Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism

Failing to Prevent

Paul Thomas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849665254
• eBook ISBN: 9781849665995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Violence in Society
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. How should we understand home-grown terrorism like the 7/7 London bombings? This is a classic monograph focusing on recent British attempts to 'prevent violent extremism', their problems and limitations, and what lessons this can offer for more effective policy approaches in future. Paul Thomas's extensive research suggests that the Prevent policy approaches, and the wider CONTEST counter-terrorism strategy, have been misguided and ineffective, further alienating British Muslim communities instead of supporting longer-term integration. He argues that new, cohesion-based approaches encouraging greater trust and integration across all communities represent the best defence against terrorism.

1

The Threat of Violent Extremism

Introduction: ‘Terrorism’?

The threat of ‘violent extremism’ faced by Britain over the past few years is a complex one that defies simplistic analysis or explanation. This chapter aims to both outline the key facts and scale of that violent extremist threat, and to draw on a range of academic material and perspectives to discuss how we can understand its nature, motivation and make-up. Such detailed discussion of the threat is a vital prerequisite for a meaningful assessment of whether British policy attempts to date to ‘prevent violent extremism’ have been realistic or well-designed. The threat of Islamist violent extremism to Britain clearly can be characterised as ‘terrorism’; yet too often political, media and academic discussions of the problem and policy responses to it have focused on Muslims and the nature of Islam, rather than what we know more broadly about terrorism. This is particularly surprising, both because of the considerable academic literature based on examples of terrorism around the world and Britain’s own modern experience of terrorist activity in both Northern Ireland and Britain itself relating to the northern Irish conflict. That experience and body of academic material relating to terrorism cautions against overly simplistic understandings of the make-up and motivations of terrorists or against ill-conceived or even counterproductive policy responses.

Defining ‘terrorism’ is surprisingly complex. A common understanding focuses on violence by ‘non-state actors’, on the basis that any actions by terrorists are often mirrored by state military forces in situations of war or occupation, a parallel not lost on political opponents of the ‘war-on-terror’ state military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. A suggestion that terrorism focuses on civilians is similarly simplistic, given that some terrorist movements have avoided attacks on civilians, whilst state military operations have involved bombing civilian areas. Coming originally from the Latin word ‘terrere’, to frighten, deter or scare away, terrorism came into popular use after the ‘terror’ period of violence and anarchy in the aftermath of the French Revolution that saw as many as 40,000 people sent to the guillotine. However, long before then Britain had arguably already faced its gravest ever terrorism threat in the form of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, designed to kill the monarch and members of Parliament, with the religiously motivated plotters having also considered kidnapping and killing the royal children. Given this history, and the fact that ‘zealots’ were Jewish ‘terrorists’ of the first century AD, English (2009) suggests that the ‘new’, post-9/11 Islamist terrorism facing Britain and other Western states is actually much less new than it appears. Indeed, he questions whether terrorism is actually still a helpful term, given that ‘terrorism might best be considered as a method deployed by people who collectively see themselves as engaged in a war’.¹ This is echoed by Dipak Gupta, who suggests that ‘it is perhaps useful to think of terrorism as an epi-phenomenon, a minor sideshow of a larger social problem’.² These characterisations immediately challenge notions of terrorists as deranged or unbalanced individuals, living in their own fantasy world. Instead, these leading analysts of terrorism see individual terrorists and their actions as part of wider social movements, with the individual acts of violence a form of altruism towards ‘their’ social group. Other commentators identify a number of metaphors used in relation to modern Islamist terrorism. The terrorism as ‘war’ formulation deployed by the US Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 has rightly been criticised as fundamentally flawed and counterproductive in their inspiration for military involvements,³ whereas notions of terrorism as a ‘disease’ that can spread among populations if unchecked can be seen as the inspiration for preventative domestic policy efforts around ‘preventing violent extremism’.⁴

This immediately gives some sense of the complex debates around the motivations of terrorists generally and in particular the young British Muslims involved in the current threat of ‘violent extremism’. This is far from being a uniquely British problem, with the United States Attorney General, Eric Holder, admitting in December 2010 that the domestic Islamist terror threat in America was now more about American Muslims rather than foreign visitors.⁵ This chapter will explore some of those arguments and theories. It first briefly outlines the pivotal events of 7/7 and subsequent terrorist events, plots and convictions. It then discusses how we might understand the motivations and actions of the young British Muslims involved by focusing on six distinct but interrelated theories and explanations for such Islamist terrorism:

• Radical Islam: The ‘single narrative’
• A reaction to British foreign policy?
• A foreign hand?
• A product of ethnic/racial segregation and poverty?
• Radicalisation: Radical mosques and ‘preachers of hate’?
• Group dynamics

In discussing these theories and explanations, the chapter will suggest that understandings of the current and serious threat of Islamist violent extremism facing Britain are complex and interrelated, and that policy responses need to recognise that.

