THERESA MAY’s most senior counterterrorism adviser has warned against portraying Muslim communities as “intrinsically extremist” days after David Cameron said some were “quietly condoning” radicalisation.
Charles Farr, director-general of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, said there was a risk of over-simplification given that around 2.7 million Muslims live in Britain but just a few hundred had joined Isil in the Middle East.
Mr Farr knocked back suggestions that the country was losing the online war against jihadists, and suggested the Government was keeping step with the waves of propaganda being uploaded by Islamist radicals.
The comments contrast with Mr Cameron’s keynote speech on radicalisation last week, when he toughened his rhetoric on the responsibilities Muslim leaders had to stamp out extremism.
Speaking at a Jewish News conference on Israel, Mr Farr warned of the dangers of playing up the numbers of Britons who have headed to the Middle East to join Isil. He said he was “a little bit worried” by the suggestion that radicalisation was a genie that had already left the bottle – the title of the debate he spoke at – and said people should be “really cautious”.
As few as 100 Britons may be fighting for Isil, Mr Farr said. “It’s not to say the challenges they pose are not significant, they are. But … the more we overstate them, the more, frankly, we risk labelling Muslim communities as somehow intrinsically extremist, which actually, despite an unprecedented wealth of social media propaganda, they have proved not to be. So I think we need to be cautious with our metaphors and with our numbers.”
The warning from Mr Farr, who previously oversaw security at the London 2012 Olympics, strikes a different tone from the Prime Minister, who implied that parts of Britain’s Muslim communities were complicit in the radicalisation that was convincing some teenagers to flee to the Middle East.
He suggested anti-Western rhetoric was something “quietly condoned online or perhaps even in parts of your local community” and could lead to extremism.
Asked about social media, Mr Farr said Facebook, Twitter and other companies had showed “good collaboration” with British security services in taking down radicalising content when flagged.
However the senior civil servant said the Government did have a “problem” getting the American firms to hand data on suspicious users that could help in investigations.
He also revealed that the kinds of people drawn to Isil often had “personal problems” and could be seeking excitement. “The background of broken families, lack of integration into what we might call mainstream society, some level of criminality, sometimes family conflict, are all more than normally apparent,” Mr Farr said of those who head east to fight with extremists.
He added: “People join terrorist organisations in this country and in others because they get something out of them beyond merely satisfaction of an ideological commitment.
“Sometimes it’s about resolution of personal problems, sometimes it’s about certainty in an environment which has deprived them of it, sometimes it’s about excitement and esteem, and we should not omit the last two factors.”