A former civil servant, Anna Stanley reports on a counter-terrorism course she attended which she found a deeply, existentially depressing experience. She argues that ‘prestigious’ educational institutions are delivering politically biased, anti-Government training, amounting to indoctrination and that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.
I recently attended a Kings College course called ‘Issues in Countering Terrorism’. Organised by the Centre for Defence Studies, it was designed for civil servants and professionals in counter-terrorism. Staff from the Foreign Office, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defence and Home Office attended. Facilitating this relatively new three-day course were senior lecturers from the Security Studies Department.
The civil servants were given presentations by Kings College lecturers while Visiting Senior Research Fellows and Professors also spoke. These included those formerly holding positions such as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director of GCHQ, Defence Minister and Foreign Office Director.
The course was a deeply, existentially depressing experience.
‘Prestigious’ educational institutions are delivering politically biased, anti-Government training, amounting to indoctrination. It confirmed my fears – that extremism and terrorism are misunderstood by civil servants to the point of being a national security risk.
Underpinning their presentations, some of the lecturers relayed typical post-modern identity politics.
The course began with the issue of definitions. What is terrorism? Without anyone providing an opposing standpoint, we were taught the adage, “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”
I posed to the room: “Surely we can acknowledge subjectivity while being able to come up with a collective understanding of what terrorism is?” Some 40 civil servants looked at me blankly. No?
I wondered why we were there.
The danger of understanding terrorism with cultural relativism is that it breeds moral apathy; the kind that says, “Who are we, mere democratic, liberal Westerners to impose our morality onto others? Who are we to say our culture is superior to others?”
These are luxury attitudes. It is easy to be sat in Kings College London and feel that all cultures are equal, when you haven’t been anally raped at a peace festival by someone shouting “Allahu Akbar” and held hostage. In the introduction to the course, labelling an organisation as terrorist was described as a problem because it “implies a moral judgement”. Nothing was said about why a moral judgement might be appropriate.
All the civil servant participants were given a topic to research and present. One attendee said her brother had been radicalised and fought in Syria for Islamic State (ISIS). Phew, I thought. At least one person here will understand the problems of extremism. Her presentation was about the U.K.’s Counter Terrorism Strategy, Prevent. She argued Prevent is inherently racist because it focuses on Islamist extremism. The mere mention of Islamist extremism makes Muslims “feel uncomfortable”, she argued. Her brother would most certainly have agreed.
I raised the point that nearly 70% of terrorist attacks in the U.K. are Islamist. Similarly, 70% of lung cancer cases are caused by smoking. It would be absurd to avoid mentioning this in the study of cancer so smokers don’t feel uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, this comparison was not well received.
Later on, we were shown an ISIS propaganda recruitment video filmed in Syria. The same attendee’s face lit up. Laughing and pointing at the jihadi in the video, “He used to go to my school! I know him!” she exclaimed. Mouth agape, I looked around the room for responses to yet another disclosure involving personal links to ISIS terrorists. I appeared to be the only one to find this extraordinary.
There was an irony to being surrounded by civil servants who hate the concept of the state. As young professionals, they represented a microcosm of the views emanating from British universities: when it comes to extremism and counter terrorism, the state is not to be trusted.
The Head of Security Studies at Kings College read concernedly, “Problems of Definitions: Labelling a group terrorist can increase the state’s power”. The civil servants nodded in agreement.
The visiting speakers were political heavyweights. Possessing genuine expertise with interesting anecdotes, their past responses to crises like the Northern Ireland Troubles were referenced frequently. Yet I couldn’t help but feel many of their insights were lost by the audience.
One attendee provocatively asked a former head of GCHQ whether he “felt bad infringing on our civil liberties in the pursuit of terrorists”. Naïve and uninformed, the questioner had highlighted mainstream opinion that security services are routinely listening to innocent, random people’s phone calls or stalking their WhatsApps. Lacking was any appreciation the U.K. is exemplary. Protective legislation is laborious to the point of being near obstructive and investigations pursuing criminals and terrorists are rigorously audited.
Israel was referenced throughout the course. We were told some consider Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters whereas Israel was provided as a prime example when considering the question of whether a state can commit terrorism. In the introduction, one slide read “Condemning terrorism is to endorse the power of the strong over the weak”, a dangerous conclusion breeding anti-Israel positions. In this perspective, Israel is seen as a powerful aggressor and the Palestinians militarily disadvantaged in asymmetric warfare. Thus, the Palestinians are inherently oppressed an axiom that fuels the view that Israel is a terrorist state and Hamas’s atrocities are justifiably ‘contextualised’. To call Hamas terrorist – as the BBC is so pointedly resistant to doing – would be to “endorse the power of the strong over the weak”.
