Former UK prime minister David Cameron has accused critics of the government’s flagship counter-radicalisation programme Prevent of “enabling terrorism” through a concerted campaign to undermine the strategy.
Mr Cameron criticised a “small but vocal range of fringe groups” for misrepresenting the two-decade-old strategy as an attack on Muslim communities. He said Prevent remained an essential tool to tackle radicalisation.
“I believe those who refuse to challenge the falsehood surrounding Prevent are guilty of a form of ‘passive tolerance’ whereby society fails to interfere in minority communities for fear of appearing racist,” Mr Cameron wrote in the foreword of a new report on the anti-Prevent campaign by right-wing think tank Policy Exchange.
“So just as we need to counter the Islamist extremist narrative, we need to counter the anti-Prevent narrative. We need to show that delegitimising counter terrorism is, in essence, enabling terrorism.”
The report identified groups such as the Muslim Council of Britain, Muslim Engagement and Development, and Cage, which has previously described the policy as “fundamentally racist and Islamophobic”.
Cage said the report — Delegitimising Counter-Terrorism: The Activist Campaign to Demonise Prevent — smeared Muslim organisations for “challenging the policy and holding the government to account”.
Muhammad Rabbani, Cage's managing director, said: “The report promotes a false reality of ‘unopposed activists’ critiquing Prevent in order to explain away communities’ wholesale rejection of Prevent.”
The Prevent policy was part of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy introduced in 2003 but expanded after the July 7, 2005 attacks on the London transport network, in which 52 people were killed.
Read More : https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/uk-news/2022/04/26/david-cameron-denounces-islamist-critics-of-uk-anti-terror-strategy/
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