Iraq, it also means those who do choose to fight are as likely to be disillusioned by the experience and the reality of the situation as they are enthused by it.  For all the fear about jihadis coming back from Syria to launch attacks, there has as yet not been a single returnee charged who has been found to have such designs.

Here also is the stupidity of the double game being played in Syria: rather than approach those coming back with the intention of trying to persuade others not to make the journey, the prosecutions continue regardless of the groups being fought with.  This is despite Patrick Cockburn reporting how one of the major reasons the non-IS rebels have made such advances since the turn of the year has been a influx of support for the al-Nusra Front, aka al-Qaida's official affiliate in Syria and a direct split from IS, and which Qatar is all but openly supporting.  One day, the way policy on Syria has ebbed and flowed will be rued in the same as the war on Iraq now is.  Till then, we'll hear more families make their children out to be victims without examining themselves, while the efforts to tackle what extremism there is will continue to fail.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

6/17/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, September 30, 2014 

Shorter Theresa May.

We have to destroy the town in order to save it.

(More tomorrow once the nicer effects of an anaesthetic wear off.  Don't ask.)

Labels: , , , , ,

Share |

9/30/2014 09:49:00 pm | |

Tuesday, February 11, 2014 

Here's to you, Mr Robinson. (And the Quilliam Foundation.)

It's been an eventful few weeks for Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation, or as I've taken to calling them, the Quill.i.am Foundation. Apart from writing a guest post for this blog on his revolutionary tweeting of the Jesus and Mo cartoon, an act that sparked more of a spat over how broadcasters and newspapers also censored the horrendously unfunny web comic than it did over how Nawaz had received death threats for saying he didn't find it offensive, he's also been deeply concerned at the treatment ex-EDL leader Tommy Robinson has been subjected to in prison.

Not for Nawaz a simple denunciation of the alleged deliberate leaving of Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, in a room with three men who took a disliking to his face at HMP Woodhill. No, such an incident required an open letter to the Lord Chancellor and the justice secretary (PDF) expressing his disquiet, as well as how he was worried it could reinforce Robinson's "perceived grievances" against the state and undo all his good work in persuading Robinson to quit the EDL in the first place.  You see, "decapitating" the far-right street protest organisation had clearly been in the public interest, and Nawaz dreads to think what might happen if Robinson wound up dead.

Just how in the public interest Nawaz believed his good deed in extracting Robinson from the EDL to be, despite Robinson not retracting any of his previous statements, was revealed in a freedom of information request to the Department of Communities and Local Government. Despite Nawaz claiming that Quill.i.am had not received state funding since 2010, something undermined by another FOI request which showed that, although much reduced, they had still received a substantial grant for the following year, on the very day as Robinson was presented to the press as having left his inciting days behind him Nawaz was begging the DCLG for funding to help facilitate Robinson's defection. He obviously couldn't continue to live off donations to the EDL, so why shouldn't the state recognise such an important contribution to community cohesion and cough up?

Strangely, despite the polite request, the DCLG demurred (pay wall). Without wanting to surmise too much about why the DCLG decided not to donate to the keep Tommy Robinson/Stephen Yaxley-Lennon in the manner to which he was accustomed fund, it's difficult not to suspect that like some of us, they might just have felt the entire Damascene conversion was not all that it appeared.  With Robinson now detained at Brenda's pleasure, something that both he and Nawaz must have known was likely, and with the EDL already falling apart, having failed to capitalise on the murder of Lee Rigby, it was the perfect time for Robinson to claim he was leaving because he couldn't control the "extremists" any longer.  As Nawaz reveals in his letter, it's also clear how desperate Quilliam was, without a budget to fund their most high profile act of deradicalisation.  Deprived of state funding it's unclear how the thinktank is staying afloat, although that's far from unique as many other thinktanks also refuse to disclose who their benefactors are.

Due to a lamentable oversight, the letters to the department were however published with Nawaz's personal mobile phone number not redacted.  Such a breach of privacy would be unacceptable even if Nawaz hadn't been receiving threats, regardless of the credibility or lack of them.  All the same, Nawaz seemed to put the blame as much on Jason Schuman, who had also placed an FOI request, as Richard Bartholomew notes.  Threatening legal action or responding to criticism with insults is something Quilliam has a record for: Craig Murray faced down just such a threat, while Vikram Dodd was attacked after he revealed Quilliam had secretly profiled Muslim organisations for the government.

