Counterterrorism Practices

Lord Ahmed Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Ahmed (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, for providing us with the opportunity to discuss this important subject. I am delighted and honoured to follow the noble Lords, Lord Hylton and Lord Judd, and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who are all much more experienced, knowledgeable and committed than I am. However, I want to say a few words. We are discussing this important issue a day after Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowali were sentenced for their appalling, despicable and heinous crime against Lee Rigby, an innocent soldier. I thank Mr Justice Sweeney for separating these two criminals from the Islamic faith and the Muslim community in his remarks.

In February 2011 the Prime Minister, David Cameron, tarnished the image of British Muslims by speaking in Munich about radicalisation and “Islamic extremists”. Then in December, during his visit to China, he said:

“There are just too many people who have been radicalised in Islamic centres, who have been in contact with extremist preachers, who have accessed radicalising information on the internet and haven’t been sufficiently challenged. I want to make sure in our country that we do this effectively”.

I have no problem with the Prime Minister’s fight against extremism and we will help him and work with him, but I wish that he had made these two speeches in east London, Bradford or Luton, or even at his Eid party at Downing Street, rather than in Germany and China. It sounds so much like the colonial attitude of divide and rule. The good guys are invited to the Eid party but the bad guys he cannot face—Sufi Islam versus the Jamat-e-Islami, the Deobandis and the Ahl-e-Hadiths, the so-called Wahhabis. Although he enjoys the hospitality of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and others, I wonder whether the Prime Minister tells them what he says and does at home.

The isolation of large sections of the Muslim community is not good. Demonisation and sensational headlines in the tabloid newspapers are also bad. Despite what the media portray, Muslims are not the major source of terrorist atrocities. The Government seem preoccupied with Islamist terrorism despite the fact that, according to Europol, fewer than 6% of terrorist acts across the continent, year on year for the past 10 years, have been carried out by Muslims. Counterterrorist anti-extremism measures need to be more holistic in their approach and be careful not to cast aspersions and turn particular communities into social outcasts.

Counterterrorism practices have often been leveraged through dangerous rhetoric on so-called “non-violent extremism” and “conveyor belt theory”. The whole discourse is problematic and lacks evidence. CIA officer Marc Sageman, who also advised the New York Police Department and testified in front of the 9/11 Commission, described the conveyor belt theory as “nonsense” and said that there was little empirical evidence for such a conveyor belt process:

“It is the same nonsense that led governments a hundred years ago to claim that left-wing political protests led to violent anarchy”.

The Government need to take an evidence-based approach. There are clear laws surrounding incitement to violence and hate speech. For the Government to develop a new category called “non-violent extremism” and claim that it produces a conveyor belt to violent extremism has real implications for freedom of speech. People have a right to hold opposing views on political governance, whether they be communist, socialist or whatever.

Both the media and the Government have made assertions that radicalisation is occurring at universities, yet the Universities UK report makes clear that there is no evidence for such a link. Ms Dandridge, the chief executive of Universities UK, said that universities had been unfairly singled out for attention because many terrorists went to university,

“but they tend to be young people and 40 per cent of young people go to university”—

again, an evidence-based approach, not simply making assertions. Such measures would only be detrimental to free speech at university campuses and oppose the values that we are supposed to cherish. The protection of free speech on campus is enshrined in law within Section 43 of the Education Act, but it is in jeopardy.

Professor Michael Lister and Professor Lee Jarvis from Oxford Brookes University and Swansea University wrote a paper based upon empirical data from a series of UK-based focus groups. It was on the impact of antiterrorism measures on citizenship in the UK. They found that people felt that antiterrorism measures eroded rights, freedoms and liberties and went against the whole point of living in a democracy. If you remove the freedom of individuals, it restricts the democracy we live in. The Government should take on board a wide range of expert opinions, not a few select or cherry-picked voices.

I turn to policies abroad, a point raised by the noble Lords, Lord Hylton and Lord Judd. At the meeting of the APPG on Drones on Tuesday, we heard evidence from two victims of drone attacks and from Mr Clive Stafford Smith from Reprieve, who described the 600,000 citizens of North Waziristan as living through a blitz. His mother had lived through the Blitz and he said that she described how people lived day after day in the same conditions. One third of the population in the region is on antidepressants due to drone attacks and the fear of them. He said that the American policy on drones has made the Americans the most hated people on earth for the Pakistanis in Pakistan. True, the Pakistan Government are taking action against the terrorists and the Taliban. It because they are doing it themselves that the public support that action. However, they resent any outsider making attacks on their land, on their culture and, as they perceive it, on their religion. That increases radicalisation and creates suicide bombing.