 Mae'r prif, a ddim yn gweithiau arall i eich arwain yn cael ni'n cymdeithasio'r ac yna a os fyddem i oddi'u'r ysbl moisture. Yling, dwi'n meddwl amны, er nadd yw Yng nghefnwyr am yw llythoedd anghof ac unrhyw yng ngyll仔d, dwi'n meddwl am yng Nghymru David Goodhart, a os gallwch i amlwg yng nghymru, Mohamed Abdel Aziz, yng Nghymru yng nghymru yng nghymru mewn diwethaf wedi ei feddwl mwysgolio am ystodraeth. I was slightly misled by the programme, the version that I saw suggested that I would come after Izzwan and Waqas and Khadija and I thought I could just add a few thoughts and provide a few concluding thoughts on the impact of the legislation and non-legislative provisions made over the last 10-15 years in the area of counter-terrorism. But it appears that I have to go first, so I'll need to provide some background. And what I propose to do is to present in three parts the first part looking at some of the legal provisions over the last 15 years, but particularly the provisions during the new labour years, particularly between 2000 and 2010. So a little bit about the non-legal provisions that were introduced by new labour about the same time, and finally a little bit about what I feel are the chief or the key impacts coming out of both those legal provisions and non-legal provisions. So, before I do that, I should make it clear that this is really coming out of one of the chapters for my PhD, which when I started in 2011-12, all of this stuff felt very contemporary, but the stuff that I'm covering is actually now almost historic, and I'm therefore very pleased that Wachars will be coming after me, because he'll bring us bang up to date. The first piece of legislation that I want to consider very, very quickly, well, actually the first piece of legislation I'll spend a little bit more time on than the other bits of legislation I might look at, and that is the Terrorism Act of 2000, which was the first and perhaps the most important of the legislation introduced by new labour on terrorism. The main criticism of this legislation is that it was dangerously broad and has affected vast numbers of people, in particular peaceful protesters, and ethnic minority and religious groups, particularly Muslims, where it need not have, and that undermines civil liberties and fundamental human rights in a way that has not been beneficial. The provision which is of most concern, I think, to most lawyers, concerned about this piece of legislation is the very wide definition that it gives to terrorism, which includes any action or threat of action which is designed to influence the government or intimidate the public with the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause involving serious violence against a person, causing serious damage to property, endangering life, creating a serious risk to the health or safety of the public, or acts designed to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system. The definition is so wide, in fact, that it could cover almost anything, and it's been pointed out by numerous academics that it could even cover direct action or industrial action by doctors, nurses, or even the fire brigade. It makes no distinction as to which government the accused were seeking to influence, whether it's their own government, the government of a neighboring democratic or friendly state, or the government of a repressive, a colonialist state, further afar. Nor is it specific as to where the act or actions took place, and whilst it gave some flesh to the scope of the acts to be covered, it was extremely thin on the threshold for those acts to begin constituting acts of terrorism. The second key concern with the legislation was the significantly enhanced powers of the police that the acts provided in relation to stop search and arrest. Section 40243 of the act defines a terrorist as someone who has been concerned in the commission preparation or instigation of an act of terrorism. The words concerned in and instigation are undefined and add to the vagueness of the wideness of the definition of terrorism in section one. The provisions in section 4243 collectively then allow the police to stop and search any person where they suspect a person to be a terrorist in order to see if they hold any evidence that proves the suspicion. The suspicion does not have to be justified and anything the police find during such a search and regard as evidence, the person may be a terrorist, may be seized and retained. Secondly, the provisions allow the police to arrest someone without a warrant but simply on the suspicion of being a terrorist. Again, there is no requirement for the police to give grounds for the suspicion. Thirdly, they allow the police to apply for a warrant to search any premises for a suspected terrorist and again there is very little given in terms of what constitutes suspicion. Considering the already very wide and indeterminate definition of terrorism, these police powers all based on mere suspicion are of course breathtaking and equally breathtaking how open they are to abuse. But as if this was not enough, the legislation further providing in section 44 that the police were allowed to stop and search without suspicion in defined areas and this disproportionately impacted particularly ethnic minorities and particularly Muslims. Fortunately this has now been repealed. The other stop and search power is to be found in schedule seven of the act which provides powers for constables immigration officers or custom officers at a port or border to stop question, detain and for the police to take the DNA of anyone entering or leaving the UK, determine whether they are involved in some way in acts of terrorism. Again, the power can be exercised without any reasonable suspicion of involvement in terrorism. So these are two key provisions of that act. The third key provision of particular concern is to do with prescription of terrorist organisations and related offences. Under section three of the act the Secretary of State could prescribe an organisation if he or she believed it to be concerned in terrorism and again the word concerned is not defined. Thus academics have provided examples to illustrate the point as to how wide this could be. So for example where Greenpeace has been associated with tearing up GM crops it could easily prescribed as terrorist organisation. Further an organisation that encourages such actions without engaging in them itself could also be prescribed and most vague of all all organisations that is somehow concerned with terrorism, organising some related anti-government rallies for example could also be prescribed. What's more concerning about this piece of legislation is that the Home Secretary was not required to make a case against the organisation in court to order the prescription and the organisation did not get a chance to defend itself against the prescription. It could only appeal after the prescription had been made. So this is the 2000 act. I'll go through the other main acts more quickly. The second act of concern for us here is the Antiterrorism Crime and Security Act of 2001 and this was formally introduced just a couple of months after and in response to the terrorist attacks in the USA and there are two key provisions here in addition to the 2000 act. The first is the introduction of provisions on indefinite detention. Part four enable the Home Secretary to indefinitely detain without charge a trial foreign nationals who are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Over soon after this legislation about a couple of years later the House of Lords in a case called A and others found in favour of a terrorist suspect who had been detained without charge for over two years and set a time limit for the release and as a result indefinite action indefinite detention was replaced later with control orders and I'll come on to control orders just in just a moment but the other key provision of this terrorism act of 2001 was a freezing of assets provision which extended executive powers over freezing bank accounts and assets of suspected terrorists. Section one of the 2001 act allows money to be seized and detained for a period of up to two years however the magistrates court can order upon application for the cash to be for fated totally or in part. I mentioned that the indefinite detention provisions were repealed and this was replaced by control orders and this was in the provision of terrorism act of 2005 and the control orders were basically a form of house arrest if you want to call it that or see it like that it allowed the government to restrict the activities of individuals it's suspected of involvement in terrorist related activity but for whom there was not sufficient evidence to charge it resulted in unfair and unsafe orders imposing severe and intrusive prohibitions including indefinite house arrest were up to 16 hours a day without charge let alone conviction. Five more minutes. How many? Five more minutes. I'll just mention the other acts then and what they introduced and say a little bit about the non-legal provisions before I move on to some of the conclusions that I want to test in my field work. So the next act that was introduced was the terrorism act which introduced the idea of pre-charge detention and also the idea of glorification of terrorism and the final act that I want to touch on very very quickly is the counter-terrorism act of 2008 which provided for fingerprints and DNA samples from individuals who were subject to control orders very quickly in terms of the non-legal provisions and very quickly indeed because I know Khadija will be covering some of these later on. There are really three sets of non-legal provisions that new labour introduced the first was to do with community engagement and leadership activities they started with the pet initiative that if had talked about earlier labour also new labour also supported this idea of setting up a mosque and imams national advisory board minab and also a muslim woman's advisory group and a young muslim's advisory group it also invested a fair bit of money in educational and awareness raising initiatives and the two that that I'm looking at are the radical middle way and Islam and citizenship education and finally it also put some money in to what was called theological initiatives looking at contextualising Islam in Britain and those two reports commissioned through Cambridge University it did some work around muslim faith leadership training and also working with theological institutions abroad like the University of Azhar. Finally in terms of impact I want to suggest that the three sets of impacts that came out of the decade of work on counterterrorism from 2010 to 2010 the first set of impacts were to do in changes to do with changes in the muslim mindset. I want to suggest that after 9-11 and even after 7-7 there was considerable denial in muslim communities that the bombings were the work of muslims some suggested that it was a conspiracy to frame muslims many denied that there was a violent interpretation of Islam and that some authors of that interpretation lived among the muslim communities in Britain that outright denial seems to have dissipated considerably and muslims are far more ready today to recognise that there is a problem that also needs muslims to help address there was a certain reluctance to condemn this is after 9-11 7-7 perhaps as well reluctance to condemn aq outright whilst muslim organisations disagreed with the atrocities many muslim sympathised with muslim grievances across the world and the aq cause towards the end of the decade there was clear condemnation of the aq and a growing suggestion that aq has caused serious damage to muslim causes one more minute please okay there was a tendency amongst muslim organisations to couple the need to address muslim grievances and towards the end of the decade there was a process of decoupling and there was a considerable degree of emphasis on the unity of Islam and towards the end of the decade there was at least some emphasis on the diversity within Islam within British muslim communities the second sets of set of impact is that extremist voices and activities were driven underground I recall very in my youth I recall people making open calls to jihad both in terms of recruitment and financial support for places like Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia but even with me living in the muslim community for all of my life now and despite having the finger on the pulse personally surprised by 7-7 well surprised by 7-7 subsequent atrocities sudden rise of jihadis from UK going to Daish or joining Daish young girls from tarhamlets going to Daish or joining Daish as jihadi brides and families mothers taking their children to Syria very finely 30 seconds despite the outreach and co-production work some of which I mentioned by new labour my feeling is that by the end of the decade muslims mainstream muslims are dispossessed from the national fight against terrorism and I just mentioned four very very quick points on that to perhaps make it to make it to okay the ideological dogmatic position on the causal of terrorism and the single narrative or the conveyor belt theory meant that muslims who would otherwise engage in this fight with some empathy for young muslims if you want to hear the other three ask me a question yeah thank you rashad y next speaker is rashad ali from the institute for strategic dialogue rashad is a classically classically trained in islamic theology and interestingly has written both for conservative home and dissent magazine a magazine of the radical left in America so a man of broad interests can I preemptively apologise for the superficiality of a discussion surrounding extremism and counter extremism within 15 minutes so that's that's my first caveat and the second one is I just flew back this morning and haven't slept so I may be a little bit grumpy but to start I thought I but given the the kind of context in the setting and this is the islamic studies department I thought it'd be good to start from an entry islamic perspective on on the discussion you know the whole notion of extremism within an islamic framework is not unheard of whether it's going back to quranic citations where we're told do you not go to excesses or extremities in your religion or the warnings that the prophet gave be wary of going to extremes in your religion and various different traditions that existed on this and the way muslim scholarship traditionally has understood it so the concept of gholuw of extremism and how it was understood we you know by muslim jurist in the past we had a mention of shatabi earlier who wrote two very interesting works one called the etisam which was about sticking to islam and the other was the moir faqat which was about the purposes and the higher aims of the sharia and he discusses both these issues he discusses the issue extremism in both texts separately and he speaks about a certain attitude in one and that attitude of essentially is found in what he mentions as two examples people who wish to stick to eastern customs believing those things are religious and dogmatic and holding on to them and abandoning the orf the custom of the provenance society therefrom he mentions this is one of the examples of people being worried about clothing if you worried about attitude and not really understanding that the social context that they're in is a factor and the other thing he discusses in the moir faqat he says those those that adopt merely the surface what people called the literal but he says the surface of the text mindw nath ryl yn maqasid without investigating the undermining intent of the text purposeively understanding what it is that the religious scripture is seeking and he says these are factors that create hulu and extremism and the other prophetic tradition we have about this that's well known is halakal mwtanatioon that they're destroyed those who are hair splitters you know obstinate and ibn tamir one of the well-known famous jurist who's a contemporary of shatabi he says this meant the mutashad didun and the mutashad didun were those people that were so obstinate that they were right and everybody else was wrong and they were obstinate about issues when there was no need to be obstinate about those issues and so there's a lack of respect of diversity a lack of respect of the plural tradition and he said these were kind of factors that looked at creating extremism in his mind in those in those scholars minds so within islam you have almost a tradition of looking at what is extreme or extremist tendencies and they tended to be obstinate rejection of diversity attachment to alien tradition irrelevant of context and that type of mentality and i think to some extent we can probably generalise from that to understand how that internally within islam how muslims look at some of the debates and the discussions and i'm sure the theologians amongst you can can in part take and maybe debate some of those issues bringing into an extremism and counter extremism context in the legislation we have i think there are obviously some similarities with the idea of defining extremism and defining british values that actually i think some of those notions of pluralism freedom basic liberty equality democracy the rule of law as general ideas people i think would generally agree with and you have this debate and discussion if you ask anyone what british values everyone will know what you're talking about and i think that's true but if you ask people do you think you should respect other people's right to free belief people will generally agree do you think we should generally uphold the rule of law people will generally agree do you generally think democracy is better than tinpoch dictatorship people will generally agree and hence those broad ideas of equality liberty tolerance the rule of law and generally you shouldn't support people killing atrups i think most people in british society would agree with those things in their specificities even if they wouldn't particularly define them as british values the problem becomes in trying to legislate those things because then what you're trying to do is you're trying to pass a law to dictate what everybody thinks everybody believes and not how people behave because legislation in broad terms is about drawing red lines and we've seen some of the the difficulties in the way the legislation has come out and the the broadness and the blurriness of the red lines in muhamdabd dan aziz's presentation when you add this to try and note what we are now having is a definition of extremism and in the counter extremism policy where we're trying to legislate for extremism it's going to be infinitely infinitely much worse than what we have seen and i think this for me is a is a major problem for the number of reasons first is well it's it's kind of un british it's kind of self contradictory the idea that you can ensure freedom of belief by imposing upon people they have to believe certain things and can't express beliefs outside of that because fundamentally that's that's you know the whole the whole thing about freedom of belief people free to believe what they want it's in conflict with our historic traditions you know we have a history in a tradition that supports dissent and i think this is the other part of the problem with this legislation it is very very much partisan small c conservative framing of the debate and the discussion is british values because actually british values are quite diverse and british history is very very diverse and the history of the left in britain and its direct action and all of that is part of britain and it's part of our history it's part of our heritage it's maybe not that neat and doesn't form a singular narrative but actually it's part and parcel of it and secondly i think it go it like i said philosophically speaking it conflicts with what we define as our value system it conflicts with our philosophical heritage that we are people who remember john stewart mill as someone who we look up to as an ideological intellectual a philosopher who did express part of the problem with inheriting liberty was that we would come to kind of not respect not understand and not appreciate the fact that liberty is priori to any particular right of belief or action or expression and so actually protecting it is something that becomes fundamental so i think in that sense i think these are some of the issues and some of the problems with that having said that we can kind of appreciate a social need to have some of these discussions to define some of these issues and yes amongst academics and intellectuals you can debate forever about defining terrorism you know the u n still hasn't decided on a definition you can debate about what is extremism and people will debate and discuss it forever but actually if i was to say to you as a thought experiment you have somebody who says very clearly anybody that converts to islam should be imprisoned or executed i think we generally agree that's slightly off yeah anybody disagree again in the in the i think we generally agree that that idea that imposing upon someone a penalty or pain of death as john jacru so did in the social contract for someone abandoned in christianity today we would see that as an extreme point of view and i think we can contextualize that and see that in british society that we would actually consider that a very extreme position to proselytize to uphold to believe to enforce over society so actually even though we we wouldn't necessarily want to legislate i'm fundamentally against legislating it i think it is quite simple to say there are certain ideas which we would see is extreme and so as a society we should be able to stand up and say hold on a second we stand against that similarly although the framing of british values is fairly right wing that a lot of the research that people have done and people on this panel will show that actually one of the driving factors for extremism and radicalization including in towards terrorism is an absence of a sense of belonging and therefore this is why in an integration context we're talking about extremism because we see it as a fundamental barrier to extremism and we see that at least many people do as