Article by By Ian
Acheson for the Centre for Policy Studies
‘Jews don’t count’, they say, except perhaps in the malign
statistics of hatred. Last week’s Shawcross review of the Prevent
programme shone a light on just how pernicious and deep-seated
antisemitism is among those judged to be at risk of becoming
terrorists.
Shawcross looked at a number of ‘Channel‘ referrals and was
alarmed by what he found. Channel is the part of Prevent, past
the initial screening triage, where those judged to be genuinely
risky potential extremists get tailored intervention from
counter-terrorism professionals.
While the language used in virtually every official description
of the Prevent programme is achingly neutral on this process,
bingeing on the verbiage of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘safeguarding’,
when you get to Channel things are more straightforward: you’re a
potential terrorism risk to others. To illustrate the point, in
the latest government Prevent statistics, of the 6,848 referrals
in the year ending March 2022, only 13% were adopted as a Channel
case.
Shawcross found a prevalence of ‘extreme antisemitism’ in the
Channel cases he dip sampled. What’s striking is that
antisemitism is an equal opportunities hatred. It is mobilised by
extreme left, right and Islamist ideologues and their followers.
Perhaps this explains a pre-eminence of obsessive, ‘fanatical’
violent hatred towards Jews in the cases he examined – behaviour
that included the professed desire to murder and bomb Jews and
the burning of synagogues.
Perhaps the hatred was to some extent animated by what was
happening in Israel and Gaza in the timescale covered by the
cases. In 2021 a pro-Palestinian rally drove through a Jewish
part of London with the occupants observed on widely circulated
video shouting , ‘Fuck the Jews, rape their daughters’ through a
megaphone. The state’s response, eventually, was to decline to
prosecute those identified because of ‘insufficient evidence’. In
November of the same year, the Metropolitan Police failed to
secure any arrests or convictions for another widely publicised
antisemitic attack on a group of Jewish
teenagers celebrating Hanukkah on a bus in
central London. The BBC were later censured by Ofcom for
‘significant editorial failings’ for asserting in reports of the
incident that the occupants of the bus provoked the attack.
It’s quite possible that such a pathetic and supine response to
these hate crimes has encouraged antisemites to think themselves
unimpeachable and untouchable. Righteousness kills.
The latest 2022 census data shows that people identifying as
Jewish comprise just 0.46% of the population of England and
Wales. They would all fit into a city the size of Sunderland.
Great hatred, little room. Jews are disproportionately attacked
for their religion and their very existence is conflated with
that of the state of Israel to justify othering one of this
countries smallest ethnic minorities.
The Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity that analyses
antisemitic hate crime, continues to report historically high
levels of antisemitic attacks in Britain both online and on the
streets. Its latest annual report shows a worrying number of
young people under 18 drawn into antisemitic behaviour, just the
sort of young people who eventually make it on to the Prevent
radar. In over 50% of the cases, one or more ideological themes
was present, including glorification of the architects of the
Holocaust and other Nazi-related rhetoric. The CST relates this
to the increasing influence of the far right on young
people.
Shawcross was right to say that the Government needs to
investigate whether his dip sample of Channel cases is
representative of a wider trend. Furthermore, he makes the
crucial point that while these are disgusting behaviours, as is
the toxic anti-Muslim hatred that clearly exists, they will
certainly not all be forerunners of terrorist attacks.
Prevent is not the right vehicle to contain virulent
antisemitism. It merely treats the symptoms of a well-entrenched
pathology. Mission creep has meant it is treating far too much
and often not well enough. But there does need to be a wider
societal response – and a much more muscular one – to the
relative impunity and official indifference that people who hate
Jews prosper under. In particular, the state must taken on
the people who Shawcross calls the ‘chronic’ radicalisers – those
whose barely legal activities and narratives legitimise extremism
that targets Jewish people. Some of the bravest people I know are
British Muslims engaged in this work. They are detested by
Islamists, tired, isolated and fearful because the state is not
on the field with them.
That sort of impunity is an incubator for the smaller number of
people who have murder in mind and in deed. Jews must count. If
they don’t, who is next?
