Category Archives: PVE

What Inayat Said

By Guest | Published: July 24, 2009

This is a cross-post from the Hitchens-Maher ‘Focus on Islamism’ blog.

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The government has announced it will be conducting a major review into ‘Prevent’, one of the pillars of its overall counter-terrorism strategy known as ‘Contest’. The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) will be setting up a Committee to examine:

[...] the effectiveness of the ‘Prevent’ programme to date, and its likely effectiveness in the future, with particular reference to the following questions:

  • Is the Prevent programme the right way of addressing the problem of violent extremism, or are there better ways of doing it?
  • How robust is the Government’s analysis of the factors which lead people to become involved in violent extremism? Is the ‘Prevent’ programme appropriately targeted to address the most important of those factors?
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Also posted in Your View | 6 Comments

Picking on Moderates

By Yossarian | Published: July 19, 2009

Articles here at the Spittoon tend to be quite controversial. For this we make no apologies. Normally this provokes the ire of members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Jamaat-e-Islami and other Islamist groups, but on one particular occasion I guest posted a piece written by ‘Al-Qanaas Al-Masri’. It investigated links between the City Circle and IIIT, a group whose US branch is closely linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, and was entitled ‘The City Circle – Not So Moderate After All?’

This sent certain individuals into a tailspin. Not because of what was suggested by the article (none of its many critics attempted a refutation of the points it made) but because its author had the audacity to pick on moderates. These critics missed the point. The post was not a bitter attempt to blacken the name of people doing good work, rather it sought to point out to a moderate organisation that some of its allies were letting the side down.

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Also posted in Antisemitism, Blogosphere, Islamism, Israel/Palestine | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

Conspiracy Theories and Birmingham Central Mosque

By Guest | Published: July 11, 2009

This is a cross-post of an article by Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens from his blog.

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Mohammad Naseem, Chairman of the influential Birmingham Central Mosque (BCM), is well known for his ‘questions’ regarding the true perpetrators of the July 7 terrorist attacks in London. Last weekend, he finally crossed over to the realm of total and all encompassing lunacy.

My fellow Standpoint blogger, Nick Cohen, and David Aaronovitch have both recently written extensively about conspiracy theories, including those surrounding 9/11 and 7/7. One of the main complaints of both authors is the increasing trend towards the mainstreaming of theories that are based on little more than questions and debunked ‘facts’. In the case of 7/7, Cohen writes that:

More than half of British Muslims (56 per cent) agreed that the [9/11] hijackers were innocent stooges of a devilish plot, and one-quarter went on to say that ‘the British government was involved in some way’ with the 7/7 atrocities on the London Transport system.

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Posted in PVE | 1 Comment

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