Another slide read, “Terrorism is not the problem, rather the systems they oppose are terrorist”, reflecting post-modern identity politics wrapped up as counter-terrorism education. Everything was viewed through the lens of power.
While the lecturer did not explicitly present the slides as reflecting his own beliefs, he said nothing to counter them.
I am grateful I attended the course before the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks. I have no doubt the pogrom would have been contextually justified as “merely the oppressed countering the oppressor”, with Israel’s response described as morally equivalent (or worse) to the atrocities.
None of the counter-terrorism lecturers (bar two) posted about the attacks on their otherwise informative social media platforms. Of these two, one Professor wrote a RUSI Think Tank commentary, saying Israeli “crisis meetings could be affected by a desire for revenge” and why “restraint in counter-terrorism is so important”.
During the span of the course, there was no mention of immigration being relevant to terrorism in the U.K., except as a view “given by the right wing”.
The course’s overriding emphasis was that Islamist extremism is exaggerated. Right-wing extremism was given more weight than is proportionate. This is in direct conflict with William Shawcross’s findings, in the latest Government commissioned review of its anti-radicalisation programme, Prevent.
One lecturer derogatorily described Shawcross as “the type of person who would say all current counter-terrorism professionals are woke… He is of that ilk”. This of course discredited Shawcross to the course attendees.
The lecturer further argued that Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan are both examples of the far Right. “To what extent should Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray be suppressed?” he asked. “They have millions of followers. To de-platform them would cause issues.”
Concluding his talk, the lecturer told a room full of Government professionals, “so, society needs to find other ways to suppress them”.
First published by Fathom.
Stop Press: Watch Douglas Murray react to the news that counter-terrorism experts want to ‘suppress’ him on Julia Hartley-Bewer’s show on TalkTV.
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Why are we not surprised. After 13 years of useless Tory government this is what the civil service stands for.
And how many years of useless, bigoted Labour government before that?
Conservative = Labour = The Political Class. Left and right wing now only exist in the minds of the populace. The entire system has shifted aggressively to the left. Far left actually. Communism is but a stones throw away. A theory that this article supports.
Welcome to the new Lebanon by the Atlantic.
50 plus years of leftist undermining has led to this. Not just the last tory government. This has been a sustained attack on the west. I blame the soviets: they instigated a disinformation and propaganda warfare campaign against the west from the 1930s onwards. Although the USSR has fallen, the virus they injected (metaphorically) into the west has spread and metastasised. It is powerful against weak and uninformed minds. There are also many neo communists in western institutions, media and the establishment. It has almost become the accepted norm that socialism is the only sensible way to order a society. The soviets have actually won the cold war. Fighting back would take similar decades. The only rapid solution is civil war, or major disorder that governments could not resist. Unfortunately.
“It is powerful against weak and uninformed minds”. Yes, Britain’s swathes of professional and managerial classes have sucked it up haven’t they?
“Find other ways to suppress them” The Nazis used Concentration Camps. The Soviets used the Gulag. Is that the kind of suppression our “politically impartial” Civil Service has in mind?
The Americans use solitary confinement for those they wish to define as insurrectionists for political gain. The Brits use it for Julian Assange. So I take your question as purely rhetorical, because the cards are already on the table.
Oh there’s no misunderstanding- they know exactly what they are doing
Thank you for a good, if deeply depressing, article.
By the way, this YT channel … https://www.youtube.com/@Travelingisraelinfo … from an Israeli tour guide, has some well-argued pro-Israel material … not that facts, logic or commonsense figure in anti-Israel rhetoric.
Concur about this YouTube channel. He’s an interesting guy. His observations about our religion of love and peace friends, is well observed.
I think this has to be one of the most worrying things I have ever read on DS.
What is it called when an organism starts attacking it’s own parts? It boils my you-know-what that my taxes go towards paying these traitors.
“Facilitating this relatively new three-day course were senior lecturers from the Security Studies Department.”
The evidence presented indicates to me that the WEF or subsidiaries therof have infiltrated the Security Studies Department. In the Civil Service attitudes and strategies are all top-down so crap logic at the top soon infects those at the bottom. Those tiddlers swimming in the middle soon get the message for fear of losing their spot on the greasy pole.
I know, I was in it.
This must be heartening to know if you’re a parent in the UK. That the authorities could not give a rat’s arse about determining the legit age of migrants before putting full-grown, beardy men in a secondary school, all because they identify as a child. So they’re presumably very up on doing background, CRB checks for teaching staff applicants but this pretense at ‘child safe-guarding’ ends when a migrant 30 odd year old man wants to pretend he’s a teenager. So I guess he’s whatever age he says he is then!