part of one of the root causes by which people become radicalized and terrorism takes place and hence has a need for a discussion around belonging and hence there's some context to the notion of british values although actually we may see the notion of liberty freedom democracy they're not particularly british you know the greeks may lay somewhat of a claim to democracy and so on the other side of that we can recognize the tension in the discussion that we want to look at countering extremism we can't legislate against it and actually the measures in the counter extremism policy are quite horrific so the idea of banning groups for expressing these ideas is part of that strategy it's still discussed i think section five of the counter extremism policy the idea of things which are similar to asbo's asbo's in themselves horrid but similar to asbo's for extremist preachers again a means of curving curbing freedom of speech something that is integral to our british values the idea of removing citizenship from people this is one of the suggestions in the counter extremism policy it's a horrific idea because not only does it violate already extant legislation that we've signed up to in the human rights act that actually we're not just going to remove citizenship from people who and make them stateless unless you're talking about defining the islamic state as a state you can't have it both ways either is a state and they've adopted it and then we recognize it as a state or it's not a state and we don't cut off the means of individuals from coming back if they wish to do so because that's effectively what you're doing as a policy measure and as a legal measure it's in conflict with with all of the things we've already signed up to historically uh three more minutes i forgot i forgot at the five minute point i'm afraid you you were so engrosing okay um so now having said that we do need to look at the context of this discussion because in the integration context again people will talk about this again in a very dichotomous way people will describe this as an attack on islam and you'll hear people describing this attack on islam an attack on muslims well actually if that's the case then you are saying inherently islam is against all these values and muslims all do not embrace these values if on the other hand you you you're going to criticise it and say actually now hold on a second these people are essentialising islam and muslims will now actually know if that's the line that you're coming out with you've essentialised islam and you've essentialised muslims as being inherently against those ideas which as we've heard today from various speakers throughout the day from professor at halim from um if it knows us etc is just not correct or not true at least in their perspective in their eyes now that doesn't mean there are not unintended consequences and therefore are there unintended consequence on the way the policy arrives the way that the media discusses it and the way that muslims are perceived of course there are and of course that may well have led to arise in anti muslim and anti islamic sentiment etc both to very different and very distinct things but we have to be very very clear that actually we shouldn't be guilty of essentialising islam and muslims which is quite ironic given where we are in the school of oriental and african studies i thought that was quite funny as it did um the last point i would add and just to end and i think just because and i thought of this and i know i'm probably running over so i'll be very quick um just because it came up as a discussion point regarding citizenship and jizya and some of these discussions that we heard earlier actually if you go all the way back to the founding fathers of islamic jews brudence and islamic law um and i wanted to give this as an example was imam malik radiallahu ann and imam malik who had the view that actually know the jews in medina who lived in the prophetic city were not them mes they were not protected citizens who had to pay the jizya explicitly they weren't because they were described by the prophet sallallallahu ala islam in the treaty they signed as kana umma tum waheda barki ansair ul umma they are one people separate from all of the nations and you'll find imam no we discuss as that in his commentary on sarah sarah so actually the notion of citizenship belonging of togetherness i think is something very deeply rooted within islamic teaching not necessarily all muslims aspire to that but that's the whole point we are a diverse bunch just like wider society which has a very diverse bunch of political you know anarchist leftist right wing people nigel faraj you know and it's all part of being part of British society and i think the only way we can combat the extremism on either sides of on all sides is going to be recognising the diversity not trying to restrict it thank you very much thank you very much indeed and um next up we've got dr rizwan sabir from currently the department of criminology at liverpool john moors university but also an ex-sOS man research assistant many years ago yeah only for a short stint but i don't get shared because it was less than less than six months thank you for the invite to the organisers it's nice to see so many people here today i'm going to crack straight on with it today i want to focus on how the government's counter extremism counter terrorism strategy has essentially been operationalised and implemented when it comes down to one organisation a relatively well-known organisation called the quillian foundation there's two points to this paper today one is to show you how the quillian foundation has been manufactured by the government to serve as a strategic asset against political islam that means violent and nonviolent interpretations of islam which say islam has an ability to govern socially economically politically and militarily and the second one is to show or to frame the quillian foundations manufacturing by the state as a wider principle of counter insurgency warfare which is essentially what the theoretical foundations of the counter terrorism policy are essentially based on and Muhammad talk on the legislation i think set this up quite nicely because it showed that the state of exception that's been operationalised and implemented through that legislation and law so the opponent the political islamic opponent and i'm giving you a gross simplification of this is essentially considered to be transnational and globalised and what that essentially means is that this opponent is unified by a uniting ideology that operates across the globe but uses tactics and techniques that are relative to a particular environment now historically the european the european continent and the uk especially has been home to dissidents including the infamous carl marks and then later sheikh amar bakri mohammed and abu hamza who's now serving a sentence in a american prison which is where the nickname came londonistan that famous coin turned by french intelligence it was and londonistan has essentially been claimed to serve three purposes one is to serve as a hub of intellectual intellectual and propagandistic capital where places where political islamic individuals and groups will organise and operate in in this kind of media savvy way the second one is to raise funds hence why a lot of the legislation implemented after 9 11 was about disrupting economic systems and networks and so on and so forth and thirdly recruitment so even though attacks have taken place in europe and the uk 77 being the prime example only a a stone's throw away from here what you essentially find historically is that the uk has served as a place for recruitment to violent militant actors across the world as opposed to always being the target so the argument is that if this is the threat that we face how do you defeat this opponent and military thinkers one of whom i've referenced is david kilcolon an australian counter insurgency theorist who served as general david patreus's senior task advisor and was responsible indeed for the surge that took place in iraq in 2007 basically says that we we need to imagine a chain political political islam being a chain if you take out one of the chains the chain collapses or it weakens and it certainly collapses so if we target those elements of this global movement for example by disrupting the the media operations and the organisation and finance then we weaken this opponent globally so that is essentially the technique that has been used and encouraged in much of the counterterrorism policy that's been implemented and this is most vividly visible you could say in the prevent strategy because the prevent strategy builds upon this logic that the whole islamic political islamic idea of violence is based upon a narrative a narrative which says that the that the muslim world is at war with the west and the west is oppressing muslims and so on and so forth so what we actually need to do is rather than address the socio economic political factors which give rise to militant movements we need to involve ourselves encountering ideology because that is ultimately the driving factor behind this so it essentially whitewashers you know decades of western hegemonic control domination of these populations and communities and basically offers an extremely simplistic idea that history started on 9 11 and these people are zealots that are driven essentially by a set of ideas and if we challenge those ideas and grievances then we'll deal with this issue this is where minimum force and the use of minimum force is a very important counterinsurgency principle now the slides are filled with information but counterinsurgency is a doctrine is based on four ideas exceptional but limited force if i was to shoot everybody in this room because there was one terrorist hiding the likelihood is that i'd breed a hundred more terrorists so you need to use limited but exceptional force and if you can through the force of the law secondly it's based on increasing your intelligence and surveillance infrastructure and capacity and this is very important where the prevent program is concerned because we know now through empirical evidence that's been collected over the years since its implementation that the prevent program is essentially one that is uh uh one that is based on the collection of low-grade information collected through community intelligence neighbors policing and crime prevention and so on and so forth the third one uh is the integration of civilian and military power this is best understood through the counterterrorism and security act 2015 which has just gone on to become law and has made the prevent program into a essentially given it legal standing and legal strength and the fourth one which i want to focus on today is called influence in military doctrine better known as psychological warfare scyops or hearts and minds as the saying goes one of the agencies responsible for hearts and minds is a little unit in the office for security and counterterrorism in Whitehall known as the research information communication unit now i know some of you will know this um but essentially it was created in 2007 and it's coordinated by four agencies that are listed there foreign office home office communities and local government and the ministry of defense what one of its key research projects which it allocated to an external agency to conduct found and this is a key quote to undermine political islam messengers who were or who are amongst other things passionate charismatic articulate and quote islamic are needed to counter political islamic propaganda and this logic ties into the fact that when you are trying to persuade somebody to change their ideas and their viewpoints what you essentially need to do is you need to use a language that resonates with that person so you can appeal to the emotions and that's one way of persuading them to either change their outlook on the world or to internalize a particular idea or viewpoint and so on and so forth and also of course this is a very famous military thinker frank hitson responsible for much of the counterterrorism and counterinsurgency activity in the north of island during quote the troubles and he basically says in this quote i've read many years again i find it extremely powerful and i'll read it it says although the government may provide the framework and the leadership for psychological operations or hearts and minds it's important to incorporate individuals from an indigenous population now this is key because if for example a white non muslim individual was to go over to a vulnerable 16 year old who was considered to be vulnerable to radicalization and i use that in quotations the likelihood is that their arguments won't have a resonance so what you do is you employ individuals who will be able to communicate because of cultural norms and values with an individual in order to persuade that individual and this is ultimately what the channel program is interested in doing especially the mentoring aspect of it is to use individuals who will be able to communicate with a vulnerable individual in order to basically persuade them to not become future terrorists this is also where the activity falls under influence and i'm going to focus on one key leader engagement today key leader engagement is essentially about managing leaders in local communities so it's a long it's a long process rather than waiting for an emergency or a crisis to arise and then going up to individuals within the community so the whole point is to build up a relationship with a particular individual or an organization and then to draw and use that organization in order to ensure that your military and tactical objectives can be met when a particular crisis arises and this is of course where the quillian foundation come into it because the quillian foundation have essentially been issuing and disseminating a series of ideas which are extremely problematic you could say they are scientifically unproven they are empirically untested and i know i'm getting some grins from people so i'm looking forward to the q&a um and they've been encouraging carte blanche surveillance of muslim communities ed hussein's infamous comments in 2009 which are there on the public record um can be consulted in order to show that point and they've also been essentially responsible according to one of the directors of that institution the quillian foundation um as having somewhat of attraction within policy circles and only recently any matter of weeks ago uh david camron the prime minister uh named dropped quillian foundation as being an organization that he thought was quite useful in terms of helping aid his understanding about where the threat of political violence and political islam comes from what does the data show what the data shows that this organization has clearly been manufactured certainly at the onset from government funds and this data is accumulated under the freedom information act it's available to everybody and anybody to have a look at it's all available online and it basically shows that almost two million pounds worth of funding for this claim to be non-partisan organization involved in dealing with political violence and extremism in quotes has received two million pounds in government funding here is a breakdown for one of the years some number crunching that was done and it basically shows that 93% of the funding in just one year 2009 to 10 has come from the UK government and it tells you how much has come from donations and how much has come from consultancy so the evidence they say speaks louder than words and I think that example and that pie graph which is very colourful indeed um shows that quite strongly obviously across the pond in the US the funding has also um been taking place the stewart family foundation has been responsible for issuing over half a million pounds to this organization anybody who knows anything about the stewart family foundation will know that it is essentially an organization that encourages the use of counter insurgency or counter subversion for those who are familiar with the cold war approach in dealing with political islamic opponents at home and indeed abroad also the meetings with the government that have taken place again acquired under the freedom information act shows a massive level of micro management so some will argue what happens so what if an organization has been funded by the government they can still operate independently and in a non-partisan way well actually no that's not true because if we have a look at the amount of meetings that have paid taken place with different agencies and we have a look at what was discussed in those meetings that paints another picture and here is a record of what was discussed in those meetings the yellow ones are the interesting ones so the 30th of april 2009 to discuss a quilly impress release five minutes okay thank you um and if you roll down further um if you have a look the yellow ones are all on the right where it says record available incidentally there's no record so they can't be verified actually what was discussed in these meetings so you know in terms of accountability and transparency it becomes very challenging to know what's happening with this organization and indeed the corridors of power but I mean the yellow ones an informal catch up between the director of prevent and the quillium directors who I'm presuming at that time were one Ed Hussain now in the US and Majed Noir's here is another example this document was made public many many years ago 2009 and it contains the words of one Debbie Gupta the director of the prevent strategy in the office for security and counter terrorism in the home office and it says after a report was produced on prisons by the quillium foundation um and and Debbie Gupta writes this to the directors at quillium I was disappointed at the way in which the publication of your report on prisons was handled OSCT were not given an opportunity to read the report in full prior to publication and indeed press coverage I would reiterate my request that in future you share with this material you intend to release to the press in advance and in a timely fashion what does this show in the last few minutes it shows a few things it shows how propaganda which is the organized mechanisms through which persuasion takes place has essentially been used and operationalized through one organization that I've picked on because I think it's of increasing significance in the UK counter terrorism discourse there are others available that you can research if you wish it shows how it's been used as a strategic resource I also think how the manufacturing and the integration of militarized practices into counter terrorism policy reveal the kind of structure that this policy is operating within is one in which perceptions are that the opponent that we face can't be countered and dealt with or tackled using usual law enforcement or policing mechanisms but one which ultimately relies on a state of exception or the normalization of the state of exception because a lot of these policies do normalize a state of exception for example you can be held for 14 days if you are suspected of being a terrorist you can only be held for 96 hours if you are a criminal who has committed a non-terrorism offence so there is one very superficial and one very brief example to show you this state of exception that exists one more minute thank you I think it's also very important to note that any policy that uses an approach that is based on a doctrine that is ultimately used for the control and domination of populations and territory which is where counter insurgency comes from it's from colonial times used by the british empire to control populations is bound to be problematic and the reason for that is is that it creates or certainly gives this monikian view some kind of strength that they are against us they are fighting us and we therefore are not only individuals involved in armed resistance but we are holy warriors so actually what you find is through the government's own strategy which it thinks is so appropriate in order to deal with this issue not only does the issue become extremely perpetuated but it actually raises greed it increases grievances I beg your pardon and it actually perpetuates the conflict that leads to more insecurity not less and correct me if I'm wrong but the actual objective of the counter terrorism strategy that we have is it not to decrease insecurity rather than increase it thanks okay Catherine brown is next Catherine who has only had to come from across town works at king's college I do work at king's college although not necessarily across town for my sins all the way out of noxford however I'm also moving to birmingham university in january to join their religious studies department which I'm really looking forward to and you need your power point awesome I don't have a power point so we're okay there I'm going to deviate slightly from the abstract that you've been given partly because I also want to talk about a few things that have come up most recently in relation to questions that I've been frequently asked in relation to why it is that young British Muslim women would seek to join so-called Islamic State or Daesh or just for shorthand here Islamic State and the problem as it is perceived or the way in which the problem is framed to me is quite simple politicians and others have asked why it is it that young British Muslim women who have all the benefits and the wonders and the wisdoms of living in the United Kingdom would seek to give all of that up to go and join a restrictive oppressive barbaric organization and to go and live in a war zone it is presented purely as a dichotomy of one place which has extreme good values that are achievable and obtainable for all women and in contrast to an organization and a place where none of those things are realizable I'd suggest to you that actually what that framing of the problem does is it places a simple understanding of what it is like to be a young British Muslim woman here in the United Kingdom but also a simplistic understanding of what it is Daesh Islamic State attempting to present to young British Muslim women this problem