As Sunny Hundal argued back then, government funding of certain groups and not others only increases suspicions, and Nawaz's begging for money for having "turned" Robinson does everything to reinforce those prejudices.  For an organisation that started off so promisingly, Quilliam's reputation now lies in the gutter.  To have a chance of recovering it will almost certainly need new leadership, and with Nawaz the prospective Liberal Democrat candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, there's a ready explanation available should he feel it's time to move on.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

2/11/2014 11:31:00 pm | |

Tuesday, October 08, 2013 

Meet the new boss.

Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of Tommy Robinson, or Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, or whatever the now former leader of the English Defence League's real name is.  From once being a small time member of the BNP, he succeeded in creating an organisation which became the most powerful far-right street movement since the National Front.  You can't properly enjoy such a position of influence though when you're constantly assailed by your opponents as being a racist dedicated to undermining community cohesion, to the point where your friends are (allegedly) refused service just for being with you, or indeed when you apparently get ejected from a Milton Keynes casino on the grounds that you're a thug and therefore not welcome at the roulette wheel.  Why anyone would want to be in a Milton Keynes casino in the first place is a good question, but let's leave that to one side.

When the Quilliam Foundation then offers to reinvent you as an completely legitimate political commentator, why on earth wouldn't you take them up on it?  After all, you already made an abortive attempt to get involved in a political party, so why not square the circle and form a new campaigning organisation almost exactly the same as the EDL, merely without the embarrassing street protests that made you so notorious and loathed?  What's more, Quilliam for their part will ignore all the evidence that makes clear you're still a thug who's read a few far-right blogs and books and so knows that Islam simply must have a reformation, and instead present you as someone who merely needs "encouraging" in your "critique of Islamism".  Who wouldn't sign up when a (formerly, see update below) government-funded think-tank simply decides to forget that you deliberately conflated Islamic extremism and Islam in general on innumerable occasions?

Where Hope Not Hate offers cautious optimism, I give you absolute cynicism.  Because that's exactly what this hilarious move by both Robinson and Quilliam is, the height of cynicism.  If Robinson had truly long been worried about the extremism lower down the ranks in the EDL, he wouldn't have joined the balaclava wearing idiots who thought it a good idea to confront the police on the night of the murder of Lee Rigby, nor would he less than a week ago have humiliated himself by attempting to intimidate one of the authors of EDL News, instead going to the abode of a completely different Gary Moon.

The reality is that the EDL had reached a dead end, as was evident with the failure of the Tower Hamlets march.  Just a matter of months after Lee Rigby's murder, a crime they had long predicted and which they tried their darnedest to exploit, they couldn't even manage to equal the numbers that had marched through the borough a couple of years ago. This was despite attempting to portray the area as being under sharia law, and challenging the ban on marching through Whitechapel itself.

On a personal level, as alluded to above, Robinson had become too notorious to lead a normal life when he wasn't with his beer-swilling mates encouraging and fomenting hate. After all, what is this country coming to when the leader of a far-right organisation whose members have been convicted of countless offences can't pick his children up without getting nervous glances? Abandoning a moribund movement with the help of a counter-extremism think-tank while not renouncing a single thing you've previously said makes absolutely perfect sense.

As for that other moribund organisation, Quilliam, it makes sense for them too. Having started out promisingly, it quickly showed itself to be intolerant of criticism and more than happy to denounce Muslim organisations it decided were Islamist in nature, regardless of what others saw as a positive contribution to their local communities. Being a counter-radicalisation think-tank is also rather difficult when your raison d'etre has plunged down the political agenda; Quilliam has been pretty much reduced to commenting on Islamist movements abroad, which while a public good considering the lack of specialist knowledge elsewhere, doesn't realise justify continued public funding, if indeed they are still receiving it.

"Persuading" Robinson and Kevin Carroll to abandon their movement suits both sides. It means Robinson can join up with his even more extreme pals in America, as now seems likely, his baggage with the neo-Nazis among the EDL a thing of the past, while Maajid Nawaz can claim he's pulled off something that will benefit the country as a whole. In fact, he's handed legitimacy to a convicted criminal still facing further charges, and who hasn't altered his virulent views as much as looked to rebrand them. The problem they now face is that this discredits them equally, and Quilliam has a lot further to fall than Robinson does.

