In this new era, all government departments needed to be plugged in to the machinery of counterterrorism. And the local authority chief executive in Lancashire was as significant to the government’s integrated response as the army commander in Lashkar Gah. The Prevent program pressed staff of the former to see themselves as engaged on an ideological battlefield whose human terrain was Muslim citizens—a very different self-conception from that of a public servant accountable to the people. Counterinsurgency models, which had been crafted in overseas colonial settings, were now to be applied domestically to the enemy within.
This blurring of boundaries also meant the collision of two different modes of policing practice. The conventional view of the criminal justice system involves the notion of a ladder of escalating evidence thresholds that the state needs to cross before it is entitled to use increasing levels of coercion. To stop and search someone normally requires reasonable suspicion; to arrest someone requires more solid evidence of a crime; to charge someone requires a probability that such evidence will stand up in court; and to imprison someone requires evidence beyond the reasonable doubt of a jury of peers. On the other hand, counterinsurgency thinking starts from the need to gather intelligence on the contours of an ideological terrain. Knowledge of the ideological process by which a moderate becomes an extremist is necessary to develop a strategy to prevent and reverse such radicalization—quite a different kind of knowledge from evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Whereas criminal justice thinking asks whether someone is involved in terrorist activity, counterradicalization thinking asks whether someone’s beliefs constitute a risk of extremism. With Prevent, domestic counterterrorism agencies dealt much more systematically in risk assessment. From one perspective, this transition seemed reasonable. Given the harm terrorism does, it might be argued, the state ought to widen its definition of the threat beyond those actively inciting, funding, or preparing terrorist activity. But there were a number of problems with such an approach. First, it assumed radicalization models can accurately describe a causal relationship between extremist ideas and terrorist actions, and that such models were capable of generating predictions statistically significant enough to base counterradicalization interventions on.
Yet such models did not stand up to scrutiny. Second, it led governments to consider the expression of certain ideas unacceptable. What this meant in practice was that you could be a target for counterterrorist initiatives even if you were fully law abiding. From both the pragmatic perspective of stopping terrorism and the point of view of civil liberties, there were deep problems.
A third danger was that British Muslims became, in the imaginations of counterterrorism officials, not citizens to whom the state was accountable but potential recruits to a global insurgency threatening the state’s prospects of prevailing in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Because radicalization theory mistook attitudes of disaffection and opposition to foreign policy for signs of an extremist risk, state actors came to see a cross section of young Muslims as potential terrorist recruits rather than as dissenters who simply opposed the war on terror. They came to view young Muslims as a whole as on a knife edge, balanced between the ideology of al-Qaeda and allegiance to Western states. What was obscured by the imposition of this binary frame of moderate and extremist on the multitudinous tapestry of British Muslim life was precisely the new forms of identity young Muslims were creating beyond either of these poles. Instead they became the target for ideological campaigns aimed at changing their beliefs and attitudes through strategic communications programs. The narrow focus on stopping terrorism became confused with a wider project of reshaping the cultural identities of Muslims.23
That project was in part a matter of intervening on questions of theological interpretation. An organization called Radical Middle Way received £350,000 of Prevent money to organize a road show of “mainstream Islamic scholarship” to tour Britain to “counter extremist propaganda” and “denounce it as un-Islamic.”24 In Walsall, imams were given training “to identify individuals who show signs of misinterpreting the Quran.”25 In Bradford, the Council of Mosques was given £80,000 to develop a teaching resource for madrassas that seemed to gloss religious texts with Prevent-friendly messaging. Prevent officials occasionally spoke as if theological categories had inherent political meanings. For example, Salafis were classed as extremists and Sufis as moderates, or Deobandis as extremists and Barelvis as moderates. In effect, the government began to promote its own version of a good Islam to counterpose to al-Qaeda’s bad Islam. Noticing these trends, Asma Jahangir, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, pointed out in her 2008 report on the UK:
It is not the Government’s role to look for the “true voices of Islam” or of any other religion or belief. Since religions or communities of belief are not homogenous entities it seems advisable to acknowledge and take into account the diversity of voices … The contents of a religion or belief should be defined by the worshippers themselves.26
A specialists’ unit was established at the Home Office in 2007 to develop an expertise in the ideological campaigning aspects of Prevent. The Research, Information and Communication Unit (RICU) had twenty-nine staff members by 2009 and a budget of over £4 million.27 Each week they sent out a briefing to local Prevent officials across the country, providing a list of current issues thought to be of concern to Muslims and the key points of the government’s narrative, so that the latter could be effectively communicated and the legitimacy of the war on terror shored up in public discourse. RICU also trained local authorities on techniques of strategic communication for countering radicalization, produced briefings on using appropriate terminology, conducted polling on Muslim attitudes, and commissioned academic research on the identity of young Muslims, how young Muslims used the Internet, and the impact of different counterextremism messages on domestic and foreign Muslim audiences.28 In many ways, RICU was a revival of the Information Research Department (IRD) that was established at the Foreign Office in 1948 and continued to operate throughout the cold war. The IRD’s aim was to fight a battle of ideas against communism and anticolonial nationalism by seeking to influence what journalists and intellectuals wrote. IRD officials fed confidential information on alleged communists within the UK labor movement during briefings of the media and various government agencies, and worked with the CIA to covertly fund cultural activities aimed at discrediting communism.29 Dean Godson, a neoconservative who while research director at the Policy Exchange think tank had a strong influence on Prevent policy, wrote a 2006 article in The Times in which he called for a revival of such cold war techniques in the war on terror.