also seems to ignore significant sorry the narrative as it is ignore significant empirical evidence and also has a fundamental conflict at the heart of it because implied within this framing of the problem is that somehow the United Kingdom has achieved what no other country on the planet has done which is pure gender equality and that this is racially blind as well and that somehow this is all women including all Muslim women but in doing this our counter radicalization programs nevertheless demand and insist that the solution is simply to empower Muslim women further and that they need all of this more and that is indeed the problem so you can see attention and indeed a contradiction there because on the one hand they should already be empowered and yet actually the problem is they are not empowered enough and the solution is not necessarily to provide material or economic or social support educational support or indeed to look at some of the major issues surrounding what you might even desire in terms of emancipation or empowerment but indeed simply to have leadership training programs which will last for one or two days what is further more really interesting here is that when we start investigating further what exactly the counter radicalization programs are that are being directed towards women and at date there are actually very few of those but they actually justify themselves as is not about recognising that young British Muslim women may indeed be tempted to become radical no the problem is they have failed to prevent their men from becoming radical and most of this is directed at how to encourage and facilitate young Muslim women who are in fact then redescribed as mothers and wives in spotting the signs of radicalization in their husbands brothers and sons but not them themselves they themselves are not agents they do not get to have policy directed at them now you could say that's an actually probably a really really good thing because when policy attention is focused upon young Muslims it is very rarely to their benefit instead actually what has happened is you see the continual reframing of young British Muslim women as passive weak vulnerable brainwashed victims that should they go and join islamic state it is because they are naive sometimes stupid or that they have somehow become obsessed with their own sexuality and fallen in love in some naive romantic vision and are going to go and marry a jihadi hotty because all they want to do is become a bride now I'm doing a lobotomy if you will on much of the discussion but what I'd also like to suggest to you that is actually on the one hand here we're saying that we are going to provide Muslim women and give them value and status here in the United Kingdom as mothers and wives while at the same time turning around and complaining in a way that is what islamic state also seek to do because I'd suggest to you and this is quite controversial that actually the young British Muslim women heading out there are not going out there to be jihadi brides they're going out there to be jihadi wives to be a bride implies that it is the one day that matters it is not that it is about the creation of a new good life a new version of humanity and a new version of their life in which they can unify their political objectives with their private faith in their everyday life and for it to have meaning and purpose in a way quite frankly doing that here doesn't really hold much fun the difficulty is of course that that is as much alive from islamic state and isn't anywhere near a representation of reality as one might argue the claim that the united kingdom has somehow achieved gender equality for all as well neither of these are particularly true messages and neither of these actually hold out to represent perhaps a true freedom for young British Muslim women but what I'd also like to suggest is that rather perhaps than focusing purely on ideas or suggesting that young British Muslim women need to do more in order to prevent their brothers sons and husbands from being victims of radicalisation that actually we start taking seriously the concerns that young British Muslim women have now those concerns are concerns not just for their communities but actually for wider society and this is why I get quite a hate mail for suggesting this I would suggest to to the audience here and to others that it is a tragedy of British society that young people believe that life is better in islamic state and in Syria and Iraq than it is in the united kingdom and that is a tragedy that our citizens see life that way that is a failing of our young people of our politicians of academics like myself and others for not empowering young people for not giving them control because I'd suggest it's not merely a lack of integration perhaps there is a contribution to radicalisation but the failure to take our young people seriously in their politics and in their personal lives and to give them control when you start reading through the narratives of young people who have travelled out to islamic state they're increasing frustration at the lack of control the lack of voice the disempalement that they face within their communities and within wider society this is not some simply something that we can as policy makers simply throw back at the Muslim communities and say that they need to do better I would suggest that all society needs to do better I would also suggest that it would be incumbent upon us all to think more broadly in terms of what exactly does it mean to be a young British Muslim woman what exactly does that mean in gendered terms because it is actually quite striking that although gender is rarely mentioned in any counter narrative in any sense of coin counterinsurgency counterterrorism operations when you look at the national security strategy gender only comes up as a presumed liberal good i.e gender equality but it is never really discussed about what that might mean and how one can actually realise that in the terms that are meaningful to young people I would also suggest that we really need to take seriously the claims islamic state make about gender they make particular claims about masculinity they claim that european muslim men are not real men at all they claim that young british muslim men are emasculated by the state that state behaviors remove their masculinity from them and they use that actually to recruit young men as well and say you come to us you can be a real man you can be a hero five more five more minutes there are clearly problems with that as well being a hero is not just simply about picking up a gun in fact actually heroic restraint is something that various armed forces seek to inculcate for various degrees of success of course but that's an issue there but also looking at claims around femininity and what does that mean and the ideas of being a pure muslim woman and how one can be feminine within a particular public and private space and I think actually that is where we can engage with islamic discourses of islamic feminism as well where we can look about what does it mean when we embrace a degree of complementarity or perhaps gender segregation and what are the alternative traditions around gender within the islamic faith and elsewhere that can be drawn upon in order so that we can challenge perhaps some of these very diverging sorry um divisive understandings of gender from islamic state rather than actually reimposing them through the current counter narrative programme in relation to that I would also suggest that giving young people the skills they need to create a counter narrative is perhaps going to be way more influential than anybody like me doing it or you to be blunt actually to my mind what islamic state have done is created a singular answer to the truth they are totalitarian in their understanding of faith they provide or they claim to provide the truth be one singular notion and then actually a very anti foundational manner that ignores centuries of islamic thinking and they recreate it in a postmodern world they are also as Muhammad alias argues a postmodern organisation I would suggest that rather than trying to impose the correct version of islam upon our young people we should give them the skills give them the ability and empower them to determine what islam means for them to give them the ability to ask difficult questions of their community leaders of imams of theologians of academics politicians policemen but also to know how to question the answers that come back and not just be seduced by the glossy shiny or singing or dancing black and white world that islamic state put forward I would suggest that actually embracing the polarity and the diversity of islam rather than trying to impose and recreate a singular notion of it is going to be the most successful way of encouraging and empowering our young people so that they too can believe their future is better held here in the UK than in a war zone where life really is in hobby and terms short brutish and nasty thank you thank you very much thank you very much indeed um and you were nice and short um very good um yeah our final our final speaker is wakast to fail from leeds becate university on the counter terrorism and security act 2015 pretty topical subject hello um first of all thank you for the invitation to speak today um I think I'm a slight double disadvantage in that I'm the last speaker in the panel so hopefully I'm not going to be too repetitive in what I'm saying and also it's lunch next so if your tummy is rumbling please bear with me um I think it's always the most unpopular slot when you're speaking at a seminar um I've also had food poisoning in the past week so I'm a little weak um uh have eaten at some of the greasy spoons in the country and I've never had food poisoning and I actually got food poisoning from a sainsbury salad so I think that the moral of the story there is if you have a choice between salad and kebab stick to the kebabs um so okay no more excuses get away okay yeah okay great so just bear with me is what I'm saying okay um so the counter terrorism and security act yes this is a very topical issue um and it's very prominent in terms of a lot of the discourse and newspapers and politics um just to give some insight um first of all it's been widely criticised and it's been widely criticised by a number of muslin political organisations but also more broadly by human rights organisations by by civil liberties groups and and kind of one of the covers a wide range of different measures in terms of the counter terrorism and security act but I'm going to focus on this mandatory push for public sector bodies to to have to engage with prevent and so public sector bodies have engaged with prevent previously and what it's been on a voluntary basis it's not been mandatory that is the change that I'm going to focus on in this paper today um and I think that it needs to be situated in the wider context of the failures that have been associated with prevent um and there's a wide range of literature on this and I think that a good starting point is to look at the work of Aaron Konani and in particular