I know Tommy Robinson has been reporting on this and has videos on Rumble, talking to concerned parents and school kids because 13yr old girls are being approached by men posing as school kids and being sexually inappropriate, but all is enabled by sackless school staff. Why/how in the world is this allowed to happen?? Yet one more example of adults in a position of responsibility failing kids miserably.
”Half of all asylum seekers who claimed to be children in Britain since 2020 have turned out to be adults, with dozens even being above the age of thirty.
The practice of migrants claiming to be children, which increases their chances of the UK government granting them asylum in Britain, has increased to such a level that 45 per cent of the 8,766 migrants who claimed to be “kids” were reality adults, equating to 3,944 cases.
According to information from the Migration Watch UK reported by The Sun, there were 1,582 cases of migrants fraudulently claiming to be children in 2022, compared to 227 a decade prior. The think tank went on to reveal that 887 asylum seekers, at least 52 of whom were older than 30, falsely told border officials that they were children between January and September of last year.
The most prevalent country of origin for the fraudster migrants was Afghanistan with 1,361 cases, followed by Iran with 612, and Sudan with 550.
Migration Watch chairman Alp Mehmet told the paper: “That so many still go for this ruse, even when they obviously look much older, tells me it’s a deception that often works.”
The issue of asylum seekers posing as children has been longstanding in Britain, with minors being afforded increased welfare and protections compared to adult migrants and increased chances of being granted the right to remain in the country.”
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2024/01/09/nearly-half-of-uk-asylum-seekers-who-claim-to-be-children-are-adults-with-4000-cases-since-2020/
Well done for standing up to it.
Direct democracy, direct action is the way forward, as modelled by the severing of speed cams.
They don’t like it up ’em Capt Mainwairing.
Terrorism is a strategy (usually by minority extreme groups) of using spectacular acts of violence or threat thereof, to frighten, panic, destabilise civil society so that it pressurises its Government to give in to the demands of the group.
I thought the definition was well known.
Terrorism can also be a strategy of Governments to pacify and force compliance of the population by instilling fear, uncertainty, threats, coercive power – eg CoVid scamdemic.
What a terrifying article, thank goodness it’s been written and appears here.
It’s a dreadful article and badly written by someone unable to join the dots.
What do you think is wrong with it? To what dots are you referring? I think the happening here (at our expense) shows that the CS is totally out of control, it is acting against its own supposed principles. We know that “education” is now ruined with nonsense, it is time for severe action against all these leftie idiots. Have you spoken to any recent graduate, they are basicly ignorant of everything that underpins all society. Their subject knowledge is also abysmal, but that is because the whole time is spent being indoctrinated!
I knew people could Sleepwalk. —Apparently my dad used to walk about in the middle of the night in his sleep. —But I did not know a whole continent could Sleepwalk. ——That is exactly what Europe is doing. The Liberal Progressive mentality thinks it can socially engineer all crime away. ——How is that working out? –Not so good is it?
I see this article is now pinned to the top of zerohedge.com … over 500 comments so far … gaining traction.
The civil service is now an enemy of the people. These augian stables neednto be cleaned
When the islamists make their move, and the great civil war breaks out, the civil service traitors (and, it seems, shockingly, RUSI faculty) will suddenly be faced with reality as it smashes them hard in the face.
I shall not be putting out my hand to help anyone in the establishment that calls for assistance. I shall stand on the side of the righteous and fight for and with my people.
Spent a while reading this sentence before realising there maybe should be a break such as a dash or semicolon after “oppressed”:
“Thus, the Palestinians are inherently oppressed an axiom that fuels the view that Israel is a terrorist state and Hamas’s atrocities are justifiably ‘contextualised’.”
Good article though, despite its depressing message.
It’s bad enough Stanly considers it provocative to question that the pursuit of terrorists can lead to the infringement on civil liberties – has she not heard of Edward Snowden? Yet with witless irony, Stanley considers others naive and uninformed, yet falls for the 70% of terrorism is Islamic trope. Operation Gladio anyone? And how is it she can prove ‘anal rape’ (while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’) when Haaretz and the Times of Israel cite statements by Israeli Police who found no evidence of rape or when thousands of festival attendees with mobile phone footage posted at https://www.october7.org/post/three-terrorists-aimed-kalashnikovs-at-our-heads-and-told-us-to-get-out – no rape claims. Released hostages say there were put in Hijabs – not raped. Maybe she should connect with former CIA counter-terrorism expert Larry Johnson who will tell her that of the 1,129 (on the official Israel ONS equivalent website), 695 were Israeli citizens, 80% of whom were killed by Israeli Security services. By the sounds of the presentation, Anna Stanley may no longer be perfect recruitment material for the civil service counter-terrorism unit – naive, racist and wholly unable to join up the dots. No surprise she sits so comfortably here at the Daily ‘Sceptic’.