Slight update: Maajid Nawaz says that Quilliam hasn't received public funding since 2010, as Spinwatch suggested above.  We don't know who does fund Nawaz and friends however, as despite the promises made on their website, you won't be able to find any annual reports there.

Labels: , , , , , , , ,

Share |

10/08/2013 09:43:00 pm | |

Wednesday, May 29, 2013 

Not quite out of the woods.

Considering the potential there was for serious unrest following the murder of Lee Rigby, such was the immediate reaction to the crime on both old and social media, a week on from the tragedy it seems as though the immediate danger to community relations has passed.  This isn't to understate the number of reported attacks on either mosques or ordinary Muslims, which are clearly unacceptably high, or the vandalising of two war memorials (although it's unclear who was responsible in that instance) but further deaths, serious injuries or significant property damage have thankfully been avoided.

In a way (and bear with me here), it's perhaps helped that the key figures on both sides of the extremist divide are either completely discredited or acted like bulls at the proverbial gate.  Taking into account the long weekend, the numbers the EDL managed to mobilise at their various rallies were pretty pathetic.  The most significant, the protest on Monday outside Downing Street, probably attracted somewhere in the region of 2,000 demonstrators, if we're to account for the usual police under counting and the usual organisers' over counting.  Nor have they helped themselves through the way they set about expressing their anger while trying also to honour Rigby: in Newcastle on Saturday one of their speakers let the mask slip when he said "send the black cunts home" to cheers from the crowd, while there are more than a few shots from Monday of various protesters doing something eerily similar to a salute most closely associated with a party that came to power in Germany in the 1930s.

The EDL's biggest mistake though was to imagine that rampaging through Woolwich last Wednesday night was in any way a good idea.  It would have been one thing to hold a vigil for Rigby; it was quite another to distribute EDL branded balaclavas to a bunch of boozed up hot-heads who then did little more than confront the police who were there to provide reassurance.  Rather than drawing attention to their long-standing campaign against Islamic extremists, as they desperately try to maintain their protests are aimed at, it only made crystal clear that their intention is to incite hatred and cause fear, which is of course precisely what those they claim to be against also set out to achieve.

Which brings us, sadly, to Anjem Choudary. You could say that if he didn't exist the media would have to invent him, except they err, partially did. No one else so thoroughly unrepresentative of those he claims to speak for has been so indulged and coddled down the years, whether by the tabloids who fell every single time for his stunts, or the supposedly more serious broadcasters who kept inviting him onto panel discussions. His appearance on Channel 4 News and Newsnight last week, where he predictably refused to condemn the murder of Rigby, however badly defended by both, at least made clear how loathed he is by other Muslim leaders who have to try and deal with his brand of false consciousness.

This said, it ought to be obvious that attempting to restrict extremists such as Choudary from getting on the airwaves is counter-productive, quite apart from being unworkable. It ought to be the case that the media could exercise common sense and not invite those like him onto our screens the day after an attack, but when images of one of the suspects addressing a camera, his hands soaked in blood, is deemed acceptable then it seems we've moved beyond that.  Rather than going about things backwards, we ought to be asking just how it is that Choudary has managed to stay on the right side of the law all these years.  If he does have some kind of relationship with either the police or the security services, then surely we've now reached the point at which his use as an informant has been completely exhausted.

To try and get things in some sort of perspective, it's worth remembering that up until last week it had been almost two years since we had heard anything from the government about tackling radicalisation.  This wasn't because the problem had gone away, clearly, more that a point had been reached where it seemed as though we had something approaching a handle on it.  With the greatest of respect to BenSix, who's dedicated a number of posts to Islamist ideologues and the invitations they've had to speak on campuses and at conferences, too much can be made of students listening to radicals.  It's true that far right figures clearly wouldn't get such a free pass, and we could do with an organisation on the left that argues and organises against extremists of both stripes, but let's not worry unduly.

