—Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham City Jail
In April 2010, Talya Lador-Fresher, then Israel deputy ambassador to the UK was invited to speak at Manchester University in the north of England. The previous year Israel had mounted the devastating attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead, which had been condemned by the prominent South African jurist Richard Goldstone in the months leading up to Lador-Fresher’s lecture. He had been asked to lead a fact-finding mission for the UN Human Rights Council on the war in Gaza, and its report described the Israeli Defense Forces’ war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. In Manchester, where students had been clashing bitterly over the issue of Israel and Palestine for years, Palestinian rights activists planned to challenge the deputy ambassador over the allegations in Goldstone’s report as she delivered her lecture. However, strict security arrangements meant activists were prevented from entering the building. Hoping to confront Lador-Fresher as she left the university, they assembled at the exit to the university’s car park. When her car emerged, they blocked it for a few seconds before the vehicle pushed through the crowd and sped away.1 One of those who stood in front of the car was Jameel Scott, a seventeen-year-old student and member of the Socialist Workers Party. Jameel was hit by the vehicle as it pushed through the protesters, and was lifted onto its hood, leaving him with a minor limp.
The protest provoked a furious reaction from Ron Prosor, then Israeli ambassador to the UK:
What is going on at British taxpayer-funded universities is shocking. Extremism is not just running through these places of education, it is galloping. My ears are ready and waiting to hear the strongest condemnation of this behaviour both from the heads of campus and the local authorities.2
Shortly afterward, officers of Greater Manchester Police turned up at Jameel’s home and arrested him on suspicion of racially aggravated public disorder. Lador-Fresher alleged that he had thrown himself at the car’s windscreen several times while chanting anti-Semitic slogans. This was soon contradicted by a security guard at the university who witnessed the incident, and no charges were pursued against Jameel. However, the matter did not end there. Since 2008, Greater Manchester Police had been one of the forces running an antiextremism project known as Channel—part of Britain’s Preventing Violent Extremism program—that sought to profile young people who were not suspected of involvement in criminal activity but nevertheless were regarded as drifting toward extremism. Through an extensive system of surveillance involving, among others, police officers, teachers, and youth and health workers, would-be radicals were identified and given counseling, mentoring, and religious instruction in an attempt to reverse the radicalizing process. In some cases individuals were rehoused in new neighborhoods to disconnect them from local influences considered harmful. Across the UK, between 2007 and 2010, 1,120 individuals were identified by the Channel project as potentially traveling on a radicalization pathway. Of these, 290 were under sixteen years old and fifty-five were under twelve. Over 90 percent were Muslim (the rest were mainly identified for potential involvement in far Right extremism).3 By the end of 2012 almost 2,500 people had been identified by the Channel project as possible risks.4 The official guidance for the project—influenced by Sageman’s and Wiktorowicz’s focus on socialization and cognitive openings—listed indicators of potential radicalization such as abandoning current associates in favor of a new social network, experiencing a crisis of identity or family separation, and expressing “real or imagined grievances.”5
Being a teenager, having a Muslim father (though not himself identifying as Muslim), joining a left-wing political party, and being involved in the incident at the university seem to have been the factors that led police to consider Jameel a radicalization risk and to decide to initiate a Channel “intervention.” Officers of the North West Counter-Terrorism Unit (CTU) began by contacting Jameel’s parents, his aunt, and his school. Then they approached Jameel himself and told him they were referring him to something called the Channel project because they considered him vulnerable to Islamist or far Left radicalization. He was told he would be on the project for two to three years, but if his behavior improved, he would be left alone after a year. A program of counseling with two officers from the CTU was initiated. The officers met with Jameel at his aunt’s house to discuss concerns about his “political trajectory.” They said they were worried that Jameel had been at a political demonstration at a young age. Conversations focused on the people he associated with: fellow members of the Socialist Workers Party and its various spin-off campaigns, such as Unite Against Fascism and the antiracist cultural group Love Music Hate Racism. They wondered whether he was being “groomed” by older people and asked him for names of activists and their political affiliations. Officers visited his school before left-wing demonstrations in Manchester and advised him not to attend and not to talk to other students about such events. “It was bullshit. It was completely and utterly exaggerated but scary at the time,” says Jameel. When his political science teacher organized an educational trip to the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, officers contacted the school and ensured Jameel could not participate. This was for his own safety, they told him; they were concerned he was falling in with a bad crowd. Jameel said:
I was bemused by the whole two-year process … It was quite clear that I wasn’t in the terrorist category, but I was told that I’m being monitored and mentored by an antiterrorist project.
Jameel told the police he did not know anybody involved in terrorism or violence.
People at most will put bike locks around their neck and chain themselves to a fence. They’re activists.
