Organised campaign to hobble anti-terror fight

Andrew Gilligan in the Telegraph

An organised campaign to undermine Britain’s fight against terrorism can be revealed today.

Islamist activists linked to Cage, a group known to sympathise with terrorists, are using coordinated leaks to mainstream news organisations, including the BBC, to spread fear and confusion in Muslim communities about the Government’s anti-terror policy, Prevent.

Investigations by the Telegraph reveal that several widely reported recent stories about Prevent are false or exaggerated – and many of the supposedly “ordinary Muslim” victims are in fact activists in the campaign, known as Prevent Watch. The stories include a claim which became a cause célèbre for Prevent’s opponents – that a Muslim schoolboy from London was “interrogated like a criminal” for using the phrase “ecoterrorism” in class.

The boy’s mother, Ifhat Smith, who took the story to the media, presented herself as a traumatised ordinary Londoner. She is in fact an activist in the Prevent Watch campaign and a key figure in the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which believes in replacing secular democratic government with Islamic government.

In a “scathing” court judgment to be published shortly, Mrs Smith’s legal claim against her son’s school and the Government has been dismissed as baseless and she has been ordered to pay £1,000 for wasting court time.

In November, the BBC reported that the east London council of Waltham Forest had mistakenly released the first names of some primary school pupils thought at risk of radicalisation.

The release came as the result of a parent’s Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence about Prevent. The parent concerned, Haras Ahmed, described Prevent as “a disaster from start to finish”, and said he was “appalled [that] children’s data, such sensitive data, are released.”

However, a council spokesman said that the names had been blocked out in the release sent to Mr Ahmed but that the information sent had been “manipulated by a third party to reveal the blocked-out names.”

In the coverage, Mr Ahmed presented himself as merely an ordinary parent. However, he is also an activist in Prevent Watch. An online search would have revealed that he was listed to speak at a meeting with the group only four days after the story aired.

At a rally in Waltham Forest later this week, Mrs Smith and Mr Ahmed will share a platform with Jahangir Mohammed, a Cage activist, regular speaker at its events and co-author of at least three reports for Cage, one of which described Prevent as a “cradle-to-grave police state.”

Mr Mohammed wrote an article in the Socialist Worker for Cage, blaming the security services for the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby and saying that “if anyone radicalised [the killer Michael Adebolajo], it was them.” There is no suggestion that Mrs Smith or Mr Ahmed are supporters of terrorism.

Another speaker at Wednesday’s rally will be Weyman Bennett, a hard-Left activist who has falsely claimed that Prevent criminalises any opponent of the Government, stating that “if you question Cameron, you are a non-violent extremist.” Alex Kenny, an senior member of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), will also speak.

As The Telegraph revealed last week, Mr Kenny and other NUT leaders and activists in east London are working with Cage and Mend to undermine Prevent, even though teachers have a legal duty to safeguard pupils from extremism.

Prevent Watch claims that Prevent “singles out” Muslims because it is “racist”. Almost all terrorist plots and attacks in Great Britain over the last ten years have involved Muslims, and all those who have joined Isil are Muslim. However, only 56 per cent of those referred for Channel interventions are Muslim.