The situation is more that we're in transition.  Whereas a decade or more ago radicalisation primarily took place in mosques or meetings where charismatic preachers or leaders were in control, the shift has been to the internet and smaller groups that are self-reinforcing.  Those that previously went through the ranks of Hizb-ut-Tahrir or associated with al-Muhijaroun, as one of the suspects in the murder of Drummer Rigby did are increasingly the minority.  The lone wolf tendency has also probably been exaggerated, yet it's true that the influence of Anwar al-Awlaki and al-Qaida's Arabian franchise has been significant, as in the cases of the Fort Hood shooter and Roshonara Choudhry.  Even if YouTube or Facebook/Twitter were more proactive in taking down content that incites hatred or promotes terrorism, as some MPs have demanded (if we're being extremely creditable to them, considering some as well as the Daily Mail seem to imagine Google essentially is the internet), something that isn't necessarily laudable, then those looking for it would quickly find it elsewhere.  The solution has to be to get smarter, both in our arguments and further empowering those who have spent the past few years successfully challenging and counselling those who've strayed towards the extremes.

It doesn't therefore help when politicians and newspapers continue to push the line that much of the blame can be put on extremist preachers, almost always without naming those apparently responsible.  It just plays into the EDL/BNP line that mosques are hotbeds of hatred, an argument helpfully refuted when protesters were invited inside for tea and biscuits when they gathered outside the Bull Lane mosque in York.  Sadly, that approach clearly isn't going to work when it comes to the planned BNP march in Woolwich on Saturday, which intends to end outside the Lewisham Islamic Centre, which is "said to have had one of the suspected murderers amongst itscongregation".  We aren't quite out of the woods yet.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

5/29/2013 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, June 07, 2011 

Radicalisation and the ideologues.

It's Tuesday, which means it must be time for another government review to publish its findings. Having yesterday demonstrated muddled thinking and a complete unwillingness to confront the real fundamental problem when it comes to the supposed commercialisation and sexualisation of children, so today we have a report on the Prevent strategy of countering radicalisation which demonstrates muddled thinking as well as an apparent determination to potentially make things much worse.

For this we have the prime minister to principally thank. Where Tony Blair once told the country that the rules of the game were changing, and the prospect of 90 days detention without charge followed shortly after, David Cameron back in February in Munich of all places informed the nation that the time had come for a muscular espousal of our values. In what was meant to be a speech on terrorism he decided the time was right to pronounce on both integration and the failure of "state multiculturalism", when even if the issues are hardly mutually exclusive he had not even begun to exercise the proper level of caution before making sweeping statements of fact. His key new point was that no longer would the government tolerate organisations which hold "extremist" points of view being either funded by the state (which they weren't in the first place) or consider them as useful in combating extremism. Why, you wouldn't expect a fascist political party to help in steering followers away from a violent white supremacist grouping. Why should it be the same when it comes to groups with an adherence to Islamism?

Two months in to a consultation exercise then and the findings of the review had already been set out. As well as being heavily influenced by the personal biases of Michael Gove, he of such remainders as Celsius 7/7, along with Policy Exchange, they of such fine reports as the one which was undermined somewhat by the forging of receipts from mosque bookshops, it also draws heavily from the work of the Quilliam Foundation, the counter-extremism think-tank which is err, mainly funded out of the Prevent budget, and has, err, Michael Gove on its non-executive advisory board. Having started out promisingly, the think-tank has since settled on a course of annoying almost every other Muslim organisation it's come into any sort of contact with, and last year singled out a good number of them as being the kind the government should have little or nothing to do with, among them the Muslim Safety Forum, a grouping which has been praised for its work with the police in helping to understand the concerns of the community.

Not that this closeness has stopped Quilliam from today being highly critical of the end result. The criticism is also rather rich, and more than a little self-contradictory: having previously set out in a secret document which Muslim organisations had extremist leanings, it now finds that Prevent's definition of what Islamism is is flawed. To quote from their press release (PDF):

The Prevent strategy’s definition of Islamism as ‘a philosophy which, in the broadest sense, promotes the application of Islamic values to modern government’ shows a complete misunderstanding of the nature of Islamism and why it is problematic. This current definition downplays the negative aspects of Islamism and ignores the fact that most non-Islamist Muslims also believe in combining Islamic values and modern government. The Prevent strategy’s definition therefore risks smearing ordinary, non-Islamist Muslims as Islamists and thus falsely identifying them as being part of the problem while also implying that Islamism is one of the aspirations of every Muslim.