During the cold war, organisations such as the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office would assert the superiority of the West over its totalitarian rivals. And magazines such as Encounter did hand-to-hand combat with Soviet fellow travellers. For any kind of truly moderate Islam to flourish, we need first to recapture our own self-confidence.30
As informed readers would have known, Encounter was covertly funded by the CIA. Today the battle of ideas—the state’s attempt to set the terms of public discourse on extremism—takes place on blogs, Facebook, and YouTube and in chat rooms rather than in the pages of literary journals, and it is there, and in local communities, that Prevent focuses its attempts at influence warfare.
Dissent as Extremism
In March 2010, the far Right, Islamophobic English Defence League (EDL) planned to march through the town of Bolton in the north of England. The day before the demonstration, two local authority workers handed out leaflets across the mosques in Bolton after Friday prayers, telling congregants not to go to the demonstration and to stay away from the town center. Students were also given letters at schools, advising them not to go to the town center on the Saturday. In effect, Muslims were being asked to remain at home or in their own neighborhoods while the demonstration took place. It was “community lockdown time,” as one local activist p
ut it.31 On the day itself, Muslim families stayed indoors, shops in Muslim areas closed for the day, and the police formed a ring around the town center to turn young Muslims away if they tried to head into town. The result was that the EDL managed to occupy the town center largely unchallenged by local Muslims. Like the EDL demonstration itself, the counterdemonstration by the Unite Against Fascism group was made up mainly of people from out of town. Its leaders were arrested early in the day and, from then on, antifascist protesters were easily contained by the police, while the EDL was able to marshal in front of the town hall. In the past the police had found it difficult to prevent local young people from confronting far Right groups when they marched through northern towns unless they deployed large numbers of officers in Asian areas and risked the kinds of violent confrontations that took place in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford in 2001. In the Prevent era, a new approach was possible. Central to managing events on the day was the Bolton Council of Mosques, which had been generously supported with Prevent money and was embedded in a counterradicalization partnership with the local authority and the police. Police commanders could thus rely on the Council of Mosques and the local authorities to follow their lead. Representatives from the Council of Mosques agreed to the police’s recommendation that Muslims be prevented from entering the town center, and they sat with police officers in the operational control center for the day, helping identify young people on closed-circuit television screens. From the point of view of the police, the EDL was not an extremist threat. The real danger was that the EDL’s presence would foment radicalization among local young Muslims. The best way to prevent this, reasoned the police, was to keep young Muslims off the streets. But to the local Muslim population, this meant that their right to protest against the anti-Muslim EDL was dispensed with. Their frustration was directed as much at their own community “representatives” as at the police.
Community leaders who were more interested in building up their own ethnic fiefdoms than in advocating on behalf of the people they claimed to represent could be relied on to parrot the official line: terrorism was caused by the virus of extremism and best eradicated with an injection of British values. Prevent created a mini-industry of groups and organizations willing to give the government’s message a Muslim face. Those who took a different view—for example, on questions of foreign policy—were put under pressure. On the eve of the publication of a new version of the Prevent strategy in March 2009, the government wrote a letter to the Muslim Council of Britain, the most prominent national Muslim organization, stating that unless its then deputy general secretary, Daud Abdullah, resigned, it would sever relations with the organization. Abdullah had recently signed the so-called Istanbul declaration, which called for Muslims to resist Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Home Office civil servants said the key test of extremism for national Muslim organizations was whether they were willing to completely condemn Hamas. Of course, no other national organization was asked to criticize the human rights abuses of their coreligionists in other parts of the world.
At a local level, the test of extremism was more insidious. There was no objective definition, but in practice it included questions of foreign policy—young Muslims’ views on the presence of British troops in Afghanistan, for example—and also revolved around nebulous questions of culture, identity, and British values. As a Muslim youth worker managing a Prevent-funded project in London told me: “The push for Britishness causes alienation. We become the ‘other.’ We need to be studied, managed, contained. Every conference we go to on Prevent frames things this way.”32 If Prevent’s aim was to promote liberal values, it involved making judgments of people’s attitudes in a most illiberal way. As Birmingham councilor Salma Yaqoob pointed out, this would end up being counterproductive.