his report spooked uh that he did when he was at the institute of race relations um and he's also done some more recent stuff but a range of scholars um have really critiqued prevent um and in terms of the impact that has had on the muslim community um I want to focus on this idea of partnership policing so now um this kind of latest development where public sector bodies have to engage in partnership policing so these are university lecturers these are college lecturers these are high school teachers um and I'm going to focus um my insight on two projects which I'll briefly discuss so the first one is my PhD study which was looking at partnership policing um in marginalised deprived communities and the second is an ongoing study uh that I'm involved in which is uh looking at delivered experiences of british muslim minorities in the context of integration demands um so firstly I'm very briefly um my PhD study was an ethnographic study um of partnership policing so after the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act um it was mandatory for a number of organisations to have to work with the police in partnership with the police to reduce crime and disorder um and this was kind of the focus of my research because there was hardly any literature in terms of looking at what this meant for local communities on the ground so I was looking enough to have access to a police force which is quite rare um in research and criminology because the police are not always too willing to open their doors to researchers and I completed more than 250 hours of observation over 18 months um in terms of my findings and it's always very difficult to summarize um in such a short amount of time but I found that the police heavily dominated the partnerships uh that they were involved in so these crime and disorder reduction partnerships or community safety partnerships um and that this actually sidelined the work of other agencies for example the local authorities or youth services or social services um and that this tended to result in punitive actions towards local residents um and I found that this had a negative influence as well in terms of the work of partner agencies who were then much more willing to share information with the police um not for a social welfare focus but rather for a punitive focus and I also found um in this context that policing um which I found was really interesting was considered to be the primary social response to poverty because these marginalised communities that I was researching in um these were given an additional level of policing um an intensive level of policing was the phrase that they used the police at the time um and I found that it was really interesting that policing was seen as the key social response to poverty not any of the kind of social welfare response um another study that I'm currently involved in and both of these studies shape what I'll be talking about today um it's to explore this concept of integration and what it and what it means for for second generation British Muslims um so these interviews were carried out um and they are still going on as well uh with British Muslim men and women primarily in the Greater Manchester area and some of the themes from interviewees included identity belonging and criminalisation um so the CTSA act um as I've already mentioned it makes it mandatory for non-police organisations to effectively take on policing responsibilities it affects um a number of public sector bodies universities colleges schools local local authorities the NHS and prisons and they require staff to monitor for such issues such as signs of radicalisation and now this has been heavily critiqued in the literature um in terms of some of the sociology literature criminology literature um uh in terms of how ambiguous these signs of radicalisations are um and also one of the worrying developments is that prosecution is the possibility of non-compliance uh with this new mandated responsibility um and another development that coincides with this um is that it places channel on a statutory footing um how many people have heard of channel uh so this is a multi-agency dev radicalisation programme that sounds awful doesn't it dev radicalisation I have this image of some kind of decompressing chamber that they put so-called radical Muslims into and they press a button and they come out deradicalised you know um I'm not sure if it's Magynoise pressing the button or something but um I mean um it's uh it's quite interesting um so what this does in terms of now looking at some of the some of the implications of the counter-terrorism and security act emerges counter-terrorism policing and criminal justice with social policy okay and I think that this again is a really worrying development okay um and there's a huge concern from academics, from lecturers, from teachers in that this will lead to the policing of ideas and we've already heard mentioned this morning the Muslim student who mentioned the phrase eco-terrorism and that this aroused the suspicion of teachers and and also relies on ambiguous concepts such as British values and this is at the heart of the discourse in terms of looking at counter-terrorism and I think that one of the key things that we need to focus on really in terms of making sense of this is how concepts around social policies such as cohesion and integration are then fused with counter-terrorism and policing I think that is a key development okay that we need to concentrate on um so British values um you know again uh I think that this has been heavily criticised today in terms of some of the concepts of British values what are British values selling arms to Saudi Arabia a brutal dictatorship um inviting cc um her dictate her from Egypt you know are these British values you know um you know that's just a starting point it's a nonsense when we when we talk about British values five more minutes it doesn't really mean five more yep yep five cheers yeah that's fine um okay um so and again some of the other suspicions or some of the other um worrying aspects that that have been raised by commentators around the fact that within a climate of anti-Muslim hostility and rhetoric and I think that it's beyond doubt that we're in that particular climate um that there's the potential for local actors to rely on biases prejudice and misconceptions we have to we have to contextualise this development okay it's important to think of context we live in a context of growing Islamophobia we live in a context of growing suspicion of Muslims and we need to think about the context um and from all of the literature that we have or from the majority of the literature that we have we know that this is going to be discriminatory towards Muslims um I've already I've already mentioned the challenge program I think that this is a brilliant quote from some some academics at Edgehill University um that kind of challenge some of the underpainting features of the challenge program which relies on a multi agency initiative involving psychologists and psychotherapists and youth workers trying to devidicalise those are considered to be extremist or radical and they say that as currently formulated in practice counter terrorism and counter radicalisation strategies aimed at safeguarding vulnerable children and young people from extremism are ill-conceived, unreliable and give legitimacy to unjustifiable regulations and social control of young British Muslims underpinned by essentialising racialised constructions of childhood vulnerability and bolstered by pseudo scientific psychology or radicalisation discourse educational welfare agencies and are strategically positioned at the forefront of the late war on terror and I think that this lack of democracy just coming back to British values I think that this lack of democracy and lack of accountability is central to the development of the counter terrorism and security act and and to channel as well and just one thing that I like it to reflect on is what actually happens to that Muslim student that is referred to the to the channel or prevent officer it might not mean that they are faced with a criminal offence or because to take part in channel they say that it needs to be on a voluntary basis but what happens to that Muslim student in terms of their sense of belonging in terms of their sense of themselves and I think that we need to I think that we need to have some kind of reflection on this bourgeoisian sense of symbolic violence okay what violence is being caused here that we can't actually measure and I think it's fair to say that I mean and this is open David Cameron you know he gave the speech in Birmingham he chose Birmingham for a reason right there's a lot of Muslims there in June or July when he gave his speech outlining his new counter extremism strategy you know this is going to be targeted against Muslims Muslims have to feel the pain of the counter terrorism and security act so we have to regard this as fundamentally racist because it's targeting a particular group one more minute okay great and I just want to end now with some final course that I'll just let you read actually because I need a drink I've been doing a lot of talking but this but these are just some views from our from our respondents in our research in terms of looking at this concept of integration and what and what it meant for them because from a lot of our respondents they felt fully integrated you know they had normal jobs they had they had normal relationships they had a normal involvement in local community life in local political life their friends had a wide variety of diverse friends but actually their sense of belonging was destructed by others and I think that we need to turn this concept of integration on its head and they look at how the wider community and how wider society constructs Muslims okay so what space is made for them to integrate and even though this concept of integration are highly challenged anyway so these are just a couple of quotes here that I won't have time to fully go through and I'm more than happy to share the presentation afterwards and I think I'm running out of time now but um I'll be very very quick just to summarise there is a campaign of resistance against the counter-terrorism and security acts and against this new waiver prevent and I think it's important for people to get involved and I think it's important for people to recognise that with policy phases like this it's only resistant by grassroots campaigning so please get involved and finally I think this is the part that I want to focus on the counter-terrorism and security act is going to rupture the social bonds that Muslims have with their pace and their institutions and Muslim students are already more likely to face structural inequalities to be discriminated against in the job market facing Islamophobia and now this new waiver of prevent is just one more thing that they have to face and I think it's more than a minute that we've looked in it okay all right very much great all right um well thanks to all our speakers um we've got about 12 minutes to to have a conversation about what you just