The reaction in some quarters to William Shawcross’s review of Prevent, the UK’s counter-extremism programme, has been predictable. The Muslim Council of Britain, Amnesty International, the Guardian and Cage have all criticised the report and the author, with Amnesty launching a particularly unpleasant ad hominem attack on Shawcross, describing him as ‘bigoted’.
None of the above consider that Shawcross was the right man to lead the report because of a remark he made a decade ago stating that Europe’s relationship with Islam ‘is among the greatest, most terrifying problems of our time’.
Shawcross was speaking after the Madrid and London bombings of 2004 and 2005 that claimed 245 lives, and before the atrocities in Paris, Nice, Barcelona, Brussels, Manchester and London Bridge that resulted in hundreds more deaths. It is, therefore, difficult to understand what exactly it is about this honest and accurate statement that has caused so much anger. When one schoolteacher has his head cut off on a suburban French street and another in England is forced into hiding for the crime of blasphemy, then you have a terrifying problem on your hands.
For too long, Britain has tolerated the intolerant
In the last 48 hours, Cage has retweeted a claim that ‘Muslims working with Prevent are native informants’ and another from the Lewisham Mosque accusing the Prevent review of being ‘Islamophobic’, along with the hashtag ‘Whitewash’. It has also expressed its indignation at the Home Secretary. The distaste is mutual. In her statement to the House on Wednesday, Suella Braverman praised the Shawcross report. She took aim at its critics, including Cage, which she described as ‘an Islamist group’ that ‘has excused and legitimised violence by Islamist terrorists’.
Cage first came to public attention in 2015 when Asim Qureshi, its research director, described Mohammed Emwazi as a ‘beautiful young man’. Emwazi had recently been unmasked as ‘Jihadi John’, the Islamic State executioner who beheaded prisoners – including fellow Britons – on camera. Emwazi had had contact with Cage while a student in London between 2009 and 2012, and the organisation claimed he may have been radicalised after feeling harassed by British intelligence services.
The furore prompted the Charity Commission to declare that Cage should not, in future, be funded by charities, a position that Cage subsequently overturned in court. The commission’s chairman at the time was William Shawcross. In February 2015 he emailed fellow board members to inform them that he had just come from Washington where he met senior US government officials, one of whom expressed deep reservations about Cage.
In her Commons Statement this week, Braverman said that Cage and other groups have been fierce opponents of Prevent since its inception. ‘They have slandered those who work with Prevent to combat Islamist extremism as disloyal, sinful or “native” informants,’ the Home Secretary stated. ‘We must combat those pernicious fallacies and be courageous and muscular in combating that misinformation.’
As I wrote on Wednesday, the French are far ahead of Britain in this respect. The term ‘Islamophobia’ was discredited a decade ago, recognised by the government as an Islamist strategy to shut down any legitimate debate of Islam. France is also far less tolerant than Britain of Islamist ideology, regardless of whether it is promulgated by groups or by imams.
Last year, France expelled a Moroccan-born Imam, Hassan Iquioussen, who was active in mosques and on social media. In announcing the deportation order, the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin said the Imam had ‘been using hate speech against the values of France’.
Iquioussen is one of 734 foreign nationals expelled from France since Emmanuel Macron came to office in 2017, and there will be more. Darmanin confirmed this in a television interview last September, explaining that the Ministry of the Interior was compiling a list of ‘preachers’ and ‘presidents or agitators of associations’ that contained dozens of names.
The French government is also not shy in banning organisations that it regards as antithetical to the Republic. Not long after the brutal murder of the schoolteacher Samuel Paty, in October 2020, the Collective against Islamophobia in France (CCIF) and the humanitarian association BarakaCity were proscribed because of their ‘Islamist propaganda’. The decision was examined by France’s highest administrative court, who validated it on the grounds that it was within the government’s jurisdiction to dissolve organisations that ‘provoke discrimination, hatred or violence…propagate ideas or theories tending to justify or encourage such discrimination, hatred or violence’.
There was the inevitable backlash, both within and outside France. In March 2021, 25 organisations wrote to Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, demanding that action be taken against Emmanuel Macron and his government. They accused the French government of ‘exploiting the death of Samuel Paty’, who was killed because he showed a caricature of the prophet in a class discussion about the importance of freedom of speech, ‘for its own racist, discriminatory and Islamophobic agenda’.
The letter provoked comment in the French press, not just for its contents but also for some of its 25 signatories, among which were Cage and another British group, MEND (Muslim engagement and development). Were Cage a French organisation it would likely have been proscribed a long time ago. Considering that the Home Secretary described it on Wednesday as an organisation that ‘has excused and legitimised violence by Islamist terrorists’ one wonders why it is tolerated in Britain.
The same could be said of those British mosques which, as The Spectator revealed in 2021, are controlled by the Deobandi, who have long and strong links with the Taliban. Any government ban would be supported by the majority of British Muslims, 74 per cent of whom said in a 2016 poll that they approve of outlawing tutoring that ‘promotes extreme views or is deemed incompatible with fundamental British values’.
For too long, Britain has tolerated the intolerant. If the government is serious about acting on Shawcross’s courageous report, a good start would be to follow the French example and act against those individuals and organisations whose ideology is opposed to British values.
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