Prevent Strategy: How Does the British Right Plan to Dismantle Islam and Monitor Muslims?

In 2012, William Shawcross, then director of the Henry Jackson Society, gave a speech in the United States: “I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly growing Islamic populations.”

These comments reflect the essence of Shawcross’s purported independent review of the controversial Prevent Strategy, published earlier this month.

For most of the 190-page report, Shawcross—known for his advocacy of extrajudicial concentration camps such as Guantanamo Bay and torture tactics such as waterboarding—listed why the war on terror was in the first place, suggesting that Muslims posed an extraordinary threat so Britain’s response should be exceptional.

The Shawcross report claims that the far-right does not pose a similar threat. The report points to the fear that some may have of focusing on Islamists.

But it should happen at all costs, and the public should overcome its anxiety about showing its racism—or rather its hatred of Muslims.

The Shawcross report insists that “the value of preventing people from being radicalized into terrorism is incalculable.”

With the alleged existential threat growing, the Shawcross report paves the way for a redesign of Prevent’s strategy to target Muslims.

 

Prevent Islam

Tensions have long been fueled by ways to combat extremism. One camp wants to expand the fight against extremism to include all forms of violence, including misogyny.

For example, Tim Squirrell of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) argues that “[Andrew] Tate clearly represents a risk of radicalizing young men into misogynist extremism.”

By doing so, this anti-extremism camp is trying to erase all the differences between the types of counter-extremism strategies.

In the past few years, Prevent belonged to the first camp that initially targeted Muslims, but its operations are now “without distinction” and “threat-agnostic.”

Shawcross, who is at the forefront of the second anti-extremism camp, abhors the “absence of differences” and sees it as a weakness to the real threat: Islamism.

Shawcross’s reaction is clearly partly due to the fact that racism in the non-differential deterrence strategies promoted by Prevent is not recognized by him.

He is not completely opposed to the idea of other threats besides Muslims but is not satisfied with the lack of differentiation between them.

Shawcross tries to justify his claims that the threat posed by Islamists is undermined and underestimated on Prevent.

For example, his report criticizes the “mixed/unstable/unclear” category in Prevent’s referral law statistics because it found that diverse categories include more Muslims than official Prevent statistics reveal.

Ironically, this has been the exact argument of Prevent critics for years. The Shawcross report relies heavily on case studies to argue that Islamists should take precedence and that the threat posed by the far right is exaggerated.

The report is replete with examples of Muslims committing acts of violence—not all of them within the UK—as evidence of the nature of the threat they pose.

It is also devoid of any context for the demographics of Muslims in the UK and the scant relationship they have to any form of violence.

This framing represents the key. The Shawcross report is rooted in the positions of right-wing think tanks, policy exchanges, and the Henry Jackson Society, which promote the idea that Islam represents an existential threat to secular liberal societies if left unchecked.

In an ironic way, the propaganda propagated by far-right killers like Brenton Tarrant expressed these views.

However, Shawcross’s review avoids how this violence is rooted in narratives that are completely normalized in public discourse. According to him, only far-right groups (such as neo-Nazis) are of concern here.

 

‘Bad Muslim’

The late release of William Shawcross’s review of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy reveals that we can shake off the myth that there is a “good Muslim.”

The pages of the review are permeated with a deep distrust of Muslims, leading to renewed right-wing metaphors that Islamic ideology is the root cause of terrorism.

The Shawcross report challenges the evolution of Prevent’s strategy, which has led to a focus on vulnerabilities that could leave anyone vulnerable to the threat of radicalization.

The report focuses on eradicating what it calls “bad Islam” from society. To illustrate this point, the Shawcross report gives the impression that one can clearly differentiate between bad, nonviolent, radical Islamic ideas and good and liberal-secular Islamic ideas. This distinction is the thrust of its entire review.

In a way, the Shawcross report hopes to draw strict lines about complex, disparate, and often conflicting Islamic schools of thought over decades.

For Prevent’s new strategy to shift from weakness and ideology, it will depend on exposing this clear distinction between good and bad Islam and then unifying this distinction in policy and practice.

But Shawcross did not explain how to distinguish between bad Muslims and good Muslims. Instead, it relies heavily on case examples to indicate the line in which bad Islam manifests.

Islamophobic scholars will find none of Shawcross’s examples of Islam surprising—from criticism of Zionism and opposition to domestic and international policies to conservative religious views, and so on.

Moreover, Shawcross attempts to separate Islam from political Islam by suggesting that the latter refers to Muslims who place Islam “at the center of an individual’s identity, and must govern all social and political decision-making.”

Coupled with thoughts on campaigns for the “oppressed,” he wrote in quotation marks to indicate his skepticism of this category; there seems to be something suspicious when Muslims worry about their treatment locally and globally.

What the Shawcross report for Prevent Strategy wants is actually a tightly managed Islamic civil society based on decades of shaming, provoking, and vague insinuations.

The Shawcross report is clearly inspired by countries such as France, where Islamist organizations have been shut down for the same purpose.

Shawcross is trying to create a rift between those Muslims who either close in on themselves or politicize them only according to the interests of the state on the one hand, and those who employ their faith in their policies on the other.

This is how Shawcross distinguishes between “Islamists, those who subscribe to and promote a hard-line political ideology, and Muslims, those who follow and practice Islam.”

 

Deterrence Strategy

Shawcross actually insists that Prevent program officials should be ideologically trained to identify—perhaps through tests of ideological and religious purity—those who fall outside what the state considers “good Muslims.”

For Shawcross, Muslims who align their religion with the interests of the state are the best.

However, there is a great irony in this, as the “preventive review” indicates how little the link to this condition is, especially since Shawcross specifically pursues Muslims who have worked closely with the UK government and received funding from the Prevent program.

According to him, these Muslims have come very close to “extremism”; for example, by sharing a protest video about Palestine where a song by rapper Loki was played in the background—which for him underscores the instability of the “good Muslim” category.

In the margins of the report, Dr. Musharraf Hussain—the man who received funding from the Prevent program and went on funded trips to “Israel” (a move strongly denounced by Islamist groups in the UK)—is mentioned.

However, Shawcross removed Hussein from the category of “good Muslim” because of his online posts that ostensibly called for respect for Palestinian rights. The politicization of pro-Palestinian narratives seems to intensify further under Shawcross.

Furthermore, the Shawcross report highlights the role of the highly vague Extremist Disorders Unit, a body capable of disrupting the lives of Muslims in the UK without any transparency, according to think tanks and right-wing groups. But every accusation of “extremism” towards Muslims has serious consequences in their lives and should not be taken lightly.

Ultimately, the Prevent Review seeks to legitimize unfair referrals based on innate sentiment without fear of being labeled racist or anti-Muslim, which is the goal of the Shawcross report. Conservatives have been concerned for some time about the implications of a “culture of exclusion,” but the extent to which Muslims as a whole are either censored or self-censored is enormous and well documented in research.

As William Shawcross tries to redefine the boundaries of accepted Islam in the Privilege Review, Muslims will face new challenges in exercising their faith and democratic rights without state oversight and administration.