heard um I have been allowed to abuse my position as chair to uh ask a couple of questions myself which I'm very happy to do um um it may not surprise you that I would like to ask a question to Rizwan um I mean I wonder you know you would no doubt accept that a government's primary responsibility is the security of its citizens uh Islamic extremism is clearly a threat to that security I uh I'm rather puzzled by your surprise and uh and apparent shock at the fact that the government is prepared to fund an organisation um which opposes Islamic extremism um the state supports SOAS the state supports you uh the state spends a great deal more than two million pounds funding critical academics um I'll work for the public sector yeah you work for the public sector two million pounds seems seems to me money pretty well spent and also it seemed to stop after 2012 quilliam very nearly went bankrupt um and I mean you know is it not better to have an organisation like quilliam okay it has many critics it's trying to produce a kind of a more liberal version of British Islam um is it is it not better is it not better to have quilliam rather than local police forces uh intervening and influencing prevent I would have thought it would be um thank you David wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute um as regards Catherine um the one thing I would say to Catherine is I happen to know somebody called sharia cartoon who runs a mothers against radicalisation organisation she's neither naive weak nor passive she's indeed the labour deputy leader of tower hamlet's council um my final more general point is that we've had a lot of hyperbolic language up here about the illiberalism of all this legislation but interestingly enough what we don't have is a long list of egregious miscarriages of justice now no doubt there have been one or two but I think what actually is happening here yeah yeah all right all right all right all right all right I'm just about to finish what what I think is interesting here is that so much of this legislation and my god we have had a lot of it is essentially a signal setting operations is signaling trying to signal reassurance to the British population including the muslin part of it I mean unsuccessfully possibly in that it's alienated certainly quite large parts of the muslin intelligence here and I think what's interesting is that as I say we do I mean it has not been it has not created lots of martyrs I know I know I was invited to put some questions all right okay you guys can come back in a minute I'm going to ask for some questions from the floor first okay yeah yeah okay so um in fact that's precisely my point young muslin women are not passive weak or anything but in fact when you start looking at the evidence and the kinds of uh when we start looking at muslin women's activism it is very much based within their faith and within also their commitment to what you call thick social bonds my point is that when you look at the legislation the policy and the way in which they're framed is that it reinforces a particular narrative that does not add up to uh reality secondly I would suggest that if this is a signaling manoeuvre it comes with very few checks and balances and I personally believe that a British value is to be somewhat sceptical of government yep fine okay in terms of that question um I mean I don't even where to begin with it the threat let's just take the threat as the first issue right I'm sure you value and respect your role which is a very reputable European wide policing agency involved in serious organized crime and terrorism according to their figures um from 2006 to 13 only 0.7 percent of the threat of political violence from political Islamic groups has come from muslims no that's no secular secular no secular and not people of no religion it's just important it doesn't it doesn't matter whether the threat from etter has gone rashad because all the hold on let me just finish it doesn't matter no no facts are not getting in the way facts are supporting the point that the threat is is about representation as opposed to actual hard evidence and even if you look at the number of people that have been convicted for terrorism you quickly find that most of the people that are being prosecuted are being prosecuted because of a possessing information which is a criminal offence to be in possession of information irrespective of what you intended to do with that information and this is a key point so the Europol figures are not just one abstract figure that I'm throwing out it's actually supported by others when when you can come back the second things about the quillian foundation is it appropriate for the government to fund quillian foundation that there is nothing wrong with the government aiming to basically deal with issues of insecurity that's their job as you rightly know and that's a very heartfelt idea that liberals always talk about but what I do have a problem with is the government trying to legitimize its policy by manufacturing elements within civil society because the whole point that turns out here then is that civil society becomes an arena and a domain in which those in power basically legitimize their policy and their rule rather than civil society what rashad was talking about that we need to stop legislating in use civil society yes let's use civil society but let's not make civil society into the into basically an extension of the state and quillian's manufacturing and funding is essentially that way of legitimizing policy do you want to come back on the figure quickly and if you could raise your hands while rashad is speaking so we can get a mic over to you if you've got a question yeah rashad you go just briefly I think it's important with with a lot of this discourse that actually step back and look at it so with your policy it's not that the stats are wrong they actually completely sound but there's a reason why there's a disproportionate amount because actually we've had whole swathes of terrorist groups etc involved in terrorist acts a large number of them have actually stopped so like eto now completely outside of that statistical data now so hence no but that doesn't that doesn't know that's irrelevant all right okay I mean not completely insane either okay go on so now hence what actually happens is that if you have a group which has perpetrated 75% of terrorist acts that are collected in that data no longer functioning they're out of that statistical realm now where's the mic it's misrepresenting a finding from a stat I'm sure all you guys who do research methodology look into things like that but the stats show as rashad that the most of the political violent threat comes from right wing and secular movements and that in fact the figures aren't completely sound because Britain doesn't provide data okay okay can we have can we have a a question from the floor um come on quickly just shout just shout my name Mohammed Amin patron of curriculum for cohesion my question is for Catherine Brown you were very eloquent at describing the imperfections of British society and I also agree that British society is imperfect you described Islamic state as imperfect are you finding any kind of equivalence in their imperfections okay well well let's just take a couple more let's take a couple more the guy behind you anybody else hi um my name is Imthias I have a question for Catherine as well unfortunately um I often see conversations like what the Rizwan said about people being funded by large groups like governments um to affect civil society um and yet groups and you were talking about how we need to give young Muslim women more of a voice from themselves and I agree completely how do you do that when groups like Aira earn a million a year a million a year and there's groups like al-Madin Institute funding all these organisations it goes far as far back as the 70s with shahzindani how do you do that when the conversation is completely owned by a few groups that tend to get their funding from zakat or from from other external agencies outside of the UK okay let's let's take a couple more lady up there um sorry my question is also for Catherine which is um thank you that was really try and keep notes in it was a really fantastic presentation distribute your questions amongst others the thing I was wondering about was how feasible is it for young Muslim women to have these difficult conversations and debates with each other given the current climate and especially the criminalisation of socially conservative Islamic views and I'm thinking in particular about as a as a teacher in a classroom how comfortable do they feel discussing these issues I would say not very um anyone else and then I'll come back to the panel for no one some of those people who were clapping so enthusiastically not clappers rather than speakers uh one guy here uh Abdullah El-Shamaton Grant Mufti of Exeter um my question is about so a lot has been said about the Cwiliam Foundation and I agree with Dr Rizwan about their role in in in creating a lot of that discourse but not much has been said about the demonising of organisations that are very vocal and active about countering this sort of government policy regarding extremism can the panel open up a little bit more on this topic as well because I think that this was something that was a little bit neglected throughout the most of the presentations so on one hand you've got a number of organisations that the government um kind of supports and listens to when it comes to formulating policy on the other hand you've got a number of organisations that are actively demonised within the public discourse and within within government um policy as well could you give an example cage okay so that that's the obvious one right um so can another I'm I'm starting to think of other ones but I'm sure there are other ones can the panel talk a little bit more about that as well because that I mean coming from a background of of kind of grassroots activism is a little bit difficult to engage with different organisations when the climate is so fierce okay um how about one minute for everybody yep um you um she should get more than one minute well she has already spoken one to you haven't spoken at all in the um why don't you um or perhaps you should wind up actually you can wind up so you can respond to everything uh shall we start this end yeah I mean um well I think it's important to consider this cons um this kind of idea of who the government counts as a valid british muslin voice so I think he was on the day or the day after the counter terrorism and security act kind of uh past through parliament um and it was finalised and the government had this community engagement forum um and there's been a lack of transparency over who was invited to that forum and on what basis they were invited and it has seemed like it was a number of conservative muslim organisations um or muslim organisations who have conservative political views um that are more or less in line with the government and I think that there needs to be much more transparency from government as to as to why they prefer working