– UK anti-terror chief: UK is “integrating,” not prosecuting, Islamic State returnees:
A senior government adviser has told the BBC that the authorities are not prosecuting many Islamic State volunteers, believing they should be reintegrated rather than punished.
Britain continues to expose its citizens to danger and jihad attacks. The UK is currently facing the most severe terror threat ever.
If Britain is hoping to enter these Islamic State jihadists into deradicalization programs, they don’t work. Professor Boaz Ganor, from the International Policy Institute for Counter Terrorism once stated that deradicalization is “practically impossible”; the London Tube jihad bomber had attended a deradicalization program; and France’s only jihadi deradicalization center was closed because it was based on voluntary participation as it should be, and it was empty.
Quite some time ago, Jihad Watch reported the real reason why returning jihadists were not being prosecuted. It was because UK officials feared seeming “anti-Muslim.”
“UK Anti-Terror Tsar: UK Authorities Not Prosecuting Islamic State Returnees to Avoid Creating a ‘Lost Generation”, by Jack Montgomery, Breitbart, October 21, 2017:
A senior government adviser has told the BBC that the authorities are not prosecuting many Islamic State volunteers, believing they should be reintegrated rather than punished.
Max Hill QC, who acts as the government’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, told Radio 4 that “we do have a significant number [of Islamic State volunteers] already back in this country who have previously gone to Iraq and Syria” — currently estimated at something over 400.
“That means that the authorities have looked at them, and looked at them hard, and decided that they do not justify prosecution, and really we should be looking towards reintegration and moving away from any notion that we’re going to lose a generation thanks to this travel.”
“But that’s fascinating,” responded the BBC presenter.
“Because there is a school of thought, isn’t there, that looks and these people and thinks, ‘Well hang on a second they’ve gone to a place where mass murders were being committed, they’ve gone there voluntarily, they’ve gone there presumably because they have some enthusiasm for what was happening there’ — it is odd to treat them as if they’ve committed no offence,” he said.
“And it’s not a decision that MI5 and others will have taken lightly,” responded Hill.
“But they have left space, and I think they’re right to do so, for those who … travelled out of a sense of naivety, possibly with some brainwashing along the way, possibly in their mid-teens … We have to leave space for those individuals to diverted away from the criminal courts,” he insisted.
Having previously played Devil’s Advocate, the presenter appeared to accept this at face value.
“That’s a thoroughly interesting one isn’t it Richard Barrett,” he said to his other guest, a former MI6 global counter-terrorism director. “Actually, surprising numbers, possibly, of these people, are actually not necessarily a danger to us.”
“I think that’s absolutely right,” agreed Barrett. “Many of them, I think, went to join something new, something that looked bright and attractive … and came back highly disillusioned,” he suggested.
Hill conceded that there was no doubt that some of the people in question will have carried out “the most serious criminal offences” in Iraq and Syria, but assured viewers that “in any case where there is evidence of that” they would appear before a criminal court.
How evidence of crimes committed in a jihadist-controlled warzone might be gathered was left unexplained, however……
H/t reader kevin a.
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