Radicalisation and De-radicalisation

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, Radicalisation and De-radicalisation

"The irony of the murder scene was inescapable, the contrast between the killer and his victims almost unbearable. The questions it all leaves perhaps unanswerable, but we have to try. Usman Khan was the terrorist who was supposed to have reformed. The poster boy, the papers said. for government programs to deradicalize dangerous Islamic extremists. He'd been released early, allowed to attend a rehabilitation conference near London Bridge. And there, of all places, he ran amuck with a knife. There, of all people, he killed two Cambridge graduates trying to help him rebuild his life. Bright, promising young people wanting to do good in the spirit of constructive forgiveness...

‘We have a functioning strategy that was functioning very well before austerity and that's the welfare state. My contact with children I taught, their contact with the state, one of the main contacts with the state was me as a teacher, and when I have a trusted relationship, when I could provide them with support… I would talk to them, I’d discuss with them that I also had questions about British foreign policy and they would, they would write, they learned they could write their MPs’...

‘This terror threat and the fact which was a shock to many of us who covered it throughout the early 2000s, was not sort of brought into the country by coming in bringing terrible ideas. They were children growing up in households not far from where we're sitting here in other towns and cities across the country. So that was before PREVENT, it was before austerity and something was going wrong.’

‘If want to look at the seven seven London bombers who released martyr videos in which they said that they were doing it as a result of British Foreign Policy, something that was support in the Iraq inquiry by Baroness Manning Bulla [?] and then David Cameron then gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he *something* says this has nothing to do with foreign policy. The government needs to take a long, hard look at themselves and be honest about what's going on here. There's this complete lack of honesty’

‘So it’s the fault, it's always the fault of the government. It's the fault of the country you're living in. It's *something* never the fault of the ideology’

‘But I think that we're asking here what the state can do. And if we're addressing what the state can do, then that's what I'm talking about’...

‘Is there a logic to saying that the difference is ideology, not necessarily Islamic terrorism, but all forms of ideology, including those non religious ideologies who might describe as ideologies. Is that what makes a moral difference, which leads then to a different regime?’

‘Yes, I think it does actually. I was thinking about the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 60s and 70s. And this was just trailing through to its sort of bitter end, when the Berlin Wall fell down. And what's so interesting and it was still is late terror attacks is it's very sticky. There was something about ideology that is specific because it does seem to me that once people are into it, and yes, many thankful in many cases where we can chart people being deradicalized and getting out. But it does seem to be particularly difficult to do. So I think it is reasonable and not just a bias or prejudice to say that you are going to treat these crimes somewhat differently. Some of our witnesses... but didn't seem to accept that idea at all [and thought it should be treated like normal crime]’...

‘It does strike me there's a difference here and the difference is, that what ideology does is it  enables you to view what we’d all see as a crime as the something that's the right thing to do, as something that's good. Now, a lot of other people who're locked up for murdering or doing terrible things, they would still actually think murder is a bad thing, and that you shouldn't go around murdering your wife for all these sorts of things’"


Since the ex-teacher touts the discredited claim that Western foreign policy drives Islamic terrorism, we have even more reason to question the claim that teachers (without PREVENT's mandate) were an effective way to nip terrorism in the bud (which indeed a panelist picked up on)

He then pivots to saying he's talking about what the state can do - as if self-flagellation or even having your foreign policy held hostage by domestic terrorists, or ineffective measures ("the welfare state") are the only things it can do