But Jameel felt the officers, who he thought “very friendly,” had been given
very vague concepts from the top [that were] not an attempt to curb terrorism [but] an attempt at depoliticization, spreading fear, and making people actually feel unsafe around their neighbors.
His parents, his aunt, and his college were all contacted repeatedly by officers in an effort to put pressure on him to end his political activism. On one occasion officers telephoned Jameel’s mother and told her it would be good to move the family to a different neighborhood, and that the CTU could have the local authority housing department find her a new home.
I remember being quite offended by the fact that I’d made a political choice to actually engage with politics, and the people who I actually talk and discuss with are being accused of grooming me for future political extremist activity. [The officers] were always trying to be mentors and role models … Obviously, I didn’t appreciate it, because I didn’t need mentoring or role modeling, because I was just exercising my right to protest.6
“The Pool in Which Terrorists Will Swim”
In Britain, the new thinking on radicalization that emerged in national security circles beginning in 2004 became the basis for one of the most elaborate programs of surveillance and social control attempted in a Western state in recent decades. The Preventing Violent Extremism program, known as Prevent for short, was launched by Tony Blair’s government in 2006. At its heart was a belief that, alongside the investigative work carried out domestically by police forces and the domestic intelligence agency MI5, which were focused on intercepting those whose activities were criminalized under the UK’s wide-ranging antiterrorist legislation, it was necessary to develop a program directed at a wider population whose activities, behaviors, and beliefs were not criminal but, according to government officials, indicative of extremism. In the former category were hard interventions: criminal investigations, deportations of foreign nationals, and the imposition of control orders, which, without the need for a trial, allowed the government to subject suspects to a curfew, electronic tagging, and restrictions on visitors, travel, and Internet access.7 But in the language of counterterrorism, “soft interventions” aimed at a broader group were also needed. Radicalization theories assumed would-be terrorists traveled through a series of stages toward extremism, only the last of wh
ich involved actual criminal activity. Intelligence officials argued that the government could not wait until extremism turned into terrorism; there had to be interventions earlier in the process. There were to be two kinds: one focused on individuals, and the other aimed at whole communities. At the individual level, policing needed to go upstream in the radicalization process, tackling extremists who had not crossed the threshold into behavior prosecutable as criminal activity but were seen as at risk of doing so. Partnerships between community organizations, police forces, and local authorities were meant to identify such individuals—guided by the government’s radicalization model. At the community level, the same partnerships would enable an ideological challenge to radicalism. Moderate Muslim leaders were to be empowered with government funding to win over hearts and minds and secure allegiance to Western liberal democracy, in an effort to isolate extremists and prevent their ideas from spreading.8 With a budget of hundreds of millions of pounds, Prevent became, in effect, the government’s Islam policy.
Charles Farr, who was then the head of the counterterrorism department at Britain’s foreign intelligence agency, MI6, and had worked on covert operations in Afghanistan and Jordan, was selected to run the new program.9 He described its basic approach.
There is a group of people that have been radicalized and are committed to violent extremism, and the only solution to that group of people in this country is criminal investigation and prosecution. There is a much larger group of people who feel a degree of negativity, if not hostility, towards the state, the country, the community, and who are, as it were, the pool in which terrorists will swim, and to a degree they will be complicit with and will certainly not report on activity which they detect on their doorstep. We have to reach that group, because unless we reach that group, they may themselves move into the very sharp end, but even if they do not, they will create an environment in which terrorists can operate with a degree of impunity that we do not want … That is to a degree what Prevent is all about.10
The primary way in which Prevent’s success was being measured, said Farr, was in ascertaining whether government programs were “changing community attitudes.”11 MI5 had worked a year before with GCHQ, the national communications surveillance agency, and local police forces, running a coordinated intelligence-gathering operation called Project Rich Picture, which built up a list of eight thousand Muslims considered to be extremists.12
The Prevent program had a vast budget and operated across several government departments. Authorities responsible for schools, universities, prisons, probation services, youth crime prevention, and the arts were all drawn into the policy. Police forces recruited three hundred new staff across the country to work on Prevent in existing counterterrorism teams.13 Half the Prevent budget went to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which launched propaganda campaigns in Pakistan and the Middle East to “counter extremists’ false characterization of the UK as a place where Muslims are oppressed.” Half a million pounds was used to produce a series of television commercials to be aired in Pakistan featuring prominent British Muslims.14 “A dedicated team of key language specialists [worked] to explain British policies and the role of Muslims in British society, in print, visual and electronic media.”15 Across England and Wales, £20 million a year was made available to local authorities and community organizations to fund projects to combat extremist ideology. In theory, local authorities were meant to organize a consultation process with the community to decide whether a problem of extremism existed in the area and, if so, how best to tackle it. In practice, all of the ninety-four local authority areas with more than two thousand resident Muslims (according to the 2001 census, the first to ask a question about religion) became involved in Prevent, under pressure from the regional government offices that channeled central government policy. Funding was allocated in direct proportion to the number of Muslims present in each area. The government’s assumption was that the best measure for the level of extremism was the size of the local Muslim population, which, as one government e-mail put it, was “a rough and ready proxy for risk of radicalization.”16 It was a formula that constituted a form of religious profiling and would have been vulnerable to legal challenge under antidiscrimination laws had it been made public at the time.