7/7: Home-grown suicide bombers

Some years on, the visceral shock of the 7/7 bombings in central London remains strong. Whilst the number of deaths involved was on a smaller scale to that of the 9/11 attacks on New York in September 2001, or the attacks on Madrid’s public transport system in March 2004, the resulting impact of the British domestic population seeing the world in a slightly different way was similar. The shock came not only through the large-scale deaths and very serious injuries but also in the associated realities that these attacks were suicide attacks, carried out by four young British Muslims. The attackers were four young men from West Yorkshire in the north of England, three of them of Pakistani origin from Beeston in south Leeds and one an African-Caribbean convert to Islam from nearby Huddersfield. All had been brought up and educated in Britain, with the broad Yorkshire accents of two of them captured in a video statement prior to the attacks being all the more unsettling for the general British public – these young men looked and sounded like many thousands of other young Muslims in Britain’s multiracial towns and cities. The oldest attacker, viewed subsequently as the ringleader, was Mohammad Sidique Khan, a popular learning mentor at a south Leeds multiracial primary school, and a part-time youth worker at the Hamara Youth Access Point in Beeston. Through his youth and community activities, Khan had got to know Shezad Tanweer, a 22-year-old university student and keen sportsman, and 18-year-old Hasib Hussain. Nineteen-year-old Germaine Lindsay from Huddersfield had converted to Islam as a 15-year-old, taking the name Abdullah Shaheed Jamal. Married to a white Muslim convert with a young son, and with his wife expecting their second child, Jamal was living in his wife’s home town of Aylesbury prior to the attacks but still spending a lot of time in West Yorkshire. It is likely that he met Khan when attending talks by radical Islamist preachers in 2004.⁶

Having apparently carried out a ‘dry run’ the week before, the four attackers travelled down to London early on the morning of Thursday 7th July 2005. Parting in Kings Cross station after hugging each other, they then travelled in separate directions on public transport, where they each detonated their explosives that they had previously prepared in their ‘bomb factory’ flat in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Three detonated their bombs around 8.50 a.m. on underground tube trains, with Hasib Hussain detonating his bomb on a diverted Number 30 bus in Tavistock Square about 30 minutes later after apparently failing to get on to the tube system. The motives for Hussain attempting to phone his fellow bombers after they had blown themselves up remain unclear. In the confines of a bus and tube trains, the impact of their improvised explosives, packed with bolts and other metal objects, was both deadly and horrific. In total, 52 commuters from widely varying national, ethnic, age and occupational backgrounds died, and hundreds were injured, some very seriously with lifelong after effects. In the aftermath, many critical questions were raised, first, about the speed of the response by the emergency services and whether this attack was preventable through information already held by MI5. Calls for a full public inquiry were resisted by government, with a much more limited report issued by Parliament that outlined the key facts known. After much campaigning, survivors and bereaved relatives did succeed in gaining an Inquest in 2010/11.⁷ This both provided the opportunity for survivors and relatives to hear the full facts about what happened to individuals during each bomb attack and shed some new light on the behaviour of the individual bombers in the run-up to the attack. This added some helpful detail to the facts of the plot identified by the initial police investigation and by the previous government report. It remains unclear whether others were involved in the planning and preparation of the 7/7 attacks. In 2008 the trial of three associates of Sidique Khan collapsed after they had been accused of conducting a ‘hostile reconnaissance’ mission with two of the attackers seven months before the July 2005 attacks. All three had attended training camps in Pakistan with Sidique Khan, and objects belonging to them were later found in the ‘bomb-making factory’ in Hyde Park, Leeds, but this was not enough to secure convictions.⁸

The fact that this 7/7 attack was not an isolated one-off was graphically illustrated just two weeks later on the 21st July, when four young men of Somali origin attempted to carry out further suicide bomb attacks on London transport. These attacks only failed because their home-made explosives failed to detonate, leading to their later capture and conviction. In the heightened tension of the intervening period, armed police chased and shot dead an innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menenezes, at Stockwell tube station, believing him to be one of the 21/7 attackers who was about to detonate explosives. That incident and the official slowness to accept liability for the unlawful death set an unhelpful context for future government attempts to win public support towards anti-terrorism measures. Two years later, in June 2007, Bilal Abdulla, a doctor of Iraqi origin, and Kafeel Ahmed, an Indian-origin engineering student, both resident in the United Kingdom, were arrested after an attempted bombing of Glasgow airport, this coming days after their earlier failed attempt to detonate a car bomb in a crowded part of central London. Ahmed later died of the injuries he sustained during the attack.⁹

These actual incidents have proved to be just the tip of the iceberg, with a number of other plots foiled, leading to convictions and long terms of imprisonment. Those plots have included plans to bomb major shopping centres and nightclubs, and to detonate bombs simultaneously on a number of transatlantic airliners. These plots have largely involved young British Muslims or young Muslims with transnational links to Britain. This reality and the Christmas Day 2009 arrest of the London University-educated Nigerian Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called ‘underpants bomber’, after his unsuccessful attempt to detonate a bomb on a flight landing in Detroit, Michigan, have all led to a picture of a very serious terror threat among young British Muslims, something not undermined by the failure to proceed with trials after some arrests. All these incidents and other plots have involved plans to carry out explosions in public places, often through suicide attacks. This raises the key issue of why some young British Muslims have been suddenly attracted to violent extremism over the past few years and what is motivating them.

Radical Islam: The ‘single narrative’

What is clear about this terror threat is that the consistent motivation or justification for all these attacks and plots by people of Muslim faith, some of them only very recently converted or rediscovering this faith, is a complex mixture of religion and politics. Here, a very strong identification with the ‘ummah’, or one global Muslim community, and a political analysis of Muslims internationally being oppressed, threatened and humiliated provide a context within which a small minority of those holding such views then travel further down a path towards acts of violent extremism. As the rest of this chapter outlines, there is no one simple profile of, or explanation for, those individuals who do travel in that direction, but their common starting point has been the acceptance of a hard-line Islamist position, a politicised understanding of Islamic faith, that provides what had been described as the ‘single narrative’.¹⁰ This ‘single narrative’ explains the world, and the individual’s life and experiences within it, in terms of the oppression of the Muslim umm...

Table of contents

• Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1: The Threat of Violent Extremism
• 2: Community Cohesion
• 3: Preventing Violent Extremism
• 4: British Muslims
• 5: Confusion on the Ground?
• 6: Spooks?
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index