with certain organisations over another and my view is that this is about politics the quillian foundation shared the politics of the government in terms of how they understand and interpret counter terrorism and counter extremism and that's where these other organisations are demonised the muslim council of britain who are the largest muslim organisation in in the UK the government won't even talk to them today you know so I think that that shows the state of affairs in terms of um you know um in terms of how the government views the muslim community and about who they regard as valid spokespersons for the muslim community power doesn't like a check and cage stands up for those who are unlawfully held tortured mistreated so on and so forth that brings those who occupy the corridors of power in particular the executive and the intelligence services into disrepute so what you therefore find is that a narrative is created in which those who seek to even though some of their views might be challenge or questionable what you find is that even their good work becomes tarred with this negative brush that they are terrorist apologists and so on and so forth so you won't probably hear very often that when Alan Henning the taxi driver from Salford was held hostage before being executed brutally by ISIS that those in cage from their prison cells I'm talking in particular mozan beg tried to work through his lawyer gareth pierce with the foreign office in order to secure his release and how those calls and requests were basically had fallen on deaf ears so when you find this logic that we're not engaging with cage partially it's based on this logic that talking to them will legitimize them and therefore you can't do that because you disagree with them on a few issues or policy areas or whatever but the second one is if you legitimize this organization which has kind of become at the cutting edge of activism in the war on terror then you will basically empower them and that is a challenge for your power and and what what your policy seeks to do so it's better to just sideline them and agree with the echo chambers thank you david that agree with you in order to push forward your own narratives okay so there are a number of points first one is their equivalency between islamic state in the united kingdom i'd suggest not on a number of grounds and i am by no means an apologist for the violence that islamic state carry out what i would say however and i think it's something we need to guard against islamic state by presenting a totalitarian vision of islam by saying they hold a particular narrative that is the only legitimate narrative presents this idea that there can only ever be one singular way of being and i'd suggest that we also need to resist that kind of just reversing that by saying we have the one singular way of being because all you do is repeat the logic and grammar of totalitarian thinking and i actually think islam resist that and has done for many centuries and therefore if we want to look at practical steps and i think teachers jobs have been made incredibly harder so to university lecturers to be able to discuss freely many of the issues that do concern our young students and school peoples partly because of the requirement placed upon us to monitor and to as a duty of care young individuals in case they are at risk of radicalization but what is interesting to my mind is that what we are suggesting practical senses do is give our young people the critical thinking skills and i know that's very academic of me to give an academic solution to a socio-political and a theological problem perhaps but actually if we give people those skills through education through social workers through youth groups through charitable organisations through the mosques and give them the skills that they need to recognise when a glossy magazine is actually just a glossy magazine when actually listening only to one source of information can be damaging because also one of the things that's really transparent to me is that over time young people when they become involved with various radical groups stop listening to alternative sources of information they stop believing alternative sources of information they isolate themselves from their community from their families from their friends they take on this one singular narrative and again it is the diversity of voices a polarity of voices to that will be more effective than trying to present one singular counter narrative i think that's really key actually this whole the the mentality that says that we have a singular source for reality and as a result of that singular source for reality we have a singular source for religion etc and politics and everything comes down to that coming to some of the the questions really quickly a few things with regards cage as an example cage is a really good example because you have here an organisation which is doing something really really vital which is holding the state to account which is what we all should be doing however the values and the ideology of the organisation is one that's antithical to state not as in governance but to the very essence of everything surrounding that state so therefore if you have as an example an organisation which went and interviewed anrha Olaqi well after he'd already declared total jihad against the west on his blog site for several years an organisation that a few weeks ago had Abu Qatada speaking at their organ you know speaking on their events Abu Qatada has recently recycled you know very clear al-qaeda literature which he denied doing explicitly but said he agreed with all the views in the al-qaeda magazine just to be pedantically accurate and as an organisation which yes deals with some of the injustices but also deals with defending people who are convicted of terrorism because very clearly they explain this on their website that they are looking at this in the world of jihad and that the people convicted of terrorism are prisoners of jihad this on their website on the cage prisoners website so we shouldn't blindfold ourselves about this stuff it's really explicit and they're open about it or prisoners of conscience rashad or prisoners no no no no no no no no no no no as a fact the language they use these are prisoners of jihad that's just their language it's just a word used to describe a reality yes it is that's all languages it's a matter of communication this is why this is why it's utter nonsense to take away meaning from people that very explicitly define it they have a whole section explaining what they're talking about why these people in mojahedin why they are sereinal jihad why there's a religious due to support to the thick of jihad to use them okay right okay take away your struggle their own explanation we're going can we can we can we move on go this is nonsense we we want to move on fine our final speaker mohamed as is um can i just one one thing that you said that that surprised me was you said that the legislation had driven um you know extremist views underground and you gave us your evidence for that rather egocentrically if you don't mind me saying the fact that you were surprised by 7 7 i mean do you have any other evidence for this this driving underground i mean his but taria is still legal as far as i understand isn't it i mean okay well i think i said a little bit more than that um but the main point your mic your mic mohamed bring it closer to you bring it closer to you um the main point for me is that we've now had 15 years of legislation and non-legal measures um since 2000 um and all that we've done i feel just hasn't worked whether it's legislation whether it's legislation or non-legal measures and as somebody who's you know very involved in the community has been involved in the muslim community since my early teens um going back even 10 years i would not have imagined that we would get young girls from tar hamlets going to syria to be you know jihadi wives or however you want to phrase it um and yes i was surprised that up until 7 7 i would say well actually we've never had terrorist attacks on our soil and in a sense i wasn't expecting it the way it happened on 7 7 so i was very very surprised um and all the stuff that's happened since then and i know so much going on in the muslim community now and one of the examples that i gave was that in the 90s when you know there was stuff going on and even before that in afghanistan and chechnya and bosnia you heard calls for you know jihad whether it's recruitment or financial assistance i remember very very clearly when i was um at a friday prayer in kings once that there was an open call to join the jihad in chechnya you would not hear that kind of thing now and you just don't know what's going on that's what i meant by a lot of that stuff that was going on in the muslim community in the 90s has gone underground so we don't know what's happening now there may be some goodness and bad in this uh i just want to expand this point and to say that because things are not working the measures that we're putting in place are not working the measures that we're getting are becoming more and more draconian and you just look at the pattern of the legislation starting from 2000 to 2015 and at every stage it's becoming more and more draconian and actually it's not working i think we need to do at least three things to make things work to turn the table i think the first thing that we have to do is we have to move away from this almost ideological dogmatic position that the cause of terrorism is singly and solely bad theology um and i think we have to look at the literature the research that says it's a complex number of reasons um but you know i was in government when tony blair prime minister at the time gave that speech and it was as if this was the only cause and if we could solve bad theology in muslim communities we could solve the problem you know i think we've got to move away from that we haven't and it's still the driving force behind so much legislation and so many government measures at the moment the second thing that we have to do and that's been raised i'm not just going to touch on it is that we have to engage with a wider spectrum of the muslim community not just the people that sound like what government people are saying um and what what we used to call in government the white noise is saying we have to involve a much much wider richer spectrum of all communities but in this case all sectors of the muslim community and the third thing that i would say is that we have to return the authorship and the ownership of islamic vocabulary and islamic uh concepts to the mainstream muslim community it's almost like the home secretary can say what is a perversion of islam and what is right islam and what is moderate islam not the muslim community anymore and i think until we return the authorship and ownership of what is mainstream islam to the muslim community we will have young people turning away from what are otherwise good messages thanks very much indeed thank you i want to i want to thank david for chairing the session and i also want to thank all of our panellists