Diane Abbott criticises UK counter-terror policies

[Aexodus]

Edit: Copied from post 9, the original content below is from the wrong terror report, from March. This one’s from 2 days ago.

Diane Abbot hosted an event two days ago, endorsing a report titled “Leaving the War on Terror – A Progressive Alternative to Counter-Terrorism Policy” published by the transnational Institute. Two sections of it I want to discuss first then we can expand the conversation. Link to report.

Links: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ope...ror-look-like/
https://www.cage.ngo/landmark-study-...-war-on-terror

So first of all, this report calls for the abolition of designated terrorist org lists.



Yes, they want to stop proscribing terrorist groups. This thing wants us to repeal almost all of our post-9/11 counter terror legislation.

Elsewhere in the ‘Leaving the War on terrorism’ report:



Then it downplays the existence of Islamist groups. This would be our government policy. This is bonkers that Abbott would endorse such a report. It’s also praised by OpenDemocracy and CAGE, a Muslim group.

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Diane Abbot, who is the Shadow Home Secretary for the Labour Party, has criticised UK counter-terror policies in a presentation of a report that labelled current policies as racist. Since she is the Shadow Home Secretary, this means that in a Labour government she would be in charge of our police force and our counter-terrorism policies.

British based lobbyist group Spinwatch has seized on growing concerns over Islamophobic activity and hate speech to campaign against counter-extremism efforts designed to tackle the rise of terror.

A meeting in the House of Commons attended by the Labour home affairs spokeswoman, Diane Abbott saw the presentation of a new report containing a series of allegations that Europe’s main initiatives designed to counter the rise of ISIS and other terror groups, were targeted exclusively against Muslims.

The report acknowledgements attributed part of its research work to the assistance of MEND, a British-based advocacy group that has faced accusations of extremist links and works as a close ally of CAGE, where Moazzam Begg, the former Guantanamo detainee works as outreach director.

Spinwatch is a transparency organisation that has not published a donor list since 2016 but the list of its most recent donors includes a variety of Muslim Brotherhood backers, including the Cordoba Foundation run by Anas Al-Tikriti, president of the Muslim Association of Britain.

At the presentation researchers said that Western counter-terror policies were linked to the massacres committed by the Christchurch attacker in New Zealand who committed mass murder against friday worshippers in a Mosque, and Anders Brevik who shot dozens of socialist students in Norway in 2011.

The bridge between the two was a concept described as the "counter-jihad movement". “Reflecting a broader shift on the far-right away from ‘old’ anti-semitism and towards islamophobia, the counter-jihad movement can be seen as a ‘new’ form of racism,” it said. “We consider how this inversion may have been facilitated by the onset of a historical ‘counter-extremism’ frameworks which tend to equate far-left and far-right.”

It’s quite a leap to connect counter-terrorist policies to ethno-nationalist terrorists. The two attacks aren’t even counter-jihad, but against Muslims even existing in those countries with extermination of them as a valid tactic. These men also viewed a religious differentiation through a racial lens.

The report also attacked French secularism, saying it was used by counter terror policies to target and discriminate against French Muslims.

The report argues official French policies discriminated against Muslims. “While these projects may not be helping to prevent terrorism, we argue that they have assisted the rise of far-right,” it said. “Though we did not find counter-jihad groups in France borrowing the rhetoric of counter-extremism as much as in the UK and Germany, explicit islamophobia, targeting of mosques and the weaponisation of laïcité, the French concept of secularism, have all become thoroughly mainstream.”

The article linked above mentions how the Tony Blair Institute named both CAGE and MEND as groups that perpetuate a ‘siege mentality’ which not only hinders counter-extremism efforts, but inhibits integration into British society.

Diane Abbott has a history of being opposed to UK counter-terror laws, consistently voting against counter-terror acts and bills. For example, she was opposed to designating Al Quaeda as a terrorist organisation. When given a list of terrorist groups she voted against proscribing, she said she regarded some of them as dissidents not terrorist. (As if there’s some sort of difference, in my opinion).

The gist of the report presented by Diane Abbot is that our current counter-terror policies are Islamophobic, and are therefore racist. For the scope of this thread I ask whether current policies are deliberately or arbitrarily anti-Muslim, or whether they inevitably are more active in communities more vulnerable to radicalisation, as well as whether or not Diane Abbott would be fit for the office of Home Secretary in a Labour Government. For example, Northern Irish communities, or Muslim communities. I also disagree that Islamophobia is racism, and I’ve outlined my thoughts on that here.

Here’s the report itself, entitled “Islamophobia in Europe: How governments are enabling the far-right ‘counter-jihad’ movement” which I want to look into later. Feel free to have a look at it. http://powerbase.info/images/6/6c/Ak...eport-2019.pdf