Yes, smearing ordinary, non-Islamist Muslims as Islamists is something Quilliam would never do, would it? The point however is a sound one, even it comes from those with plenty of baggage. For however much we want to espouse and define ourselves by our values, it's those very values that those at risk of radicalisation and turning to terrorism are either unmoved by or are actively opposed to: the best hope of turning them away from such a path isn't to imply that the entirety of Islamic-influenced political thinking is reactionary and opposed to Western values, especially when much of it isn't, but for such ideology to be recognised as perfectly legitimate. This is exactly why Cameron's analogy of not relying on fascists to be part of the solution to violent white nationalism is so fatuous: those inclined towards Islamism are not going to be suddenly converted to the joys of Western democracy as it stands overnight. Moreover, if we regard the likes of Hizb-ut-Tahrir or the remnants of al-Muhajiroun to be stepping stones towards full on radicalisation in the takfirist jihadist mould, shouldn't we also consider that Islamist groupings opposed to violence but not able to pass the new "extremism" test are viable steps on the road to recovery?

Quilliam is also, notably, critical of the new definition of "extremism" as laid out in the new Prevent strategy, this time for the reason that it isn't tight enough to contain all the awful Islamist groups:

For instance, the definition’s description of extremism as being opposition to ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual tolerance’ is far too open to interpretation. For instance this overlooks that both far-right and Islamist extremists are authoritarians who want more ‘rule of law’ rather than less.

This is besides the fact that governments themselves often have a rather hazy concept of the rule of law and individual liberty. The last one certainly did, whether it was ordering the end of an investigation into corruption or deciding that the threat to the country post-9/11 was so massive that it meant foreign nationals could be detained indefinitely without charge.

It is that threat after all that this entire document is meant to be about thwarting. Just how serious is the threat, though? There hasn't been a major terrorist plot in this country prevented now since the "liquid bombs" ring was broken up, and to tempt fate, there's no sign of one on the horizon. Yes, the threat remains at severe as we are endlessly informed, yet for the most part the last few years have seen the rise of the "lone wolf" attackers, operating alone or with minimal if any contact with the base organisations overseas. Just how these individuals can be prevented from becoming so disillusioned with society that they feel impelled to attack it is almost impossible to prescribe, and this document doesn't really even begin to provide any answers. Yes, some vulnerable individuals have been identified through the Channel programme, along with dozens of others it's reasonable to surmise who had nothing other than temporary interest in the subject of jihadism. Much depends then on the groups the strategy seems intent on all but proscribing at worst and dismissing at best.

This isn't to suggest that all of the changes to the strategy are bad: belatedly it's been decided that it will cover not just Islamist extremism but also what it terms as "Northern Ireland-related terrorism", as well as extreme right-wing ideology, although it massively plays the latter down, something that seems curious when it's the radicals of the English Defence League that currently pose the biggest threat to community cohesion. It's also discarded the previous combination of work on integration along with tackling radicalisation, something that David Cameron could have learned from. So much else though is either counter-productive or worrying: the document applauds the "No Platform" stance of the National Union of Students, something that continues to shut down debate, while urging universities to keep closer tabs on their charges, even if it doesn't say so in as many words. The section on the internet also appears to suggest that the Internet Watch Foundation's role in blocking "extremist" content will be stepped up, as if its completely unaccountable work wasn't already raising more than legitimate concerns.

Counter-terrorism policy is far too important to be left to ideologues, as we saw under the last government. Instead what works has to be prioritised, however much that potentially offends our political sensibilities. For all the nonsense spoken today about "extremist" organisations being funded out of the public purse, the review itself fails to name a single one which was, only saying that groups it would now define as "extremist" had previously picked up public funds. It might well have been some of those small organisations that helped those on the path to outright radicalisation to step back and reconsider; after all, there were no successful attacks over the period it was in operation. We'll have to wait and see if that remains the case in the years to come.

Labels: , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

6/07/2011 11:59:00 pm | |

Tuesday, November 02, 2010 

Looking for answers which are almost certainly not there.

