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Stopping bombs and standing up for what we believe in

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by Andy Hull, Senior Research Fellow and Ian Kearns, Deputy Chair of ippr's Security Commission.
ippr - 07 April 2009

We need a twin track approach to counter-terrorism and community cohesion. It has to be both principled and pragmatic. We must work with non-violent Islamists and mainstream Muslims, while practising the values we preach.

This has become clearer in the past few weeks, with the publication of an updated version of the Government’s counter-terrorism strategy, known as CONTEST. It is an impressive statement of purpose: tackling violent extremism. However, a number of Cabinet ministers, former Islamists and others have argued before and since that we should also now go further and tackle not only violent extremism but lawful, non-violent extremism too. Along these lines, Policy Exchange have published a report, Choosing our friends wisely, co-authored by former extremist Shiraz Maher, which provides a list of nine sorts of people the ‘government must not engage’. If government actually followed this advice, they would find themselves unable to engage, among others, the United States, Israel or the Catholic Church. The report insists upon the need for government to ‘do due diligence’ on the groups it engages. Readers may remember another recent Policy Exchange report of a similarly negative vein, The hijacking of British Islam, based in part, according to the BBC, upon fabricated receipts. Choosing our friends wisely states that the government’s criteria for engagement with groups ‘are so vague and open-ended as to be almost meaningless... characterised by opaque and jargon-filled language – employing terms that are too often left undefined’. It promises ‘clarity and rigour’ to address this ‘imprecision’. And then its final recommendation reads: ‘The government must promote and incentivise good behaviour and disincentivise bad behaviour’.

policeblur Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith have flown this flag in Cabinet and in their public pronouncements. Not content with tackling violent extremism and its apologists, they want to tackle views which fall short of breaking the law or inciting violence, such as rejecting democracy, advocating intolerance or promoting the view that minority – in particular Muslim – communities are oppressed or repressed in society. Seeming to prefer freedom of opinion to freedom of expression, they contend that such views are all right so long as they are not voiced in public. Many young Muslims growing up in the UK today buy conspiracy theories about 9/11 and 7/7 and believe – against a backdrop of widespread deprivation among Britain’s Muslims – that they are indeed repressed, and they say so. They may well not be right, but can they really all be extremists?

The argument runs that the linkage between non-violent and violent extremism is underplayed: that non-violent Islamism is a gateway drug – the marijuana to jihadism’s cocaine. This claim is unproven. Very few, if any, of the 200 individuals convicted of terrorism offences in the UK since 9/11, for instance, have been members of Maher’s erstwhile Islamist outfit, Hizb-ut Tahrir. Takfiri terrorists view such organisations with derision. The conflation of the likes of Hizb-ut Tahrir with Al Qaeda – Policy Exchange calls them ‘cousins’ – is Bush’s ‘you’re either with us or against us’ all over again.

When the Home Secretary lambasts as extremists ‘the groups that fail to speak out and condemn violence when any reasonable person would be outraged’ one can’t help but worry that the Thought Police have arrived and a modern McCarthyism is just around the corner. We need government for all the people, not just those with whom we agree. Choosing our friends wisely must not mean we talk only to our friends. As President Obama offers to open America’s hand to Iran, the UK threatens to brandish a clenched fist at a significant minority of its own people.

We must have two aims in all of this: save lives and build a cohesive society. The two are inextricably linked. A surefire way to set community cohesion back in this country is for another bomb to go off. A community-based approach to counter-terrorism is required. Communities can provide warning, when Al Qaeda won’t. They can help the police both to understand what might be of concern and to avoid unnecessary grievance. And, as a last resort, they can help them into a teenager’s bedroom – or give them the keys to Finsbury Park Mosque – when they don’t want to have to kick the door down.

In this context, engagement with law-abiding, non-violent Islamists can play a valuable role. Shared interests, if not ideologies, are paramount: it is not in our interests or theirs for terrorists to mount another attack. That is not to say we have to agree with them on arranged marriage, homosexuality or creationism, but it does mean we have some important common ground, and we should make the most of it. In Leyton, a former Al Qaeda supporter, Usama Hasan, is now an imam denouncing terrorism as haram. African-Caribbean salafi converts like Abdul Haqq Baker running the STREET project out of Brixton Mosque are doing vital counter-radicalisation work with young men in south London. The Active Change Foundation, run out of a gym by former jihadis Hanif and Imtiaz Qadir, is working to counter radicalisation among young Muslims in Walthamstow. These grassroots initiatives are delivered by charismatic individuals with real credibility among the vulnerable young people with whom they work.

We do not need dogmatic prescription at a national level proscribing partnership work on the ground. Radicalisation is a fundamentally personal process. The choice as to whom to engage should be left to professional practitioners in accountable public bodies who know the local characters. Disengagement should be a line for us to retreat behind, not start from.

Non-violent Islamists are much more likely to come across Al Qaeda recruiters and recruits than moderates, who do not move in those circles. And unlike most mainstream Muslim leaders, Al Qaeda’s Islamist critics have the credentials to make their criticism bite. If, as seasoned former counter-terrorism officer, Bob Lambert, observes, ‘Al Qaeda values dozens of recruits over hundreds of supporters’, can the government really afford to do business only with moderates?

This is not paying Danegeld or what Martin Bright, again writing for Policy Exchange, has labeled a ‘bizarre policy of appeasement’: it is the prevention of terrorism in a plural democracy. To suggest that government engagement – be it dialogue, debate, or judicious sponsorship – with the sort of non-violent Islamists described above is tantamount to government endorsement of all of their views is lazy. We can and do engage and criticise simultaneously.

And let us not forget that, like Maher, people can change their politics over time. Our own Cabinet is replete with former extremists, radicals and revolutionaries: Alistair Darling was a supporter of the British section of the Trotskyist Fourth International, Alan Johnson was a Marxist, and Peter Mandelson was a member of the Young Communist League. Martin Luther King was a radical cleric and the Archbishop of Canterbury was once arrested at a CND march.

The Home and Communities Secretaries for their part display a fundamental lack of ambition. What allows extremist views to gain traction in some segments of our society is not the fact that we’re too quiet in defence of our values but rather that we’re too loud in espousing them while being too timid in their application. The way to respond to the challenge, and to strengthen moderate voices over all others, is to acknowledge that our values are simultaneously the statement of the country we want to be but also the standard against which we identify how and where we’re falling short. Where we do fall short, as we do in many areas, not least on the inclusion of minorities, it is the moderate voice that needs to shout loudest and the state itself that needs to come to its aid. When racking their brains for a hearts and minds strategy, members of the Cabinet could do worse than to think Bill of Rights. We will defeat extremism when we demonstrate even to those with a grievance that our values in their hands are a powerful weapon for redress. We will win this struggle, in other words, not by talking the talk more loudly but by walking the walk. Where is the companion to CONTEST, the statement that honestly acknowledges that as a society we still have a long road to travel towards deeper democracy and real equality and that explains how a Labour government intends to renew and refresh, for this generation, the historic struggle for a country that is more reflective of the values we profess?