Wednesday, 11th March 2009
Wednesday, 11th March 2009
Persistently Validating Extremism
12:52am
Policy Exchange has produced yet another extremely important pamphlet on radical Islamism and the grievous and indeed lethal errors in government policy towards it. Entitled Choosing Our Friends Wisely by Shiraz Maher and Martin Frampton, it is a devastating critique of the centrepiece of that policy, a strategy called Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE). Recently, it was reported that there was a strong feeling in parts of the security establishment that this strategy had been a disaster; defining the problem as only ‘violent’ extremism’, the government had failed to grasp that the core problem is actually religious/ ideological extremism which produces a continuum of divisive, antisocial or threatening views which provides the sea in which violence swims. The strategy should therefore be changed to ‘Preventing Extremism.’
This is a case I have made many times, not least in...
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