Our practice of not allowing photography in court does not always do justice to either the accused or those in the public gallery. The sketch of Roshonara Choudhry sitting in the dock during her trial for the attempted murder of the MP Stephen Timms is one of those occasions where the drawing seems to say everything yet also nothing about how she came to commit the crime. Sitting, seemingly unmoved by the machinations of a court which she doesn't recognise, she looks aloof, yet intense, her expression harsh and severe whilst also strangely unmoved. She looks for all the world exactly like someone capable of an act of icy political calculation. She doesn't however look like the one thing she most definitely is: a 21-year-old woman who has committed what on the surface seems to be a completely unexplainable and out of character act of violence. It isn't that it seems necessarily like something someone older would have done; if anything, her youth most likely contributed to her belief that she could achieve something by stabbing an MP who had voted for the Iraq war. It's more that the drawing almost seems to capture what you think her own mental image of herself probably is.

Why she decided to attempt to kill her MP, according to her own justification to the police as an act of vengeance for his vote for the Iraq war, is still very far from clear cut. We're told she isn't mentally ill, and wasn't at the time, whilst also being informed, both by "those close to" her as well as the police that she became radicalised as a result of watching the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, the currently much sought after supposed "spiritual leader" of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. This explanation for her act has it that she was an avenging angel inspired by the specific advice of al-Awlaki and his group, which is to do something, do anything and to act alone. She does indeed seemed to have abided somewhat by the strictures suggested in AQAP's recent propaganda journal Inspire, which was very much a guide to a personal jihad in isolation. She had no links to known extremists, or to any such groups, and doesn't seem to have accessed the usual sources of jihadi material online, apparently watching al-Awlaki's video messages on YouTube.

How much of this is coincidence and how much is genuine heeded advice is impossible to tell. Certainly, self-radicalisation is not unheard of, yet most who find themselves in such a position tend to look for others for reassurance that they're not alone, and if they can't find this within their circle of friends or acquaintances, they tend to look for it online. There is nothing to suggest that Choudhry did this. The only real previous example in this country of someone ostensibly motivated by radical Islamist ideology to commit acts of violence who acted alone was Nicky Reilly, the young convert with Asperger's syndrome who singularly failed to hurt anyone other than himself, and he was, according to the police, preyed upon, although it was never established by whom. Self-radicalisation which doesn't lead to joining up with like-minded others, where companionship and the reliance on each other helps enormously with the level of conviction which is generally need to take action can be a dead end; equally, it can be the authorities' worst nightmare, someone completely unknown to them entirely self-motivated and taught, and incredibly dangerous as a result. At the same time, the internet is not the most reliable of sources, and their actions as a result, especially if they involve the use of explosives, could be as laughable as Reilly's were.

It is however very difficult to believe that al-Awlaki was the prime motivating factor here. Especially interesting and perhaps instructive is Choudhry's obvious loathing for the British state as she saw it. Very few convicted jihadists for instance have completely disdained the court system and refused to cooperate with it, although some will again claim that this is motivated through maintaining innocence in order to extract the maximum amount of cost from the proceedings. This doesn't seem to be something that would have simply developed overnight. We don't know how Choudhry at the time reacted to the Iraq war, when she would have been 14, yet it seems reasonable to assume that it at the very least exercised her. Dismissing completely that the attack had its genesis then would be dubious to say the least.

Regardless of all of this, attaching any sort of blame to al-Awlaki, jihadist ideology or designating the attempted murder as an act of terrorism is nonsense. This was and remains first and foremost a criminal act, even if there was as it seems a premeditated motive which intrigues as much as it baffles. Dave Osler suggests that Choudhry's underlying motivation was just as visceral, rage-fuelled and political as that of the hunger strikers in the Maze prison and the anarchists of the Angry Brigade and it's difficult to demur. The key difference is that Choudhry wasn't trying to change anything; she wasn't and isn't demanding an end to the occupation of anywhere, or even martyring herself for a cause. She had no intention of killing herself, and left no finger-pointing video, delivering a more expansive reasoning behind her action. In an age when we seek meaning so desperately, and when so many have their own vision for what the world should look like and are keen to share it with everyone else, Choudhry seems determined to remain anonymous, for her simple act of violence to speak for itself, almost as a warning for others as to what could happen to them. It's no wonder then that we seek enlightenment from a simple drawing of her, looking for answers which are almost certainly not there.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , ,

Share |

11/02/2010 10:27:00 pm | |

About

  • This is septicisle
profile

Links

Last posts

Archives

Email me
Syndicate this site (XML)
Powered by Blogger
and Blogger Templates