By denying the legitimacy of democratic opposition to government foreign policy from Muslims, and by promoting and recognising only those Muslims who toe the line, government policy is serving to strengthen the hands of the genuine extremists; those who say that our engagement in the democratic process is pointless or wrong. The danger of this approach is that it serves to squeeze the democratic space for dissent within the Muslim community. If Muslim organisations are reluctant to provide the space for sensitive discussions for fear of extremist’s accusations, where are these young people to go? Where will their views and concerns get an airing? The answer is obvious. They will be expressed in private and secret, with the genuine extremists keen to provide listening ears and simplistic solutions.33
Beyond this pragmatic argument, there is a deeper political point: any minority population that reduces its identity to what is acceptable to others should fear for its rights. In the early years of the US civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was considered an extremist. Eventually he was presented in mainstream America as the moderate voice and counterposed to newer, more radical extremists. But King understood that without these extremists on the horizon, his own movement would have been much less successful. So, too, Britain’s Muslims need their Malcolm Xs as much as their moderates.
Once the new Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government came to power in the summer of 2010, much of the Prevent funding for Muslim civil society organizations was cut back. At the same time, the policy was even more tightly focused on a definition of extremism that covered any rejection of British values, and ideology was placed firmly at the center of its analysis of radicalization. A more explicit catalog of opinions defined which beliefs would count as indicators of extremism, such as believing “the West is perpetually at war with Islam; there can be no legitimate interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims in this country or elsewhere; and that Muslims living here cannot legitimately and or effectively participate in our democratic society.”34 The coalition government’s June 2011 review of the Prevent policy was clearer than ever that such nonviolent extremism is a conveyor belt to terrorism. A growing number of public service professionals were drawn into participating in the Channel project, and, facing criticism for its exclusive focus on Muslim populations, steps were taken to include a small number of right-wing and left-wing extremists in its processes of identification and intervention. Above all, there was a renewed push for counterextremism work at universities and colleges.35 Teaching staff at universities faced mounting pressure to pass on to Prevent police officers information about Muslim students who seemed depressed, were estranged from their families, bore political grievances, or visited extremist Web sites.36 On at least one occasion a student union passed the membership list of a student Islamic society to counterterrorist police. The nine hundred names and other personal details were then shared with the CIA.37
By 2011, it was becoming apparent that the mechanisms established through Prevent were proving adaptable to a range of different political tasks. An e-mail sent in January from Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command to University College London (UCL) staff responsible for Prevent illustrated the new atmosphere:
As the student population is returning to “work,” we anticipate a renewed vigour in protests and demonstrations. The picture is currently building and we are monitoring the situation.
The e-mail added:
I would be grateful if in your capacity at your various colleges that should you pick up any relevant information that would be helpful to all of us to anticipate possible demonstrations or occupations, please forward it onto me.
Large-scale student protests had erupted in London a couple of months earlier in opposition to rising tuition fees. The police had not anticipated such a level of anger and were now eager to shore up their intelligence gathering on students’ political activities. In the same month, Dean Godson of the Policy Exchange think tank organized a seminar on the student protests, titled The Rise of Street Extremism. The term “extremism” was clearly being used to refer to any form of radical opposition. Peter Clarke, the former head of the Counter Terrorism Command at Scotland Yard, told the audience of security officials: “We need to—m
entally at least—compare the ambitions of some of the current crop of protesters and the terrorists. The distinction to my mind is not so much about their intention as in our response to it.”38 The student population had become more working-class and ethnically diverse than ever before, and was increasingly active in protests against, for example, Israel’s military offensives, tuition fees, and the withdrawal of maintenance grants to enable young people to attend college. In this context, campus activism was framed as the next form of extremism to be tackled through the Prevent apparatus. Because of the program’s failure to distinguish between extremist ideas and terrorist violence, its structures were eminently suited to the task of countering the new protest movements against hemorrhaging public services and the racketeering of the 1 percent. Occupy London—the peaceful protest camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral modeled on Occupy Wall Street—was soon classified as an extremist threat, according to police documents made public under the Freedom of Information Act.39
In Britain, the special branches have historically formed the backbone of political policing. These units, based in each of the local forces, focused on threats of subversion, i.e., the radical Left, the peace movement, trade unionists, environmentalists, animal rights activists, and Irish nationalists. They acted as the local eyes and ears of the security state, having developed a close working relationship with MI5, which did not itself make arrests or launch prosecutions.40 The end of the cold war made the political policing role of MI5 and the special branches much harder to justify, and although the old structures remained in place, they lacked a clear role. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and 7/7 provided the pretexts for a substantial reorganization. The special branches were reconfigured as counterterrorism and counterterrorism intelligence units to work alongside MI5’s eight newly opened regional offices across England. The number of police officers deployed on counterterrorism rose from seventeen hundred to three thousand between 2003 and 2008, and MI5’s staff almost doubled in size, to around thirty-five hundred.41 With Prevent, political policing had come back in a new form. Britain’s security bureaucracy once again widened its reach to a stance that focused on political subversion (now billed as radicalization) rather than on threats of violence to the civilian population. Prevent was, in effect, an experiment in new forms of countersubversion for the twenty-first century, with young Muslims as a convenient testing ground. Because the old deference to the security apparatus had weakened, it was harder for MI5 and the police to operate without scrutiny, as they largely did during the cold war. But by drawing a range of nonpolice agencies into their intelligence-gathering web and wrapping their work in the language of antiextremism, they were able to introduce wide-ranging surveillance of people identified on the basis on their political beliefs and lawful activities.
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