Oops. “£90m anti-terrorism project is fanning the flames of extremism,” by Duncan Gardham in the Telegraph, March 9 (thanks to David):
A new generation of Muslims is being radicalised using the very Government funds that are supposed to be fighting the problem, a new report by the Policy Exchange think-tank says.
An obsession with talking to extremists means that moderates are being ignored, leaving the stage clear for radicalisation, according to the report.
Did they say which moderates were being ignored? This is an important question, because obviously the UK government didn’t set out to fund “extremists.” The people they were giving money to presented themselves as “moderates,” and were taken as such. But when “moderate” leaders call for jihad warfare against the British Navy, the situation can become a bit confused.
The Government is “underwriting the very Islamist ideology which spawns an illiberal, intolerant and anti-western world view” the report says.
“Political and theological extremists, acting with the authority conferred by official recognition, are indoctrinating young people with an ideology of hostility to western values.”
The Policy Exchange says the Government has made a “strategic error” that is “born of a poverty of aspiration,” and the result has been to “empower reactionaries within Muslim communities and to marginalise genuine moderates.”
There sure is a “poverty of aspiration” in this field. Authorities have been cowed into thinking that to require citizens to abide by all the nation’s laws, and not to try to destroy the government and impose Islamic law, would be “Islamophobic.”
The Government has ploughed at least £90 million over three years into community groups as part of a project called “Prevent” aimed at diverting Muslims away from violent extremism.
But the project is not working, according to the report’s authors Shiraz Maher, himself a former radical who knew the Glasgow bombers, and Martyn Frampton.
“Not only is it failing to achieve its stated objectives, in many places it is actually making the situation worse,” they said. “A new generation is being radicalised, sometimes with the very funds that are supposed to be countering radicalisation.”
The authors say there is a “central theoretical flaw” in the project which means that “some within government and the police service believe that only nonviolent radicals, otherwise known as ‘political Islamists,’ possess the necessary ‘street cred’ to control angry young Muslims.”
The problem has been caused by the link between violent and non-violent extremism being “habitually underplayed in official documents produced by central government, local government and the police.”…
Ah. Well, this is not the first time that authorities have ignored the stealth jihad.