What's the difference between the government's counter-terrorism strategy "PREVENT" and the current financial downturn?
One is a catastrophic waste of money, caused by poorly thought out policies that were executed in a cack-handed way, without transparency or accountability, and has caused a complete loss of trust in several institutions as well as untold misery to certain vulnerable people...
And the other is a recession.
The Prevent programme was one strand of the government's "Preventing Violent Extremism" strategy (aka CONTEST 2) which was launched in March 2009 and has been the subject of a previous JumahPulse.
This anti-terrorism strategy has four strands: Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare. The second of those, "Prevent", has the remit to stop people from becoming violent terrorists and has always been the most controversial aspect. The government has entangled itself in its own web of ignorance caused by poor understanding, a lack of research and terrible advice on the who, what, why, where and how aspects of growing a terrorist. Despite this ignorance (or perhaps because of it) the government has issued forth a barrage of decrees, recommendations, position papers and guidelines that move away from preventing terrorism and enter the realms of rewriting Islam to fit the government's own narrow political ends.
When Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) had its first airing in autumn 2005, it was mostly about directing funding towards local authorities to allow them to carry out "capacity building" in Muslim communities. By the time CONTEST 2 arrived in spring 2009, it had metamorphosed into an all-singing, all-dancing Little Englander version of the Spanish Inquisition, complete with a pontiff-like Home Secretary (played by Jacqui Smith) releasing press statements on what were deemed to be "acceptable" views on issues like homosexuality. There were Grand Inquisitors (played by Ed Hussain and his friends from the Quilliam Foundation) who told anyone who would listen how dangerous the average Muslim is. There were also the puzzled masses (played by us) who just wanted to get on with their lives without having to figure out what an "Islamist" actually was.
Within months of CONTEST 2, reports begun to surface showing the more sinister side of PVE. The Institute of Race Relations, a charity with over 50 years experience of researching ethnic and religious interactions worldwide, released a report entitled "Spooked", which revealed:
- Prevent is not communities-led but rather the government forcing its money on local authorities in direct proportion to the number of Muslims living in an area - thereby treating Muslims as a suspect community.
- Strong evidence that part of the Prevent strategy was about intelligence-gathering and monitoring of Muslims, like a strategy to fund free IT facilities at a Muslim youth centre as it was "good for monitoring which websites people were visiting" with intelligence-gathering being one of the stated aims.
- Strong evidence to suggest that one aspect of Prevent - The Channel programme - which is described by the government as an initiative to support young Muslims in tackling radicalisation, was actually used to gather information on children. One example concerned a further education college which passed to the authorities the names of particular students because of the views they expressed in a session organised ostenstibly to encourage political discussion.
- Evidence that counter-terrorism police officers were being embedded within local services in order to gather intelligence from the community.
- Several of the volunteer agencies funded by Prevent reported feeling under pressure to inform on those in the community they served.
- A strong feeling throughout the community that the government was funding certain groups over others, in an attempt to label Muslims as either "bad" Muslims (Salafi and Deobandi) or "good" Muslims (Sufi and Barelwi).
Following the groundswell of opinion from various independent bodies which raised fundamental concerns over the strategy and execution of the Prevent programme, the government promised a review.
This week, the report of the Communities and Local Government select committee of MPs was released. If the government was hoping for a cosy whitewash then it would have been very disappointed; Prevent received a very negative appraisal. Not only did the select committee find that Prevent was isolating and stigmatising the very people whose hearts and minds it sought to win, but it recommended that an independent commission be established to investigate the widespread allegations of improper intelligence gathering.
Furthermore, the report slammed what it saw as the "construction of an 'Islamic Experts Industry'" comprising individuals and organisations funded by the government and found that they had caused "a variety of problems including the failure to represent the views of the whole Muslim community".
The "Islamic Experts" in question include the now defunct Sufi Muslim Council, which received almost £400,000 in one year alone, as well as the Quilliam Foundation, whose exact funding has never been revealed but is suspected of amounting to over £1m. No discussion of the "Islamic Experts Industry" would be complete without mentioning BMSD, which also received nearly £33,000 of Prevent funding – a relatively paltry sum, most probably not increased because even the clueless government was not taken in by BMSD's brand of marketing psycho-babble.
Other notable recommendations were that the government's meddling with Islamic theology must stop and that young people should be given the right to engage in open and honest debate and discussion - without their names being added to a watch list. To this end, it suggested that The Channel strategy be scrapped. The committee also criticised the government for failing to engage with those Muslim groups that it disagreed with. There was also the depressing statement that much of Prevent's multi-million pound budget had been wasted on "unfocused or irrelevant projects".
In conclusion, the committee said the government should shift most of Prevent back to the Home Office, where it started, so that it could be more clearly seen as a crime prevention scheme, thus allowing the Department for Communities and Local Government to properly devote itself to dealing with the underlying causes of all forms of extremism and division in multi-ethnic Britain.
The response to the report has not been a flood of resignations or apologies but rather a muted acknowledgement, without any promises attached. Some sections of the media chose to devote a few minutes or inches to the story, most notably Radio 4's Today programme where the Quilliam Foundation's Maajid Nawaz defended Prevent and accused the select committee of being hoodwinked by Islamists! From the government however, no firm undertakings to change the situation.
Another reason to be pessimistic about the future of Muslim civil liberties in the UK was cast into the public domain on Thursday, when it was revealed that the personal information of over 1,000 British Muslim university students was given to the CIA. One can only speculate what exactly the CIA would do with this data.
The government's key anti-terrorism strategy, PVE, promised to Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare. This week, a select committee of MPs confirmed and endorsed the conclusions of other independent bodies before them: PVE's only certain outcome is that British Muslims are becoming more stigmatised, more alienated and more likely to view government with suspicion.
It seems that instead of Pursue, Prevent, Protect and Prepare, the government's anti-terrorism strategy has instead caused Polarisation, Persecution, Punishment and Paranoia.
Its also lead to alot of relativley wealthy muslims who will carry on with their careers as anti-radicalisation consulantants in western europe and america, who can charge whatever fee they want as the paranioa and fear abounds.
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