In the first couple of years of Prevent’s implementation, the flow of money into local areas aimed at strengthening mainstream Muslim civil society. Muslim populations were drawn into a farrago of projects, ranging from the benign to the ridiculous. Community groups made DVDs about Islamophobia and put on plays about tolerance. Young Muslim boys were recruited to participate in basketball, football, and boxing sessions. Muslim women were given leadership training. Imams were taught English and taken on trips to the British Museum. Mosques got money for refurbishment and training in good governance. Government funding spawned a Muslim arts scene. Many Muslims welcomed the various initiatives but worried that such services were only available under the banner of a counterterrorism program singling out Muslims for attention. Often organizations providing such services were less than transparent about where the money came from, fearing they’d lose credibility if seen as linked to the police’s counterterrorist units. In many areas, established community leaders, without much support in the communities they claimed to represent but with close relationships to the local authority, found they could obtain Prevent funding for pet projects without needing to go through the usual processes of accountability. In Bradford, the Council of Mosques—an umbrella organization formed over twenty-five years earlier and a long-standing gatekeeper to Bradford’s Muslims—was seen as well suited to carry out Prevent work. “We’re not looking for new organizations to spring up,” a local authority manager said; bypassing established organizations would mean “a period of chaos.”17 In the absence of a genuine process of democratic decision making, sectarian conflicts occasionally sprung up between different parts of the Muslim population, as rival community leaders competed for money. A local authority worker in the Midlands described the allocation of Prevent funding as a “nod nod thing” involving “jobs for the boys.”
A lot of patriarchal politics is being played out, and there is a real issue of community leaders. Who has the right to be a community leader? Where does gender fit in? Some savvy and well-connected Muslim groups just take money and do what they want with it, because they are friends with the right people. This is where corruption and divisions set in.18
Meanwhile, the flow of resources into Muslim communities attracted the attention of other sections of the local population where deprivation was equally intense but no stream of government funding had been introduced on the basis of ethnic or relgions identity. Instead of uniting communities to work together on shared issues, Prevent tore at the already fragile social fabric, pitting Muslim against non-Muslim in competition for local favors from the state.
The main effect of Prevent in this initial period was to draw Muslim civil society organizations more closely into the orbit of government funding without civil servants worrying too much about how those organizations spent the money. Over time, as central government sharpened its agenda, the Prevent program became more ideological. A new version of the program was launched in 2009 with a greater emphasis on projects that directly combated what was referred to as “the ideology which sustains terrorism” and those who “undermine our shared values.”19 In a speech announcing the new program, government minister Hazel Blears defined this ideology as a
belief in the supremacy of the Muslim people, in a divine duty to bring the world under the control of hegemonic Islam, in the establishment of a theocratic Caliphate, and in the undemocratic imposition of theocratic law on whole societies.
This “ideology” is rooted “in a twisted reading of Islam” and is the root cause of terrorism, she said, and fighting it required Britons be less tolerant.
This country is proud of its tradition of fair play and good manners, welcoming of diversity, tolerant of others. This is a
great strength. But the pendulum has swung too far.20
The Prevent program’s head, Charles Farr, gave another definition of extremist ideology.
[There are] views in some quarters here that Western culture is evil and that Muslims living in this country should not engage with Western cultural organizations, for want of a better term, with Western culture itself … There is nothing violent about that, and it is not necessarily going to lead to terrorism, but it does seem to me to be unreal for this or any other government not to say that they are going to challenge that.21
Risk and Ideology
The influence of counterinsurgency thinking on Prevent was clear. Government documents introducing the program spoke repeatedly of isolating extremists from mainstream Muslims, of winning over the hearts and minds of the majority in the targeted community, of establishing a coordinated strategy across a range of policing and nonpolicing agencies, of strategic communications, and of an intensive intelligence-gathering effort to build up detailed information on extremists and the wider Muslim population—all hallmarks of counterinsurgency strategy. But pursuing a counterinsurgency program within Britain itself in this way was unprecedented. To do so implied blurring conventional boundaries between the foreign and domestic spheres, between military and police operations, and between physical force and a battle of ideas. As the UK government’s 2008 National Security Strategy put it:
The distinction between “domestic” and “foreign” policy is unhelpful in a world where globalisation can exacerbate domestic security challenges … Similarly, the traditional contrast between “hard” and “soft” power obscures … More generally, the major security challenges require an integrated response that cuts across departmental lines and traditional policy boundaries.22
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 19