A former civil servant has written about her experience of a civil-service counter-terrorism course at King's College London. It makes for disturbing reading.
Writing in Fathom earlier this month, Anna Stanley recalls an academic expert on extremism telling attendees that author and journalist Douglas Murray and comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan were examples of 'far right' extremists. The lecturer then told attendees that society needed to find 'ways to suppress' such figures. He complained that just de-platforming them 'would cause issues', because 'they have millions of followers'.
It gets worse. While this extremism specialist was only too happy to call for tough action against the likes of Joe Rogan, who is not 'far right' in the slightest, other lecturers on the course were restrained and even sympathetic towards Islamist extremists.
Though the course took place before the atrocities of 7 October, it is still shocking to read of extremism experts encouraging civil servants to consider Hamas as 'freedom fighters'. After all, Hamas is a proscribed terrorist group under UK law. Yet lecturers were warning civil servants of the risks of making 'moral judgements' about Islamist terrorists.
Stanley's experience of the King's College course illustrates the double standards at work in our elites' approach to terrorism and extremism. As William Shawcross explained in the UK government's review of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy last year, there tends to be an 'expansive approach to the extreme right-wing', capturing a variety of influences 'so broad it has included mildly controversial or provocative forms of mainstream, right-wing-leaning commentary that have no meaningful connection to terrorism or radicalisation'. At the same time, wrote Shawcross, there tends to be a much narrower approach to Islamism, 'centred around proscribed organisations, ignoring the contribution of non-violent Islamist narratives and networks to terrorism'
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