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Aug 11, 2016

Fighting Hate Speech — British Style

by Judith Bergman
August 7, 2016

In April, leaks from the review of extremism in prisons, which was commissioned by former British Justice Secretary Michael Gove and conducted by former prison governor Ian Acheson, revealed that Islamic hate literature — misogynistic and homophobic pamphlets and hate tracts endorsing the killing of apostates — is freely available on the bookshelves of British prisons. The hate literature is distributed to inmates by Muslim chaplains, who themselves are appointed by the Ministry of Justice.

According to the Daily Mail, a Whitehall source said that the material was kept in prison chaplaincy rooms and was available for anyone to come in and pick it up. The leaked review also found that chaplains at some prisons encouraged inmates to raise money for Islamic charities linked to international terrorism.

The review will finally be released to the public in August, after a long delay due, according to the Daily Mail, to the findings of the review sparking an urgent internal alert, because of the risk of “severe reputational damage” to the Ministry of Justice. Chris Phillips, the former head of the National Counter Terrorism Security Office, a police unit that works closely with the government on its counter-terrorism strategy, warned last year that staff shortages in prisons were making it harder to tackle Islamic radicalization, because extremists were not properly monitored. Then Home Secretary Theresa May rejected the claim by saying that the government was looking at “and continue to look at” preventative measures.

One former prison officer told the BBC that the “problem within prisons now is getting to a critical point”, with “many Muslim prisoners basically taking over the law of the prison.”

In June, a Muslim cleric told the BBC that a manual used by imams to teach prison inmates about Islam risks “turning people into jihadis.” Sheikh Musa Admani, who according to the BBC is a chaplain and expert in interpreting Islamic texts, and has worked extensively on anti-radicalization programs in the UK and abroad, told the BBC that the so-called Tarbiyahprogramme, used in English and Welsh prisons since 2011, could turn people towards violence and should be withdrawn. A section of the program is on jihad, and it says taking up arms to fight “evil” is “one of the noblest acts.” According to the BBC, the Tarbiyah program was co-written by a number of imams and Ahtsham Ali, a prisons adviser to the Ministry of Justice. According to Sheikh Musa Admani:

“This document sets out the steps and then addresses various forms of jihad and then goes on to emphasise a particular type i.e. the killing and the fighting. It incites people to take up arms… It prepares people for violence. It could turn people when they come out of prison, supposedly rehabilitated, back into violence.”

Notably, all this is happening despite the fact that the British government’s anti-extremism Prevent strategy requires prisons to stop extremists radicalizing inmates. Clearly, that is not going very well.