This is a guest post by Ali Suburbanite
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A few days ago, Shahid Malik MP issued a statement in the Guardian in support of the Prevent initiative. Malik is careful to take pains to explain clearly the Prevent agenda; what it is and what it is not.
It is important to set the record straight: Prevent is not about spying on innocent people. Nor is Prevent about criminalising free speech. Recent comments have claimed that the focus of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Contest, is nonviolent extremism. This is not the case.
Contest is a counter-terrorism strategy that is freely available online, and which we would urge people to read before entering a debate without all the facts. The primary purpose of Prevent, one part of that strategy, is to protect the public by stopping people becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremism. We would be astonished to find anyone who would disagree with the importance of this work. We know, and have set out publicly in Contest, that we face a real and sustained threat from al-Qaida and al-Qaida-influenced groups. Pretending the threat does not exist would be a failure of the most basic duty of government, which is to protect the public.
Symbols at EDL protests undermine their ‘non-racist’ claims
This is a guest post by Lucy James, a research fellow at Quilliam. She writes in a personal capacity.
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In the past months the English Defence League (EDL) have held a series of protests in UK cities: Luton (from where they have been banned from protesting for 3 months), Birmingham, Manchester and Newport (hosted by the allied Welsh Defence League). Last Saturday they arrived in Leeds.
I have been following each of these protests closely. Aside from their chants, placards and police scuffles, it seems to me that they are adopting a couple of symbols in a way which is somewhat concerning and needs highlighting: