Neoconservative influence

on counter-terrorism
policy in the EU:

The impact of elite policy actors on

counter-terrorism policy and its consequences
on anti-Muslim hate and intolerance.

David Miller and

Narzanin Massoumi

1
Authors

David Miller is Professor of Political Sociology at the

University of Bristol. He is also a director of Public Interest
Investigations of which Spinwatch.org and powerbase.info
are projects. Recent publications include:

‘The ethics of researching ‘terrorism’ and political violence: a sociological approach’

Contemporary Social Science. 15(2) (Co-author, 2020)

‘Secrecy, coercion and deception in research on ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’’

Contemporary Social Science. 15(2) (co-author, 2020)

‘Leaving the War on Terror: A Progressive Alternative to Counter-Terrorism Policy’

(Co-author, Transnational Institute, 2019)

Islamophobia in Europe: How governments are enabling the far-right ‘counter-jihad’ movement
(Co-author, Public Interest Investigations, 2019)

Organized Persuasive Communication: A new conceptual framework

for research on public relations, propaganda and promotional culture
Critical Sociology. 45(3), (Co-author, 2019)

The UAE Lobby: Subverting British democracy?

(Co-author, Public Interest Investigations, 2018)

Narzanin Massoumi is Lecturer in sociology and

Criminology in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy
and Anthropology at the University of Exeter. She is a British
Academy Postdoctoral Fellow undertaking research focused
on racism, social movements and counter terrorism. Recent
publications include:

‘The ethics of researching ‘terrorism’ and political violence: a sociological approach’

Contemporary Social Science. 15(2) (Co-author, 2020)

‘Secrecy, coercion and deception in research on ‘terrorism’ and ‘extremism’’

Contemporary Social Science. 15(2) (co-author, 2020)

‘Leaving the War on Terror: A Progressive Alternative to Counter-Terrorism Policy’

(Co-author, Transnational Institute, 2019)

What is Islamophobia? Racism, Social Movements and the State

(Pluto Press, 2017)

Muslim Women, Social Movements and the ‘War on Terror

(Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

Narzanin is co-convenor of the British Sociological Association

Race and Ethnicity Study Group.

2
Disclaimer:
The content of this report represents the views of the authors and is their sole responsibility.
The European Commission does not accept any responsibility
for use that may be made of the information it contains.

Publication data
British Library Cataloguing-in-publications Data.
A catalogue record for this report is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-912811-05-2

Copyediting: Adam Leyland

Design: Peter Moffat
Front/back cover photo:
Published by Public Interest Investigations –
Spinwatch www.spinwatch.org
Bristol, November 2020

Copyright
Public Interest Investigations 2020. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form
or by any means without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

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Acknowledgements.................................................................................................................................5
Funding sources...................................................................................................................................5
Conflict of Interest Statement.........................................................................................................5
List of tables and figures........................................................................................................................5
Executive summary.................................................................................................................................6
A note on methods..............................................................................................................................7
1. The neoconservative movement and the journey to ‘non-violent extremism’................8
The emergence of neoconservatism...............................................................................................8
The UK neoconservative movement............................................................................................10
The Henry Jackson Society...........................................................................................................11
Policy Exchange.............................................................................................................................12
Policy influence..................................................................................................................................13
2011 revision of Prevent...............................................................................................................13
The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015.....................................................................14
Extremism Analysis Unit............................................................................................................15
2. The attack on Muslim charities............................................................................................17
The role of the Charity Commission and Prevent..........................................................................17
The impact on Muslim charities......................................................................................................18
The neoconservative capture of the Charity Commission.....................................................19
The case of Interpal......................................................................................................................21
The harassment of Muslim Aid.................................................................................................24
Complaint from the Telegraph in 2010...............................................................................24
2012 case referred by Muslim Aid; investigated in 2013 and announced in 2014......25
Further Telegraph attack – November 2014.......................................................................25
The Charity Commission and Cage........................................................................................26
Concluding comments....................................................................................................................28
3. The Neoconservative movement in the EU........................................................................29
Establishment neoconservatism...................................................................................................30
The Zionist movement.....................................................................................................................31
Friends of Israel Initiative...........................................................................................................33
The role of the Zionist movement in fostering Islamophobia...........................................35
The ‘Islamist’ terror threat.......................................................................................................37
The ‘decent left’..................................................................................................................................41
The counter-jihad right..................................................................................................................42
Conclusions........................................................................................................................................44

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4. The spread of neoconservative ideas and policies in the EU........................................45
The UK - 2003/4...............................................................................................................................45
The EU – 2005...................................................................................................................................46
The Netherlands - 2005.................................................................................................................46
France - 2014.....................................................................................................................................47
Spain - 2017-9....................................................................................................................................49
Italy - failure - 2016/7........................................................................................................................51
Concluding comments.....................................................................................................................53
5. Conclusions: Evidence base and democracy in counter-terrorism policy.......................54
Policy recommendations.................................................................................................................54

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank colleagues at Spinwatch including Will Dinan, Tom Mills and Tom Griffin as
well as all collaborators in the Stop-Islamophobia collective, especially Niamh Ni Bhriain of the Transnational
Institute, but also including Fundación Al Fanar para el Conocimiento Árabe – Spain; Comité Justice &
Libertes Pour Tous – France; IZI Solutions BV – The Netherlands; The NOOR Foundation - The Netherlands;
Transnational Institute – The Netherlands; Un Ponte Per Association – Italy

Funding sources

This report was financially supported by the European Commission via the European Union’s Rights,
Equality and Citizenship Programme (2014-2020). This report is part of the outputs of the Stop-Islamophobia
Collective: www.stop-islamophobia.eu.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors report no potential conflicts of interest. For the transparency policy of Public Interest
Investigations and a list of grants received see: http://www.spinwatch.org/index.php/about/funding

List of tables and figures

Table 3.1 The main Zionist affiliates in France, Italy, Holland, Spain and the UK

Table 3.2 Number of items on the CST blog

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Executive summary

In this report, we examine the role of the neoconservative movement in relation to its impact on
contemporary Islamophobia, with a particular focus on how its activities have influenced both the policy
and practice of counter-terrorism. Because of the key role of the counter-terrorism apparatus in creating
and reproducing Islamophobia, we examine the extent to which the neoconservative movement has played
a key role in the production of Islamophobia. In this report, we examine the EU in general and case studies in
France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

We see neoconservatism as an example of a ‘social movement from above’, that is, an instance of ‘the collective
agency of dominant groups, which is centred on … maintain[ing] or modify[ing] a dominant structure’.1 In this
report, we make the following arguments about the direction in which neoconservative influence has shaped
counter-terrorism policy.

Firstly, the influence of neoconservatism has been to push for a Cold War-style political counter-subversion
approach.2 This has been most evident in the success of neoconservative groups to influence a shift in the UK
Prevent programme from a focus on violent extremism in its first iteration to non-violent extremism in the
second. Two key think tanks - Policy Exchange and the Henry Jackson Society - were part of a successful effort
by conservative interests, neoconservatives especially, to reshape counter-terrorism policy around Cold War-
inspired ideological warfare, focusing on political and cultural threats, rather than security and public safety.

Secondly, we will demonstrate in this report that neoconservative influence does not simply take place at
a policy level, they are also successful in shaping the nature of implementation of the policy on the ground.
In the UK, we demonstrate how neoconservative organisations act as ‘parastatal agencies’.3 We show how
neoconservative organisations have been directly involved in enacting and extending counter-terrorism
practices with the effect of repressing politically active Muslims.

Chapter one examines the origins of the neoconservative movement in the US and goes on to examine its
emergence and growth in the UK.

The second chapter focuses on the role of the UK Charity Commission in the repression of Muslim-led
charities, showing how neoconservative interests captured the Commission and used it to intensify a drive
against the role of Muslims in public life.

Chapter three shows the transnational nature of these activities across Europe. Having highlighted the origins
of the neoconservative movement in the US and its development in the UK, we show how neoconservative
actors are also active across Europe. Furthermore, the chapter shows the transnational nature of these
activities throughout the continent with a range of familiar policies and strategies. We also view the
neoconservative movement in the context of closely allied and overlapping groupings associated with the
Zionist movement, the counter-jihad movement and left-wing Islamophobes.

In chapter four, we examine how the counter-terrorism policies of selected member states have fared under
pressure from the neocons. We examine the EU, UK, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy and show that
neoconservative-influenced measures have been adopted in nearly all – with the single exception being Italy.

1. Cox, L., & Nilsen, A. G. (2014). We make our own history: Marxism and social movements in the twilight of neoliberalism. Pluto
Press: 59-60.
2. Mills, T., Griffin, T., & Miller, D. (2011). The cold war on British Muslims. London: Spinwatch. http://spinwatch.org/images/
SpinwatchReport_ColdWar.pdf
3. Diamond, S. (1995). Roads to dominion: Right-wing movements and political power in the United States. Guilford Press.

7
Chapter five lays out our conclusions and the need to build a proper evidence base for, and to democratise,
counter terrorism policy in EU member states.

A note on methods

Using a multi-levelled investigative toolkit, we examined the neoconservative movement, its history and
development in the UK and then its influence on counter-terrorism policy at the EU level and in various
member states.

1 This report relies, firstly, on an historical appreciation of the neoconservative movement, its origins
in the US and then its internationalisation around the time of the Iraq invasion in 2003. This is based
on historical research, as well as on ongoing investigative research on the neoconservative movement
and Islamophobia over the past decade.
2 Secondly, we examined a range of open-source materials including documents and presentations
originating with the organisations under investigation.
3 We complemented this material by using investigative internet research and public records searches.
In addition, we compiled detailed profiles of each of the organisations – including their personnel,
activities and funding timelines – and examined their possible or known relations with government.
4 Using these documents and other materials we have gathered, we are able to examine the way in
which neoconservative approaches to counter-terrorism focused on a specific form of ‘prevention’
have taken hold across the EU.

8
1
The neoconservative
movement and the
journey to ‘non-violent
extremism’
We begin this chapter with a discussion on the neoconservative movement’s origins in the US, and
then outline its more recent manifestations in the UK, where we focus in particular on two key British
neoconservative think tanks: Policy Exchange and the Henry Jackson Society. We examine the broader
political networks and milieu within which these think tanks operate, and we detail the neoconservative
movement’s alliances with other Islamophobic movements, notably the counter-jihad movement and elements
of the Zionist movement.

The emergence of neoconservatism

The neoconservatives are best known for the strong influence within the administration of George W.
Bush following the 9/11 attacks, and particularly for the role they played in pushing for the 2003 invasion
of Iraq. They had, however, previously exerted some significant influence on the US Republicans in the
1980s, especially earlier in that decade when Reagan publicly opposed detente with the Soviet Union and his
administration announced the first iteration of the War on Terror, claiming that ‘international terrorism’ was
largely sponsored by the US’s Cold War rival. In both cases, the neocons’ policy perspective put them at odds
with the weight of opinion among American foreign policy elites and much of the US military and intelligence
apparatus. Over the years, though, the neocons developed a parallel set of experts and institutions able to
disseminate alternative information, expertise and policy ideas – essentially propaganda built around their
favoured policies and the neoconservative movement’s distinctly militarist worldview. Indeed, it is notable
in this regard that a number of the progenitors of the neoconservative movement were not only former
leftists, but had been involved in US-sponsored anti-communist intelligence and propaganda networks, such
as Melvin Lasky of the CIA-funded Encounter magazine, or Irving Kristol of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural
Freedom.

Intellectually, neoconservatism is often said to owe a debt to the pessimistic and elitist ideas of the Chicago-
based political philosopher Leo Strauss and/or the Cold War liberalism of Albert Wohlstetter of the Rand
Corporation – a contention which has some merit. But, according to Blumenthal’s influential early study, the
neocons:

are less coherent as an intellectual movement than a social group. Some are welfare-statists, others are
free-marketeers; some proclaim the moral mission of America in global terms, others urge hardheaded
realpolitik. What really binds them together is their common experience.4

This ‘common experience’ includes in many cases a background in socialist groups, and then Cold War
liberal anti-communism, as has been noted. However, it is also a particular reaction to the trajectory of
liberal/left politics in the US from the late 1960s onwards. In this sense, neoconservatism, like other forms of
conservatism, is defined not so much by a shared set of political ideas, but a particular reaction against

4. Blumenthal, S. (2008). The rise of the counter-establishment: The conservative ascent to political power. New York: Union Square
Press. P. 110.

9
mobilisations ‘from below’. As Robin in his study, The Reactionary Mind, notes of conservatism more
generally, it:

is not a commitment to limited government and liberty – or a wariness of change, a belief in

evolutionary reform, or a politics of virtue. These may be the byproducts of conservatism, one or
more of its historically specific and ever-changing modes of expression. But they are not its animating
purpose. Neither is conservatism a makeshift fusion of capitalists, Christians, and warriors, for that
fusion is impelled by a more elemental force – the opposition to the liberation of men and women from
the fetters of their superiors.5

In the late 1960s and over the course of the 1970s, the US government – having implemented a programme
of domestic reforms on civil and economic rights – drew back from Vietnam, and sought to ease geopolitical
tensions with the Soviet Union. These moves were opposed by the nascent neoconservatives through a
number of elite social movement organisations (ESMOs) that lobbied against them; first, the Committee to
Maintain a Prudent Defence Policy, then Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger in the 1970s.6
It should be remembered, though, that as well as a strong focus on foreign policy, neocons were also deeply
involved with – and concerned about – domestic issues. These, in fact, were the issues that provided the
‘reality’ by which they were famously ‘mugged’ – and, pertinently, racism was of some importance.

In the case of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for example, who came to the neocons from the Democrats, it was
the response to his writing about the ‘negro family’ that converted him. In a report written in 1965 while
serving in the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, Moynihan deplored the collapse of the black family and its
dependence on welfare, arguing that the rise of single-mother families could be traced back to Jim Crow and
slavery. Ghetto culture was a product not simply of a lack of jobs but of a deeper cultural problem that had its
origins in slavery.7

Moynihan’s thesis was quickly decried as victim blaming and he was denounced as a racist. He was ‘embittered
and scarred by the experience’.8 A similar process affected Norman Podhoretz following his 1963 essay in
the flagship neocon journal Commentary: ‘My negro problem – and ours.’ Most whites, even liberals, he said,
were ‘twisted and sick in their feelings about negroes’.9 Podhoretz said that he had ‘grown weary of black
arguments for special treatment’, and pointed to his ‘childhood memories of the black children in his Brooklyn
neighbourhood: rather than focus on their studies as he and his Jewish friends did, they roamed the streets
terrorizing Podhoretz and the other white children’.10 While Podhoretz had never been a socialist of any sort,
his Cold-War liberalism gave way in part as a result of this encounter, during which he was, unsurprisingly,
denounced as a racist. Podhoretz then ‘distanced himself from New York intellectual life, where he had
become persona non grata. He even took a hiatus from Commentary’, while he went through what he saw as ‘a
conversion experience’. 11

By the time he returned to his editorial desk in 1970, Podhoretz was an unapologetic neoconservative.
He earnestly commenced an ideological offensive against the New Left, the counterculture, and all
that he deemed subversive about the ‘60s. 12
5. Robin, C. (2011). The reactionary mind: conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Boies, J., & Pichardo, N. A. (1990). Elite Social Movements and the State: A Case Study of the Committee on the Present
Danger. Center for Research on Social Organization, Working Paper Series. University of Michigan. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/
bitstream/handle/2027.42/51183/416.pdf ?sequence=1; Boies, J., & Pichardo, N. A. (1993). The Committee on the Present Danger: a case
for the importance of elite social movement organizations to theories of social movements and the state. Berkeley journal of sociology,
38, 57-87.
7. Heilbrunn, J. (2009). They knew they were right: the rise of the neocons. New York: Anchor. p. 137.
8. Heilbrunn, J. (2009). They knew they were right: the rise of the neocons. New York: Anchor. p. 139.
9. Hartman, A. (2015). A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press.
10. Hartman, A. (2015). A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press.
11. Hartman, A. (2015). A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press.
12. Hartman, A. (2015). A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars. University of Chicago Press.

10
A distinct neoconservative worldview and movement at this time began to take shape among intellectuals
and policy experts, and it developed a strong presence at certain publications and think tanks. These were
most notably in Commentary magazine, the Weekly Standard, and the American Enterprise Institute and the
Heritage Foundation, respectively. More overt neoconservative think tanks would subsequently be set up,
including the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which was an initiative of the pro-Israel lobby group
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and somewhat more marginal outfits like the Middle
East Forum and the Center for Security Policy – both of which would play a central role in Islamophobic
politics in the US. Perhaps the best-known neoconservative think tank is the Project for a New American
Century, which was set up in 1997 by leading neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan and would go on
to achieve some notoriety in the George W. Bush era. It brought together an organisationally disparate but
closely networked group of elite policy experts and intellectuals who would seize the opportunity that came
following the 9/11 attacks to push for a more aggressively militaristic and unilateralist US foreign policy and
an extremely close relationship with Israel and increasingly the Israeli right. The neocons reached the nadir of
their influence in the years immediately after the invasion of Iraq, with their worldview somewhat discredited
by the strong resistance the US faced. They nevertheless remain a significant current within US policymaking
circles.

Neoconservatism is often thought of as an exclusively American phenomenon and is characterised in part

by a deep-seated belief in the moral righteousness of US military power. But the movement has always been
to some extent ‘internationalist’ – if not transnational – by virtue of its origins in Cold War geopolitics and
European left and social-democratic politics.

Moreover, in the context of the early ‘War on Terror’, the extraordinary influence of neocons in the top
echelons of the Bush administration was paralleled by the emergence of like-minded figures in elite
policymaking groups and opinion leaders across the Atlantic. Indeed, neoconservatism won a number of
disciples across Europe at this time.

The UK neoconservative movement

Something like a distinctive British neoconservative movement also emerged during this period. The UK
neocons – who for the most part were only publicly self-defined as neoconservatives for a relatively short
period when their American counterparts were at the height of their political power – have been spread
across the mainstream political spectrum. The movement in Britain incorporates social democrats identifying
with the ‘liberal interventionism’ espoused by Blair and his acolytes, and right-wing Atlanticist conservatives.
The British neocons, then, have certainly disagreed on a number of issues. But on foreign policy their
underlying vision is fundamentally the same. Even if the devotion to military might and interventionist
foreign policies is somewhat tempered compared to their US counterparts by a greater emphasis on the role
of certain international alliances, the neocons all have something of a shared vision in the belief that Western
democracies are embroiled in a Manichean struggle against Islamist totalitarianism. This political struggle,
it is claimed, is comparable with the struggle against the Soviet Union and the revolutionary left during the
Cold War, when hard-line anti-communist ideology helped forge transatlantic networks of militant ‘Cold
Warriors’ – many with roots on the radical left. ‘Political Islam’, according to the British neocons, represents
a similar geopolitical threat, and defeating it requires the same sorts of ideological warfare and domestic
countersubversion.13

In the UK, meanwhile, the two major neocon outfits have been the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) – which in
2010 subsumed another neoconservative think tank, the Centre for Social Cohesion – and Policy Exchange, a

13. Mills, T. Griffin, T. and Miller, D. (2011) The Cold War on British Muslims: An examination of Policy Exchange and the Centre for
Social Cohesion. Glasgow: Public Interest Investigations.

11
think tank with a broader neoliberal agenda that has strongly influenced the Conservative Party, but which
has also served as an important hub of neoconservatism in the UK.

The Henry Jackson Society

The Henry Jackson Society (HJS) was formed in 2005 at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, with patronage
from some of the leading lights in American neoconservatism including William Kristol and Richard Perle.14
A few years later it moved to London, where it is now based. The organisation was named after the hawkish
US Democratic Party Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a liberal opponent of detente and strong supporter of
Israel. In its early ‘Statement of Principles’, the HJS expressed a commitment to ‘the maintenance of a strong
military, by the United States, the countries of the European Union and other democratic powers, armed with
expeditionary capabilities with a global reach’. Among its signatories were figures from politics, academia and
the defence and security establishment in the UK, including some liberals and left-wingers. The more liberal
faction, however, would later be ejected as the HJS shifted notably rightwards, and the think tank has arguably
always had a reactionary core. Its initial base at Peterhouse College, Cambridge is home to a conservative
tradition associated with the historian Maurice Cowling – known as the ‘Peterhouse Right’.

This subset of British conservatism was one faction of the broader New Right which cohered around Margaret
Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was distinct from the neoliberal faction, concerning itself more
with political history and philosophy and displaying more overtly elitist anti-liberal politics. Heading HJS since
2006 has been its executive director Alan Mendoza – a former Conservative councillor and parliamentary
candidate. Mendoza has also served as director and trustee for the Israel Diaspora Trust, which has brought
speakers to the UK from right-wing Zionist outfits like NGO Watch and Palestinian Media Watch (Israel
Diaspora Trust, 2013: 2). The ‘putsch’ at the HJS – when many of the more liberal elements were jettisoned
from the think tank – was led by Mendoza. The rightward shift this signalled was broadly contemporaneous
with the incorporation into the HJS of another British neoconservative think tank: the Centre for Social
Cohesion (CSC). This saw HJS’s income increase markedly, from around £300,000 in 2010 to approximately
£1.3 million in 2013.

The CSC was founded in 2007, initially as a project of the conservative think tank Civitas, which in turn had
been spun off from the seminal neoliberal think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Civitas, which was
influenced by right-wing communitarian ideas more than neoliberal currents, had already produced material
critical of Islam and multiculturalism, and CSC would from its beginning focus on Islam as the main threat
to ‘social cohesion’. This emphasis was in line with Civitas’ previous work on the subject. A key example was
‘The “West”, Islam and Islamism: Is ideological Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy?’, a 2003 pamphlet whose
authors Caroline Cox and John Marks would later become directors of the CSC. They argued that Islamist
terrorism was only part of a broader ideological challenge comparable to communist propaganda efforts
during the Cold War, stating:

Western societies must respond effectively to the challenge from ideological Islamists. To do so
they need to use principles and analyses which have many parallels with the earlier conflict with
ideological Marxism. The broad distinction between terrorists operating in the name of Islam and
peaceable law-abiding Muslims must be respected, but it must not be allowed to cripple the effort that
is needed to preserve the principles and institutions of Western societies.15

14. This section draws on Griffin, T., Aked, H., Miller, D., & Marusek, S. (2015). The Henry Jackson Society and the Degeneration of
British Neoconservatism: Liberal Interventionism, Islamophobia and the “War on Terror”. Glasgow: Public Interest Investigations.
15. Cox, C. and Marks, J. (2003) The ‘West’, Islam and Islamism: Is ideological Islam compatible with liberal democracy?, June, London:
Civitas. http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs29.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2020.

12
In effect, this is two veterans of the cultural Cold War of the 1970s arguing that the ideological apparatus of
the period can be dusted off and applied, in a very crude way, to a totally new set of circumstances in the 21st
century, with a clear recognition that this means going beyond a focus on terrorism, to labelling a much wider
range of people and their activities as potentially subversive.

Heading CSC was the young right-wing ideologue Douglas Murray, who would go on to become the Henry
Jackson Society’s associate director. Before his appointment to CSC, Murray, the author of Neoconservatism:
Why We Need It, had made a provocative speech advocating that: ‘Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be
made harder across the board.’

A majority of CSC’s output focused on Islam, typically examining a particular area of Muslim engagement
with wider civil society and portraying it as an example of Islamist subversion. Examples include the 2008
report Islam on Campus, which included a highly questionable poll that served as the basis for news stories
which claimed that ‘one third of British Muslim students say it’s acceptable to kill for Islam’.16 It preceded a
report the following year called A Degree of Influence, which claimed that there was censorship of British
universities by Muslim donors on the basis of just two pieces of evidence, neither of which stood up to
scrutiny.17

Policy Exchange

Another centre of British neoconservatism has been the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange. Founded
in 2002, Policy Exchange has been associated with the more liberal, modernising faction of the Conservative
Party, and was often described as David Cameron’s ‘favourite think tank’. It was particularly influential on
the Conservative-led Coalition government’s public service reform agenda, but has also played host to some
key players in British neoconservatism. The best known of these is Michael Gove, who served as Policy
Exchange’s first chair. Gove was a signatory to the Statement of Principles of the Henry Jackson Society
and also co-hosted its parliamentary launch. A long-standing right-wing Eurosceptic and a leading figure
in the ‘Brexit’ campaign, Gove is also Britain’s foremost neoconservative who as a journalist working for
The Times was advocating ‘total war’ and writing of ‘Saddam Hussein, and his weapons of mass destruction’
just a week after the 9/11 attacks. In the same month that Policy Exchange published its first report on
Islam and multiculturalism, it also hosted a book launch for Gove’s neoconservative polemic Celsius 7/7.
Among the people who Gove thanked in the acknowledgements section of that book was Douglas Murray.
Another was the American neoconservative Dean Godson, Policy Exchange’s director of research who has
overseen the think tank’s output on Islam and multiculturalism. Godson has close family connections to the
neoconservative movement, notably through his brother Roy – a key figure in the anti-detente movement of
the 1970s.18

Like the HJS and CSC, Policy Exchange has published a number of reports purporting to show evidence of
extremism among British Muslims and calling on the government to sever links with particular individuals or
groups and to expand its surveillance of Muslims. In one 2007 report, Policy Exchange alleged that ‘extremist
material’ was available in 25% of British mosques, and called on mosques to be subject to ‘greater regulation’.
The BBC – which had been offered the findings as an exclusive – checked the story and discovered evidence
that some of the receipts said to support the report’s findings had been fabricated.

16. John Thorne and Hannah Stuart, Islam on Campus: A Survey of Student Opinions, 2008, London: Centre for Social Cohesion.
https://www.mohammedamin.com/Community_issues/Islam-on-Campus.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2020.
17. Robin Simcox, A Degree of Influence: The funding of strategically important subjects in UK universities. 2009, London:
Centre for Social Cohesion. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 31 July 2009 on 12 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/
web/20090731092928/http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/files/1238334646_1.pdf
18. Sanders, J, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment. 1983, Boston: South End Press,
p, 212.

13
A common theme in Policy Exchange’s output on Islam has been the argument that effective counter-
terrorism measures should focus not solely on security threats, but on ‘extremist’ ideas and undemocratic
or unpatriotic values which are said to influence the broader cultural climate in which terrorism emerges.
This argument is also made in Michael Gove’s Celsius 7/7. In a 2009 report called Choosing Our Friends Wisely,
Policy Exchange called on the government to shift its counter-terrorism policy to focusing on ‘non-violent
extremism’, and explicitly advocated for the establishment of political counter-subversion operations
by Britain’s Secret Service. In a subsequent report on faith schools, Policy Exchange called on MI5’s Joint
Terrorism Analysis Centre to monitor schools for threats to ‘democratic values’.

We have elsewhere referred to this push for political counter-subversion as a ‘cold war on British Muslims’.19
Both Policy Exchange and the HJS/CSC were part of a successful effort by conservative interests –
neoconservatives especially – to reshape counter-terrorism policy around Cold War-inspired ideological
warfare, focusing on political and cultural threats, rather than security and public safety.

Policy influence
2011 revision of Prevent

The CSC – which was later incorporated into the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) – and the Policy Exchange were
at the forefront of pushing for the revision of Prevent towards a focus on non-violent ‘extremism’. For instance,
a Policy Exchange report in 2009 called Choosing Our Friends Wisely criticised the Labour government for
‘stress[ing] law enforcement and strict security concerns over and above everything else’.20 Furthermore, they
argued that government policy should expand its focus from ‘preventing violent extremism’ to countering
groups that they called ‘non-violent radicals’, who it is claimed were ‘indoctrinating young people with
an ideology of hostility to western values’. The Cameron-Clegg coalition government’s Prevent Strategy –
published in June 2011 – was clearly influenced by the kind of neoconservative ideas pushed by the Centre for
Social Cohesion and Policy Exchange. It stated that ‘preventing terrorism will mean challenging extremist
(and non-violent) ideas that are also part of a terrorist ideology’. It also later lamented that ‘work to date has
not recognised clearly enough the way in which some terrorist ideologies draw on and make use of extremist
ideas which are espoused by apparently non-violent organisations very often operating within the law’.
Advocates of this approach – such as the CSC/HJS – have justifiably claimed some success in influencing the
2011 review of the government’s Prevent Strategy. This can also be seen in the fact that the official Prevent
Strategy document cited the CSC on five occasions.

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015

The Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 was consonant with the ideas of the neoconservative
think tanks. In July 2015, The Henry Jackson Society’s Douglas Murray praised then-Prime Minister David
Cameron’s Birmingham speech on radicalisation and said that it was his best yet. In September that year,
Cameron publicly named four universities that had allegedly hosted speakers with views ‘contrary to British
values’ – claims denied by the universities concerned. Shortly thereafter, the Times Higher Education reported
that the source of much of the data was from the HJS itself via a recent report by Student Rights – an arm of the
Henry Jackson Society.21 Written by Student Rights director Rupert Sutton, the Preventing Prevent report lists
the four London universities mentioned by Downing Street in its own table of the most-visited universities.
The allegations against each of the universities is contested and denied by the institutions concerned, and

19. Mills, T. Griffin, T. and Miller, D. (2011) The Cold War on British Muslims: An examination of Policy Exchange and the Centre for
Social Cohesion. Glasgow: Public Interest Investigations.
20. Shiraz Maher and Martyn Frampton, Choosing our friends wisely: Criteria for engagement with Muslim groups, 2009, London:
Policy Exchange. https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/choosing-our-friends-wisely-mar-09.pdf. Accessed 12
April 2020.
21. Grove, J. (2015) No 10’s extremism report mirrors text of thinktank study: Government urged to reveal source of claims about
universities that allegedly hosted extremist speakers Times Higher Education. 1 October. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/
no-10s-extremism-report-mirrors-text-thinktank-study. Accessed 17 February 2020.

14
the evidential basis of that and other reports by Student Rights has been called into question on a number of
occasions.22

It also includes a list of former students later convicted of terrorism-related offences – of whom eight are also
mentioned in the Downing Street statement using terms that are identical or almost identical to ones used in
the Student Rights report. For instance, both reports state that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab ‘had repeatedly
contacted extremists who were under MI5 surveillance’ while he was a student at University College London,
before being ‘convicted in 2012, of attempted murder and terrorism, after trying to bomb a passenger flight to
Detroit in 2009’.

It can be noted that the basis of the allegations against each of the universities is contested and denied by the
universities concerned. The Conservative-led Coalition government’s Prevent Strategy – which was published
in June 2011 – was clearly influenced by the kind of neoconservative ideas that have been propagated by Policy
Exchange and the CSC/ HJS. It stated that ‘preventing terrorism will mean challenging extremist (and non-
violent) ideas that are also part of a terrorist ideology’, and later lamented that ‘work to date has not recognised
clearly enough the way in which some terrorist ideologies draw on and make use of extremist ideas which
are espoused by apparently non-violent organisations very often operating within the law’.23 Indeed, the
official Prevent Strategy document cites the CSC on no less than five occasions. 24 These examples show that
neoconservative think tanks are attempting to influence government counter-terrorism policy and have, at
least arguably, had some effect, with specific negative consequences for Muslims and others throughout the
country.

Extremism Analysis Unit

On 17 September 2015 — days before the Prevent Duty came into effect – then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s
speech launching the initiative cited 70 extremist events taking place at universities. A Downing Street press
release named Queen Mary, King’s College, SOAS and Kingston as universities which were most often hosting
‘extremists’. Six speakers were named as ‘expressing views contrary to British values’.25 However, following
an investigation from by Times Higher Education, it transpired that the names had come to the Home Office’s
Extremism Analysis Unit directly from HJS. 26 The Downing Street press release contained references to eight
individuals who had ‘[committed] terrorist-related offences while at a UK university’; had ‘at least partially
[been] radicalised during their studies’, or were ‘radicalised foreign fighters who have studied in the UK’. Each
of these references contained almost identical phrases to the Student Rights report Preventing Prevent, which
was written by Rupert Sutton. The similarities in the text suggested that the information regarding that the
Extremism Analysis Unit was getting their information directly from Student Rights and the Henry Jackson
Society.

22. Aked, H. (2013) Student Rights ‘Campus Extremism’ Study: Dishonest Pseudo-Science in Support Of a Toxic Narrative,
Huffington Post. 15 May 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/hilary-aked/student-rights-campus-extremism-study_b_3277503.
html. Accessed 15 February 2020.; Aked, H. (2013) How front group “Student Rights” undermines Palestine solidarity, The Electronic
Intifada 11 December 2013. https://electronicintifada.net/content/how-front-group-student-rights-undermines-palestine-
solidarity/12991 . Accessed 15 February 2020.; Aked, H. (2013) Ironically Named ‘Student Rights’ Group Exposed by Actual Students,
Huffington Post. 17 December http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/hilary-aked/student-rights-campaign_b_4452823.html. Accessed 15
February 2020.
23. HM Government Prevent Strategy, June 2011, p.50 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_
data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2020.
24. HM Government Prevent Strategy, June 2011, pp. 25, 67, 72, 73. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/
attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf. Accessed 12 April 2020.
25. Prime Ministers Office, ‘PM's Extremism Taskforce: tackling extremism in universities and colleges top of the agenda’, gov.
uk, 17 September 2015. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pms-extremism-taskforce-tackling-extremism-in-universities-and-
colleges-top-of-the-agenda. Accessed 12 April 2020.
26. Grove, J. (2015) No 10’s extremism report mirrors text of thinktank study: Government urged to reveal source of claims about
universities that allegedly hosted extremist speakers Times Higher Education. 1 October. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/
no-10s-extremism-report-mirrors-text-thinktank-study. Accessed 17 February 2020.

15
Further details of the case were revealed in the judicial review brought by Salman Butt.27 The Extremism
Analysis Unit (EAU) – located in the Home Office – was set up by the government in the process of the
introduction of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. According to the testimony of its head, Paul
Willis, it was established in December 2014 – although the government officially announced that it was
created in March 2015, the month after the act received royal assent. It had an overall budget of £3 million
per annum, along with 28 full-time and part-time posts. The analysts working at the EAU must all undergo
training in the government’s intelligence analysis techniques, and all team leaders and managers are from
intelligence analysis backgrounds. Paul Willis testified that staff at the unit received weekly briefings
from Student Rights. The origin of these briefings came as a result of a meeting between one of the higher-
education Prevent coordinators and the Henry Jackson Society, where the HE coordinator had requested that
Student Rights provide them with weekly digests of information rather than simply doing so on an ad-hoc
basis. Prevent higher education coordinators are responsible for overseeing the successful implementation
of the Prevent duty on campus. Their roles were created following the introduction of the Prevent duty in
higher education. They were originally located in the Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) department, before
being transferred to the Department of Education. They receive information from the EAU in order to advise
universities and local authorities as to the potential risk of extremists in their areas. This information is used
to directly advise universities, for example, about what events should or should not take place on campus. The
EAU does not communicate directly with higher education bodies or local authorities – this is done via the
Prevent coordinators. Interestingly, however, Paul Willis admitted that there are non-governmental bodies
and private organisations with which the EAU does share information when they have been contracted and
staff are given appropriate security clearance. For instance, he named the example of the PR/marketing firm
M&C Saatchi, which was contracted to produce counter-extremism campaigns.

Overall, the neoconservative movement has become an integrated player in counter-terrorism policy – being
asked to regularly brief policy makers and helping to influence them to enhance and extend the repressive
powers given by counter-terrorism legislation. The next chapter examines how this has played out in relation
to mounting attacks on the status of Muslim charities.

27. This sections draws on documents disclosed in Butt v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, 2017.

16
2
The attack on
Muslim charities
The close relationship between the neoconservative movement and decision-makers has also been seen in
the area of regulation of Muslim civil society groups, which have been attacked, smeared and undermined
by materials produced by neoconservative think tanks. However, the government has also moved against
Muslim civil society groups through the regulation of Muslim-led charities via the Charity Commission. This
chapter examines the role of the Charity Commission in counter terrorism; neoconservative influences on the
composition of the Charity Commission board and chair; and the impact that this has had on Muslim charities.

The role of the Charity Commission and Prevent

The Charity Commission has been involved in the implementation of Prevent from the outset. In the first
iteration of the Prevent programme, the Charity Commission was tasked with the regulation of Mosques’
finances and codes of practice through a charitable registration drive. The 2006 Charity Act gave the
Commission greater powers of regulation including: ‘the right to remove trustees/employees from
membership in the charity … to give specific directions for the protection of the charity … to order a person
to apply property in line with the charity’s purpose … and to enter a charity’s premises and seize documents
(with a warrant) when an inquiry is conducted’.28 The Charity Commission worked alongside the Department
of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and the Mosque and Imams National Advisory Board
(MINAB) to regulate mosque finances and push for a charitable status registration drive for mosques. MINAB
was set up at the instigation of the DCLG and in its first couple of years, at least, was funded by it to the tune of
£150,000.29

The Charity Commission issued an Operational Guidance note in 200730 and a counter-terrorism strategy
as part of the government’s CONTEST/Prevent plan in 2008.31 The role of the Charity Commission was
enhanced again after 2011. The Prevent strategy that year sought to involve more regulatory bodies – the
Charity Commission, Ofcom and Ofsted – in Prevent implementation.

The previous strategy was not systematic enough in coordinating the range of tools available to the
government in challenging those who promote extreme or terrorist ideologies. There has been some
recent and relatively limited engagement with regulatory bodies such as the Charity Commission…
Ofcom and Ofsted, but more needs to be done in this area.32

The government also noted that:

The wider role of the Charity Commission in Prevent is also important. But we do not think it has been

28. Bloodgood, E. A., & Tremblay-Boire, J. (2011). International NGOs and national regulation in an age of terrorism. VOLUNTAS:
International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 22(1), 142-173.
29. Inayat Bunglawala, ‘Minab: community initiative, or quango?’ The Guardian, 5 May 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/belief/2009/may/15/minab-mosques-imams-islam
30. Charity Commission, Operational Guidance Charities And Terrorism. OG 96 – 29 August 2007. Retrieved from the Internet
Archive of 4 July 2011 on 10 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20110704141219/http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/About_
us/OGs/g096.aspx
31. Charity Commission, Counter terrorism strategy, 1 July 2008. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/counter-
terrorism-strategy
32. HM Government, Prevent Strategy, June 2011. p. 51. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/
uploads/attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf

17
 fully explored and considered as an issue in its own right, separate from the Charity Commission’s role
in counter-terrorism more broadly. We need to take this forward as a priority. 33

As a result, the Charity Commission adjusted its strategy.34 It reported that it ‘looked into 16 cases of suspected
terrorist activity in charities in 2010/11’.35

A spokesperson for the Commission advised that the amended document reflects changes to ‘CONTEST’ – the
government’s counter-terrorism strategy – following the Prevent review in June 2011. It had ‘removed the
whole section on the risk and proportionality framework for the Commission’s compliance work and now
[makes] reference to the Commission’s new Risk Framework instead which has replaced it’. 36

The impact on Muslim charities

As a result of its new strategy, between December 2012 and May 2014 the Commission ‘put 55 unnamed
charities on a watch-list over fears of links to “radicalisation and extremism,” without the groups’ knowledge,
while five British charities operating in Syria have been placed under the commission’s most serious form
of inquiry’.37 More than a quarter of the statutory investigations ‘launched by the Charity Commission since
April 2012… remain open [and] have targeted Muslim organisations… Responses to Freedom of Information
requests show that more than 20 of the 76 live investigations focus on Muslim charities associated with
running mosques, providing humanitarian relief and, in a number of high-profile cases, aid efforts in Syria’.38

Furthermore, ‘38% of all disclosed statutory investigations initiated after January 1st 2013 and still ongoing
in the period between January 1st 2014 and April 23rd 2014’ involved Muslim charities.39 This was despite
Muslim charities representing only 1.21 % of the sector.40

In October 2014, the government announced £8 million in funding for the Commission to tackle terrorism:

In a draft bill, the Commission will be awarded powers to automatically [place a] ban on anyone with
convictions of certain offences such as terrorism or money laundering from becoming a trustee in a
charity. The Protection of Charities Bill will also give the Commission the power to disqualify any trustee
candidate they deem unfit, and to shut down any charities under investigation for mismanagement in
order to protect public confidence, or to issue an official warning in less serious cases.41

33. HM Government, Prevent Strategy, June 2011. p. 51. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/

uploads/attachment_data/file/97976/prevent-strategy-review.pdf
34. Charity Commission Counter-Terrorism Strategy, Revised April 2012 First published July 2008. Retrieved from the Internet
Archive of 29 may 2013 on 10 April 2020.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130529055111/http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk:80/our_regulatory_activity/counter_terrorism_
work/ctstrategy.aspx
35. Niki May Young ‘Charity Commission adjusts counter-terrorism strategy’, Civil Society 1 May 2012 https://www.civilsociety.
co.uk/news/charity-commission-adjusts-counter-terrorism-strategy.html. Accessed 10 April 2020.
36. Niki May Young, ‘Charity Commission adjusts counter-terrorism strategy’, Civil Society 1 May 2012 https://www.civilsociety.
co.uk/news/charity-commission-adjusts-counter-terrorism-strategy.html. Accessed 10 April 2020.
37. Belaon, A. Muslim Charities: A Suspect Sector. London: Claystone, November 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141127151201/http://www.claystone.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MuslimCharities_
SuspectSector_Claystone.pdf
38. Randeep Ramesh ‘Quarter of Charity Commission inquiries target Muslim groups’, The Guardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/16/charity-commission-inquiries-muslim-groups Accessed 10 April 2020.
39. Belaon, A. Muslim Charities: A Suspect Sector. London: Claystone, November 2014.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141127151201/http://www.claystone.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MuslimCharities_
SuspectSector_Claystone.pdf
40. Patel, I  (2017) ‘Emergence of Institutional Islamophobia: The Case of the Charity Commission of England and
Wales’. ReOrient, 3 (1). pp. 23-49.
41. Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith, ‘Cameron takes action on terrorism funding in charity sector through new law’, The
Independent, 22 October 2014. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cameron-takes-action-on-terrorism-funding-in-
charity-sector-through-new-law-9809713.html Accessed 10 April 2020.

18
The bill subsequently became law in March 2016. The regulatory environment for Muslim charities – and it is
only for Muslim charities – has become demonstrably tighter and this is by itself discriminatory. However, we
turn next to the organisational and personnel changes at the Commission which appear to have facilitated the
practical way in which the Commission undertook its duties.

The neoconservative capture of the Charity Commission

The changes in the policy of the Charity Commission were a response to changes in the government’s
counter-terrorism strategy. But to ensure that they were implemented in the ‘correct’ way, the leadership
of the Commission was radically changed. The most obvious sign of this was the appointment in October
2012 of William Shawcross, who is well known for his neoconservative and anti-Muslim views. Shawcross
supported the Iraq War and has defended Guantanamo Bay as ‘model justice’.42 Prior to his appointment, he
was a director of the Henry Jackson Society – the leading neoconservative think tank in the UK.43

In the hard-right National Review in 2010, Shawcross penned a vicious attack on Labour for its ‘humiliation
of Britain’. The party was ‘in awe [of ] Islamism’, he wrote, adding that its ‘immigration free-for-all’ measures
indicated a deliberate policy to ‘dilute Britishness’. With Britishness being apparently defined as not including
Muslims, he appears to see adherents of Islam as a kind of pollution and a demographic threat.

On January 17 2012 – while still a director at the Henry Jackson Society – Shawcross stated in a lecture to the
World Affairs Council that ‘Europe and Islam is one of the greatest most terrifying problems of our future,
I think all European countries have vastly, very quickly, growing Islamic populations.’ In a 7 June 2010 piece
in the Jerusalem Post he defended the Israeli Defence Force soldiers’ storming of the Mavi Marmara ship at
the end of May that year. Shawcross wrote: ‘Eventually, the commandos shot back in self-defence and nine
activists were killed.’44 The UN, by contrast, said that ‘the circumstances of the killing of at least six of
the passengers were in a manner consistent with an extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution’.45
The orientation towards defending Israeli policies and especially the inability to even recognise the state’s
human rights abuses is notable. Shawcross was also a founder member of the Friends of Israel Initiative – a
grouping set up by the former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar in 201046 and a trustee of the Anglo
Israel Association until his appointment at the Charity Commission in 201247. Both organisations are hardline
defenders of Israel.

In May 2013, the Charity Commission’s new board was selected to become part of Shawcross’ new governance
team. In September 2013, he commented that the Commission’s new board would ‘grasp the nettle’ and take
stronger action against charities and trustees involved in wrongdoing. Shawcross said there were three
areas that the new board would focus on: the regulator’s approach to serious non-compliance; its approach
to charities that repeatedly fail to file their accounts; and its work to prevent and tackle terrorist abuse of
charities.48

42. William Shawcross, ‘Model Justice’, Standpoint, May 2011. Retrieved from the Internet Archive 3 February 2019. https://web.
archive.org/web/20190203061231/http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/3920/full
43. David Miller ‘The Henry Jackson Society and its Lurch Towards Islamophobia’, International Policy Digest, 19 June 2015. https://
intpolicydigest.org/2015/06/19/the-henry-jackson-society-and-its-lurch-towards-islamophobia/
44. William Shawcross, ‘An irrational, obscene hatred’, Jerusalem Post, 7 June 2010. https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-
Contributors/An-irrational-obscene-hatred
45.  United Nations General Assembly Human Rights Council. Report of the international fact-finding mission to investigate
violations of international law, including international humanitarian and human rights law, resulting from the Israeli attacks on the
flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian assistance. Fifteenth session Agenda item 1, A/HRC/15/21, 27 September 2010, p. 37.
46. Tom Mills ‘Friends of Israel Initiative: The neoconservatives’ eastern front’, Pulse, 20 July 2010. https://pulsemedia.
org/2010/07/20/friends-of-israel-initiative-the-neoconservatives-eastern-front/
47. Powerbase, ‘Anglo-Israel Association’, https://powerbase.info/index.php/Anglo-Israel_Association
48. The following section draws on Tim Holmes, ‘The Charity Commission's Board: an impartial watchdog?’ Spinwatch, 12 March
2014. http://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/politics/item/5627-charity-commission-article. Sources in this section can be found in
the original report.

19
The board was packed with ideological supporters as follows:

• Orlando Fraser, who stood for the Conservatives in North Devon in 2005. He is also a co-founder of
Tory minister Iain Duncan-Smith’s Centre for Social Justice think tank.

• Peter Clarke, a former police commander who headed Scotland Yard’s Anti-Terrorism Branch from
June 2002 and its successor organisation the Counter Terrorism Command until his retirement in
February 2008. In a 2010 letter in The Times, Clarke attacked the Liberal Democrats for rowing back
on military commitments and the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’, concluding that Europe
‘cannot substitute for American power’. His interest in the warfare state is not purely ideological.
Clarke was, until September 2012, a senior adviser to the Olive Group, a security contractor in Iraq
and Libya, one of whose directors is a major Tory donor. He is also senior adviser at Kellogg Brown
and Root Limited, the latter of which is a military contractor mired in a seemingly endless string
of scandals in Iraq and elsewhere. These include fraud, extortion, money laundering, bribery, breach
of contract, false claims, sexual assault, conspiracy, and exposing soldiers to carcinogens, for which
a jury found the company guilty of ‘reckless and outrageous indifference’. Clarke’s record thus raises
serious doubts about his willingness to pursue any line of investigation that would threaten powerful
interests. So, while overseeing charities that promote peace and human rights, Clarke is employed by a
major war profiteer.

• Nazo Moosa, who was a director of the Carlyle Group – a high-powered investment firm linked with
John Major, George H. W. Bush, Saudi Prince Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and former US Secretary of
State James Baker, and widely accused of ‘access capitalism’. Carlyle, according to the Center for Public
Integrity, ‘received nearly $14 billion in Pentagon deals between 1998 and 2003’, taking over some of
the biggest U.S. arms companies. Moosa was also managing partner of C5 Capital, a company briefly
embroiled in a major scandal when its sister company G3 was revealed to have bankrolled foreign trips
by Adam Werrity and former Defence Minister Liam Fox. Money was routed through organisations
including the ‘Sri Lanka Development Trust’ – a ‘charity’ that was ‘never registered with the Charity
Commission nor with Companies House’, The Telegraph reports. ‘No details of its accounts appear in
any public records’, and its ‘address’ is the same as G3’s.

• Tony Leifer is a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of Deputies for British Jews (BoD)
– a major player in Britain’s Israel lobby. The BoD runs a campaign called ‘Speak Out For Israel!’,
which promotes Zionist Federation events and has organised rallies to defend Israel while the
country conducted indiscriminate and deliberate attacks on civilians. The BoD has been involved
in controversies regarding the status of third-sector organisations. It called the charity Interpal a
‘terrorist organisation’, a claim that the Charity Commission rejected, and for which both the board
and The Sunday Telegraph were forced to apologise following legal action. Leifer thus holds a senior
position in an organisation that disparages peace and human rights campaigners, aggressively
promotes the interests of a foreign government, and has taken a strong line in a controversy over a
charity’s status.

• Eryl Besse was ‘regarded as one of the top banking and finance lawyers’ in Linklaters’ Paris branch,
with expertise in ‘corporate finance and capital markets’, when she moved to Wall Street firm
Debevoise & Plimpton in 2002. Her ‘practice focuses on international finance, including debt and
equity capital markets, banking and acquisition financing’.

• Gwythian Prins is a right-wing academic firmly rooted in the military establishment, who has served
in a large number of advisory roles. Prins was a supporter of the Iraq War, advocates large military
budgets and supports the West’s right to wage war generally. He has accused those who criticised

20
 the Iraq invasion of ‘anti-Americanism’, adding that ‘[s]ome are beyond reasonable discussion’.
A 2008 paper summarising a ‘consensus’ among Prins and other right-wing defence, military,
intelligence and political figures concluded that ‘[d]efence and security’ be ‘restored as the first duty of
government’ through the partial removal of defence policy from democratic control. ‘We are indeed a
soft touch, from within and without’, Prins asserts, and have ‘failed to lay down the line to immigrant
communities’. In a 2012 article in The Telegraph, he supported ‘the trumping priority that belongs to the
“nightwatchman” functions of the state. Defence from the enemy without and the enemy within…’

The colonisation of the Charity Commission with true believers was a calculated part of the effort to banish
Muslim charities from the public sphere. We can examine how this worked in practice by looking at the
attacks on three Muslim-led organisations: Muslim Aid; Interpal and Cage. The first two are charities.
Cage is not, but as we will see, the Commission used its powers to ensure that charities associated with the
organisation would no longer fund its activities.

It should be noted that the attack on Muslim charities was not a purely UK affair. And nor was it carried
out simply by packing the Charity Commission board with members who were pro-Israel – aligned with
the interests of the Israeli and US state and of big business. Rather, the whole process was accomplished by
concerted and to some extent collaborative actions by the UK, US and Israeli states. These attacks did not
begin with the appointment of William Shawcross as chair of the Charity Commission or even with the
introduction and extension of the UK Prevent policy, but back before 9/11 – as the Interpal case shows.

The case of Interpal

Interpal – a British charity focused on Palestine – had been a source of friction between the Israeli and British
governments for many years.49 The Israeli authorities have pursued Interpal for more than twenty years in an
attempt to shut it down. This started as early as 1996 – only two years after Interpal was founded – when Israeli
police claimed that Interpal ‘raised money’ for ‘Hamas institutions’. The Charity Commission investigated the
allegations, concluding in May 1996 that ‘we found no evidence of any donations that could not be accounted
for or that had been given for political reasons’. It added: ‘Scrutiny of the charity’s publicity and documentation
provided no evidence of any pro-terrorist propaganda and interviews with the trustees and staff suggested
that they were motivated by faith and altruism rather than fanaticism.’50 This did not satisfy Israel, however.
In August 1997, ‘a senior Israeli intelligence source’ told The Guardian that Interpal ‘was controlled by Hamas’.51
The source also said that ‘Israel had asked the British government to shut Interpal last year’.

The second Charity Commission investigation into the charity was triggered in April 2003 after ‘allegations
that Interpal was misapplying funds for Hamas’ political activities in April 2003’. The Charity Commission
reported: ‘Evidence was found that the charity had received funds from The Al-Aqsa Foundation – an
organisation whose assets had been frozen under United Nations’ sanctions for allegedly supporting terrorist
activities. However, scrutiny of Interpal’s records revealed that these funds were for humanitarian work
already undertaken by the charity.’52

In August 2003, the US Department of the Treasury named Interpal as one of five charities linked to Hamas
and terrorism as part of its investigation of the Holy Land Foundation. That probe had also allegedly involved
Israeli influence. The charity brought a formal complaint that ‘the F.B.I. used as the crux of its case a “distorted”
and erroneous translation of sensitive Israeli intelligence material’.53 

49. Material in next three paragraphs adapted from Tom Griffin and David Miller ‘BDS campaigner targeted by law firm with
links to Israeli intelligence’, Spinwatch, 5 October 2013 http://spinwatch.org/index.php/component/k2/item/5550-bds-campaigner-
targeted-by-law-firm-with-links-to-israeli-intelligence
50. The Palestinians Relief & Development Fund (Interpal). Charity Commission Annual Report - June/1997, Page 27. http://web.
archive.org/web/20030118042624/http://www.interpal.org/web/comm-report.htm
51. Julian Borger, ‘Close Trust, Israel Pleads Britain is Being Asked to Clamp Down on Palestinian Fundraisers,’ The Guardian, 7
August 1997: 1.
52. Charity Commission, Charity Watchdog Closes Inquiry into Interpal, Press Release, 24 September 2003, PR 68/ 03 https://
web.archive.org/web/20070930163756/http://www.gnn.gov.uk/imagelibrary/downloadMedia.asp?MediaDetailsID=38335
53. Eric Lichtblau Islamic Charity Says F.B.I. Falsified Evidence Against It New York Times 27 July 2004.
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/us/islamic-charity-says-fbi-falsified-evidence-against-it.html

21
As a result, the Charity Commission opened what amounts to a third investigation into Interpal:

In line with the Commission’s published policy on charities and their alleged links to terrorism, an
inquiry was opened and the charity’s assets were frozen as a temporary and protective measure. The
American authorities were unable to provide evidence to support their allegations so the Commission
has unfrozen the charity’s bank accounts and closed its inquiry. 54

The Israeli daily Haaretz reported in 2004 that Foreign Minister Jack Straw had refused a request from his
Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom to put an end to Interpal’s activities. Significantly, Haaretz noted that even if
the Israeli intelligence on Interpal were made public, it would not necessarily meet the threshold for banning
a UK charity and that, ‘it is therefore not at all certain that even if the evidence were to be revealed, it would
lead to a curbing of Interpal in Britain’.55

After the Board of Deputies of British Jews repeated the ‘terrorist’ allegation, it was sued by Interpal. The
parties settled out of court, with the Board of Deputies making a public apology and posting the statement on
its website for 28 days, which concluded:

We referred to “terrorist organisations such as Hamas and Interpal”. We would like to make it clear
that we should not have described Interpal in this way and we regret the upset and distress our item
caused.56

Interpal was also targeted in 2006 by a BBC Panorama documentary fronted by John Ware – a journalist with
a long history of programmes critical of Muslim organisations. It had also relied extensively on evidence
provided by current and former Israeli security officials. The Muslim Council of Britain denounced the BBC
saying that ‘far from being an objective journalist, Ware is actually an agenda-driven pro-Israeli polemicist’,
with a ‘penchant for producing unbalanced programmes on Islam-related issues’. 57 The Charity Commission
opened its fourth inquiry as a result of the programme. It found that there was insufficient evidence to take
action over claims that Interpal beneficiaries were supporting terrorism, because it could not verify ‘the
provenance or accuracy’ of material provided by the Israeli government.58

In 2007, Interpal had its account closed by Natwest, as the bank sought to avoid potential liability in a law
suit.59 This incident was related to the activities of an Israeli law firm Shurat HaDin (also known as the Israel
Law Center (ILC)) which admits to working closely with Mossad.60 Director, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner claimed
in a briefing with US officials in 2007, which subsequently appeared on Wikileaks that the ILC had been
involved in the action, and that Natwest itself was now consulting with Israeli intelligence on Islamic charity
clients.61

54. Charity Commission, Charity Watchdog Closes Inquiry into Interpal, Press Release, 24 September 2003, PR 68/ 03 https://
web.archive.org/web/20070930163756/http://www.gnn.gov.uk/imagelibrary/downloadMedia.asp?MediaDetailsID=38335
55. Sharon Sadeh, ‘Giving Alms or Arms?’ Haaretz, April 19, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/giving-alms-or-arms-1.119971. Accessed 12 April 2020.
56. Dominic Casciani, Top Jewish group 'terror' apology’ BBC News, 29 December 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4564784.
stm
57. Muslim Council of Britain ‘John Ware’s Uncharitable Panorama in the Service of Israel’, 2 August 2006. https://mcb.org.uk/
press-releases/john-wares-uncharitable-panorama-in-the-service-of-israel/
58. Charity Commission, Inquiry Report - Palestinian Relief and Development Fund (Interpal). 26 February 2009, p. 12. http://
offlinehbpl.hbpl.co.uk/NewsAttachments/NST/interpal09.pdf
59. Ian Allsop, ‘Natwest closes Interpal’s Bank Accounts’. Civil Society, 1 May 2007. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 12
January 2013. Accessed 12 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20131012073456/http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/finance/news/
content/2687/natwest_closes_interpals_bank_accounts
60. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/israeli-law-center-shurat-hadin-admits-mossad-ties
61. Tom Griffin and David Miller ‘BDS campaigner targeted by law firm with links to Israeli intelligence’ Spinwatch, 5 October
2013. http://spinwatch.org/index.php/issues/more/item/5550-bds-campaigner-targeted-by-law-firm-with-links-to-israeli-intelligence

22
In July 2010, Express Newspapers announced that it was apologising and paying £60,000 along with legal
costs to the trustees of Interpal ‘over untrue allegations of support for Hamas and terrorism’.62 Since then,
there have been significant numbers of attempts to repeat old allegations and to attempt to add new ones to
the collection.

In June 2019, Associated Newspapers – the owner of the Daily Mail and MailOnline – ‘apologised to Interpal
and paid £120,000 in libel damages after articles suggested the charity has links to terrorists. The publisher
will also pay the trustees’ legal costs’.63 In August that year, The Jewish Chronicle published a full apology ‘and
has undertaken not to repeat false allegations that the Trustees are linked to terrorism or extremism. The
newspaper is also paying the Trustees’ legal costs’.64

Though the Charity Commission may have investigated some of these stories, it has not since announced
a formal investigation of Interpal. The history of challenges to Interpal shows that the arrival of the
neoconservative movement at the Charity Commission in 2012 was not the start of attacks on Muslim-led
charities and especially charities attempting to help the Palestinians. However, it did demonstrably intensify
such attacks.

The harassment of Muslim Aid

The case of Muslim Aid shows the effects that the policies adopted by the Charity Commission can have on a
Muslim-run charity and – as with Interpal – the role that the media can play in facilitating hostile action by the
Charity Commission.

Complaint from the Telegraph in 2010

The allegations against Muslim Aid came from Andrew Gilligan – a journalist known for a succession of anti-
Muslim stories. According to the Charity Commission investigation report:

On 1 March 2010, the Commission’s Press Office was contacted by a journalist alleging that in 2005
the Charity had made payments to two organisations he considered to be linked to Hamas. On 2
March 2010, a national newspaper published an article stating that the Charity had paid funds to two
organisations “allegedly linked to terrorist groups”, such as Hamas. This included an organisation that
the article stated had been designated by the US government as a “sponsor of terrorism”. A subsequent
article by the same journalist in a related national newspaper dated 28 March 2010 expanded on these
allegations. It contended the charity had channelled funds to a number of named groups which it
asserted were linked to Hamas.65

The Commission report went on to state:

The Commission identified that, of the organisations named in the articles as being funded or
otherwise supported by the Charity, one – the Al-Ihsan Charitable Society – is designated in the UK.

62. Carter Ruck, ‘Express Newspapers apologises and pays £60,000 to the Trustees of Interpal over untrue allegations of
support for Hamas and terrorism’, Press Release 22 July 2010 https://www.carter-ruck.com/images/uploads/documents/Interpal_
Press_Release.pdf
63. Kirsty Weakley, Daily Mail owner pays £120,000 in damages to Interpal trustees
Civil Society, 14 Jun 2019 https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/daily-mail-owner-pasy-120-000-in-damages-and-apologises-to-interpal-
trustees.html
64. Interpal, ‘Interpal Trustees receive £50,000 in damages as Jewish Chronicle apologises for libels’, Press Release, 27 August
2019.
https://www.interpal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Press-Release-Jewish-Chronicle-Apologises-to-Interpal-Trustees-PDF.pdf
65. Charity Commission, Regulatory Case Report Muslim Aid Registered Charity Number 295224, p. 2. https://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110107193010/http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Library/rcr_muslim_aid.pdf

23
 The Commission therefore focussed its consideration on the charity’s relationship, if any, with this
organisation. The Commission was not provided with sufficient evidence to support the allegation
that other named organisations funded by the charity had the alleged links, and consequently did
not carry out further investigations into payments to them. Given the seriousness of the allegations
made, the Commission required material evidence in support of those claims in order for it to consider
taking regulatory action. 66

But such evidence was not forthcoming:

On the evidence examined by the investigation, the Commission concluded that the charity had
not illegally funded the Al-Ihsan Charitable Society… By publishing this report, the Commission
has given a public assurance that public allegations of links between the charity and terrorism are
unsubstantiated. 67

The rejection of the complaints by the Commission did not stop the same journalist returning to this topic
again, however.

2012 case referred by Muslim Aid; investigated in 2013 and announced in 2014

In 2012 Muslim Aid referred itself to the Commission because of ‘non-compliance with some operational
aspects in two field offices’. It said: ‘Muslim Aid’s own investigations have concluded and remedial actions have
been taken resulting in minimising potential risks to the charity’s operations.’ But, though these actions were
deemed acceptable, their investigations thus far gave them a rationale to widen the investigation and they
‘opened a statutory inquiry in October 2013’.68

The inquiry was made public in June 2014 when the Commission ‘announced the names of 13 charities which
it had already opened statutory inquiries into, including Muslim Aid, the Islamic international aid charity.’
The publication of the names, said the Commission, was ‘down to a change in its policy on announcing
investigations. It said that previously it only published the names of charities under inquiry if there were
“specific public interest arguments” for doing so. But now it only withheld names if there were special
circumstances.’ 69 This was a direct result of the enhanced counter terror powers. Of the 13 charities, at least
six would appear to have been Muslim-led – vastly out of proportion to the Muslim population of the UK. Most
of these were in the end shut down or had new trustees or directors appointed at the insistence of the Charity
Commission. Even if all the allegations made against such charities were true, it is clear that Muslim charities
were being disproportionately targeted.

Further Telegraph attack – November 2014

In November 2014 Andrew Gilligan of The Telegraph returned to the fray, alleging that Muslim Aid has
‘admitted [to] funding organisations closely linked to the banned terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic
Jihad’. It was further claimed that the charity was in receipt of ‘millions in Gift Aid’ funding from the British

66. Charity Commission, Regulatory Case Report Muslim Aid Registered Charity Number 295224, p. 2. https://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110107193010/http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Library/rcr_muslim_aid.pdf
67. Charity Commission, Regulatory Case Report Muslim Aid Registered Charity Number 295224, p. 4-5. https://webarchive.
nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110107193010/http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/Library/rcr_muslim_aid.pdf
68. David Ainsworth, ‘Charity Commission announces statutory inquiry into Muslim Aid’ Civil Society, 6 June 2014. https://web.
archive.org/web/20151125222522/http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/17606/muslim_aid_is_under_a_charity_
commission_statutory_inquiry?topic=&print=1
69. David Ainsworth, ‘Charity Commission announces statutory inquiry into Muslim Aid’ Civil Society, 6 June 2014. https://web.
archive.org/web/20151125222522/http://www.civilsociety.co.uk/governance/news/content/17606/muslim_aid_is_under_a_charity_
commission_statutory_inquiry?topic=&print=1

24
government.70 Muslim Aid rejected the criticism, citing the previous Charity Commission report. It also
ridiculed the element about Gift Aid, stating that such sums are received on the basis of being a registered
charity.71

The Charity Commission finally reported on Muslim Aid in December 2018 – having intervened in 2016 to
sack all the trustees. The Commission ‘used its powers in October 2016 to appoint an interim manager (IM),
who worked alongside the newly appointed CEO to complete a full governance and infrastructure review
of the charity’. Following this, a new senior leadership team was recruited and a new trustee board was
appointed on 31 January 2018.72

In the end, the inquiry was devastating for Muslim Aid. By February 2020 it was apparent that the charity was
no longer financially sustainable73 and that March, the Muslim news website 5Pillars reported that a letter of
no confidence had been given to the new CEO which had allegedly been signed by a number of staff.74

Whether the actions of the Charity Commission directly precipitated this serious crisis for Muslim Aid or
not, it is clear that the effects of the attacks by the press and the ramping up of counter-terror legislation have
materially damaged the ability of the charity to pursue its objectives of helping the needy. That is by itself a
significant outcome, which affects Muslim recipients of charitable giving disproportionately and thus would
seem to qualify as discriminatory conduct.

The Charity Commission and Cage

In February 2015, The Washington Post revealed that Mohammed Emwazi was ‘Jihadi John’, the British citizen
who had appeared in several beheading videos of Western aid workers and journalists. Emwazi had been a
client of the human rights advocacy group Cage – previously CagePrisoners – and, prior to travelling to Syria,
he’d approached Cage due to alleged harassment by the security services.

When news broke that he was ‘Jihadi John’, Cage held a press conference announcing the publication of a
comprehensive account of their correspondence with him. This included details of Emwazi’s harassment by
the UK security service MI5. This was despite Emwazi having never been charged with – or even arrested for –
any terrorism-related crime. Emwazi faced repeated detention at airports, interrogation by MI5, deportation,
and prevention from returning to Kuwait to take up a job and get married. In addition, the security services
had tried to recruit Emwazi as an informant. When he refused, he was told: ‘You’re going to be known... you’re
going to be followed... life will be harder for you.’ In a letter sent to the journalist Robert Verkaik, Emwazi
wrote that he was a ‘dead man walking’. The picture that emerged was, of course, contested by the authorities.
It is reported that Emwazi was ‘mixing in radical Islamist circles’ prior to attracting the attention of MI5. But
even if true, questions still remain about their tactics, harassment and attempted recruitment – as well as the
accusation that they tried to strangle him.

70. Andrew Gilligan, 'Terror link’ charities get British millions in Gift Aid, Sunday Telegraph, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/
uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/11263309/Terror-link-charities-get-British-millions-in-Gift-Aid.html
71. Muslim Aid’s response to The Sunday Telegraph article on 30th November 2014, Press Release, https://www.muslimaid.
org/media-centre/press-releases/muslim-aid-s-response-to-the-sunday-telegraph-article-on-30th-november-2014/. Accessed 13 April
2020.
72. Charity Commission, Former trustees of MA 1985 (formerly Muslim Aid) criticised after investigation finds serious
mismanagement Press release. 6 December 2018.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/former-trustees-of-ma-1985-formerly-muslim-aid-criticised-after-investigation-finds-serious-
mismanagement. Accessed 13 April 2020.
73. Kirsty Weakley, ‘Muslim Aid’s auditor raised concerns about “significant deficit on unrestricted funds”’ Civil society, 13
February 2020. https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/muslim-aid-s-auditor-raised-concerns-about-significant-deficit-on-unrestricted-
funds.html
74. 5Pillars, Muslim Aid launches investigation after CEO Jehangir Malik no-confidence letter, 1 March 2020.
https://5pillarsuk.com/2020/01/03/muslim-aid-launches-investigation-after-ceo-jehangir-malik-no-confidence-letter/

25
The evidence presented by Cage at that press conference amounted, as Ben Hayes puts it, to ‘a credible
allegation of state-sanctioned blackmail of one of our citizens upon pain of having his life ruined by
unaccountable security forces’.75 Speaking at the press conference, Cage’s Asim Qureshi contrasted the young
man he had corresponded with, with the brutality displayed by ‘Jihadi John’ – describing the Emwazi he had
known years earlier as ‘extremely gentle’. Qureshi’s comments were then seized upon and distorted by the
press. The Telegraph, for example, reported that Qureshi had said that ‘Emwazi is “extremely gentle’”, removing
the past tense from his comments, which had made clear he was referring to Emwazi before his apparent
‘radicalisation’.

Following the press conference, the Charity Commission intervened and wrote to two of Cage’s charitable
funders requesting ‘unequivocal assurances’ that they had ceased funding Cage and would give guarantees
not to do so in the future. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust had made a grant award to Cage of £305,000
between 2007 and 2014. Of this, £271,250 had been paid. The Roddick Foundation, meanwhile, had made
grant payments to Cage of £120,000 between 2009 and 2012. Both charities complied with the threats from
the Commission. In response Cage took the Commission to judicial review and won.

As Moazzam Begg of Cage has written: ‘During court proceedings this week, disclosed emails revealed the
extent to which the Commission was unduly influenced by foreign entities, media and politicians.’ These
included:

• 27 February 2015: Shawcross said he’d ‘spent the last 24 hours in Washington with senior US
government counter-terrorism officials’ and that ‘one senior analyst thought it was astonishing
that Cage was not long ago exposed for what it is – a jihadist front.’

• 1 March 2015: Shawcross emailed the board referring to ‘another compelling article on the true
nature of Cage.’ Written by Andrew Gilligan, the piece in The Daily Telegraph claimed that Cage
members were ‘extremists peddling lies to British Muslims to turn them into supporters of terror’.

• March 2015: Theresa Villiers, then-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, wrote to Shawcross: ‘It
is wholly unacceptable for charities supported by the taxpayer to be funding an extremist group
like this one [Cage].’ Villiers also urged Shawcross to stop charities from funding Cage.

In another email, Shawcross said: ‘Cage and Begg are both awful – and, like all Islamists, are very skilled at
lawfare, in particular libel litigation.’76 As Begg concludes:

Lawfare is a term Shawcross often uses to berate users of the legal process in the War on Terror. The
suggestion that we shouldn’t have sought legal redress following years of torture and imprisonment
without trial fits nicely with Shawcross’ stated views. They do not, however, seem to be very British –
or legal. Even US President Barack Obama has repudiated the use of waterboarding as unacceptable
torture. Torture and false imprisonment are crimes.77

Though Cage won its case and the Charity Commission backed down, agreeing not to repeat its earlier action,
the damage was already done in that no new funding from either of the previous funders was given.

75. Ben Hayes, ‘Why Britain won’t talk about crucial elements of Jihadi John’s story’, OpenDemocracy. 28 February 2015. https://
www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/why-britain-wont-talk-about-crucial-elements-of-jihadi-johns-story/
76. Randeep Ramesh ‘Charity Commission fights claim it unlawfully choked off lobby group's funds’ The Guardian, 21 October
2015. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/21/charity-commission-fights-claim-it-unlawfully-choked-off-lobby-groups-
funds. Accessed 13 April 2020.
77. Moazzam Begg ‘CAGE court victory exposes Charity Commission torture links’ Cage.ngo, 23 October 2015. https://www.
cage.ngo/cage-court-victory-exposes-charity-commission-torture-links

26
Concluding comments

This chapter has shown the long-running attempts by state actors – particularly and originally Israel, but
later also the US and UK – to target Muslim-led charities on the grounds that they were inconvenient to Israel
by supporting the Palestinians, even if only in the sense of giving them aid. The attack on Muslim charities
became wider and more international after September 2001 and in the UK successive developments in
counter-terrorism policy made life more and more difficult for Muslim charities. In the past eight to ten years,
the neoconservative attacks on Muslim charities have heightened and the evidence in this chapter shows
that it involves the news media, neoconservative think tanks and state actors – especially those institutions
penetrated by neoconservative ideologues such as the Charity Commission after 2012.

27
3
The Neoconservative
movement in the EU
Neoconservatism is widely regarded as a distinctly American ideological phenomenon, in part because at its
core is a deep-seated belief in the moral righteousness of U.S. military force.78 However, neoconservatism’s
roots are embedded in 20th century European history – notably in the authoritarian, anti-liberal political
philosophies of the 1930s and the U.S.-inspired and supported anti-communist propaganda networks of the
Cold War era. And since George W. Bush’s presidency, disciples of this ideological tendency have emerged
across the European continent. In addition, the US neoconservative movement has long been concerned with
collaboration with like-minded European elements of political elites. There is a neoconservative international.

These ‘Eurocons’ – as they might be dubbed – share their US counterparts’ devotion to military might and
interventionist foreign policies.79 Although the unilateralism of US neocons is tempered in Europe by a
greater emphasis on the role of certain international alliances, the underlying vision is fundamentally the
same. Eurocons see multinational institutions like NATO as vehicles for pushing the agenda of the United
States and its European allies, and as instruments of global power, regime change, nation-building, and
‘democratisation’. But they regard as illegitimate any attempt to check or curb Western power via the United
Nations.

This worldview is evident in declarations such as the Prague Charter signed at the 2007 Democracy and
Security International Conference,80 the Statement of Principles of the Henry Jackson Society81 and the
Euston Manifesto.82 Representative Eurocons include politicians such as Conservative minister Michael Gove
and former Labour Foreign Office Minister Denis McShane in Britain; former Spanish Prime Minister Jose
Maria Aznar and foreign minister Ana Palacio; former defence minister Antonio Martino in Italy; and foreign
minister Karel Schwarzenberg in the Czech Republic.

The ideologies of many of these conservative figures have roots in the Cold War, when hardline anti-
communism helped forge transatlantic networks of militant Cold Warriors. Today, Eurocon theorists such
as Gove see the battle against political Islam as a similarly good-versus-evil struggle between democracy and
totalitarianism, one that encompasses geopolitical threats, domestic subversion, and ideological conflict.83

However, while the Eurocons share this central tenet about a Manichean struggle with Islamic totalitarianism,
these European ideologues are a diverse bunch who would disagree on a number of issues. The Eurocons can
be divided into four broad ideological tendencies, each of which has connections with like-minded political
factions in the United States. Each also corresponds with conceptually differentiated if in practice overlapping

78. Jim Lobe, ‘What is a Neo-Conservative Anyway?’ Inter Press Service, 12 August 2003. http://www.ipsnews.net/2003/08/
politics-what-is-a-neo-conservative-anyway-2/. Accessed 12 April 2020.
79. This chapter draws on Tom Griffin, ‘Who are the Eurocons?’, Militarist Monitor, 4 December 2009. https://militarist-monitor.
org/who_are_the_eurocons/; and, Tom Mills, Tom Griffin, & David Miller, (2011). The cold war on British Muslims. London: Spinwatch.
http://spinwatch.org/images/SpinwatchReport_ColdWar.pdf
80. Prague Charter, Democracy and Security International Conference website, https://web.archive.org/web/20160814131619/
http://www.democracyandsecurity.org/doc/Prague_Charter.pdf Accessed 21 February 2020.
81. Statement of Principles, Henry Jackson Society. https://henryjacksonsociety.org/statement-of-principles/. Accessed 21
February 2020.
82. The Euston Manifesto, https://web.archive.org/web/20160824130351/http://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto/.
Accessed 21 February 2020.
83. Michael Gove, Celsius 7/7, Phoenix, 2006, pp.127-128.

28
social movements, which elsewhere we have referred to as four of the five pillars of Islamophobia.84

Establishment neoconservatism

The extraordinary influence of neocons in the top echelons of the Bush administration was paralleled by the
emergence of like-minded policymakers across the Atlantic. Over the last decade, Europe’s own ‘establishment
neoconservatives’ have become entrenched in elite circles of policymakers and opinion-leaders. One of
their main projects has been to revive the Cold War-era Atlanticist networks of hawks that first emerged to
promote anti-communist, anti-Soviet propaganda.

In a 2004 article assessing the European political horizon, neoconservative writer Christopher Caldwell
noted that in the “war on terror” era, Christian democrats and right-wing socialists – the traditional bulwarks
of Atlanticism – were not reliable counterparts and were being supplemented by ‘an unfamiliar mix of New
Labor (in its British and Dutch variants), continental human-rights activists (particularly in France), Eastern
European ex-dissidents, and post-cold war parties of the right (in Spain and Italy)’.85

A number of these factions – particularly those based in eastern and southern Europe – were strongly
represented at the Democracy & Security International Conference in Prague in June 2007. This event was
described by one observer as a ‘neoconservative international’ because of the many core US neocons who
attended the conference along with President George W. Bush.86 Among those present was Devon Gaffney
Cross, whose work in Europe Caldwell had trumpeted back in 2004.87 Cross’ London-based Policy Forum –
which sought to bring to Europe the ‘widest possible variety of foreign-policy voices’ – has some ideological
similarities to the Cold War-era Congress for Cultural Freedom88, a CIA-backed network of anti-communist
intellectuals.89

Policy Forum’s ostensible variety was in fact clearly restricted to a narrow neoconservative-neoliberal
spectrum, stretching, in Caldwell’s description, ‘from Bush Republicans (she has invited the under-secretary of
defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to participate) to Clinton Democrats (such as the former CIA director James Woolsey)
to the human-rights activists of the Democratic left (who cluster around the Freedom House Foundation and
American organised labour)’.90

Putative evidence that US-inspired neoconservatism had taken root within a section of Britain’s foreign policy
elite came in March 2005 with the launch of the Henry Jackson Society, which was dedicated to

84. David Miller, Narzanin Massoumi, Tom Mills & Hilary Aked, 'The five pillars of Islamophobia', Open Democracy, 8 June 2015.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/five-pillars-of-islamophobia/
85. Christopher Caldwell, With friends like these, FT.com, 13 February
2004. https://web.archive.org/web/20090327064827/http://search.ft.com/
ftArticle?dse=true&sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=Devon+Cross&page=5&y=0&x=0&id=040213004277&ct=0&nclick_check=1.
Accessed 13 April 2020.
86. Jim Lobe, ‘A Neoconservative International Targets Iran,’ Inter Press Service, Lobelog, June 9, 2007. Retrieved from
the Internet Archive of 13 June 2007 on 13 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20070613110333/http://www.ips.org/blog/
jimlobe/?p=27
87. Christopher Caldwell, With friends like these, FT.com, 13 February
2004. https://web.archive.org/web/20090327064827/http://search.ft.com/
ftArticle?dse=true&sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=Devon+Cross&page=5&y=0&x=0&id=040213004277&ct=0&nclick_check=1.
Accessed 13 April 2020.
88. Powerbase ‘Congress for Cultural Freedom’, https://powerbase.info/index.php/Congress_for_Cultural_Freedom.
89. Christopher Caldwell, With friends like these, FT.com, 13 February
2004. https://web.archive.org/web/20090327064827/http://search.ft.com/
ftArticle?dse=true&sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=Devon+Cross&page=5&y=0&x=0&id=040213004277&ct=0&nclick_check=1
Accessed 13 April 2020.
90. Christopher Caldwell, With friends like these, FT.com, 13 February
2004. https://web.archive.org/web/20090327064827/http://search.ft.com/
ftArticle?dse=true&sortBy=gadatearticle&queryText=Devon+Cross&page=5&y=0&x=0&id=040213004277&ct=0&nclick_check=1.
Accessed 13 April 2020.

29
‘the maintenance of a strong military, by the United States, the countries of the European Union and other
democratic powers, armed with expeditionary capabilities with a global reach.’91 The society was partly
based at Peterhouse College in Cambridge, home to an elitist conservative tradition associated with the
historian Maurice Cowling.92 This British pedigree raised some eyebrows among observers, who wondered
why the group felt the need to name itself after an obscure US senator, Sen. Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson – a key Cold
War hawk around whom many early neocons rallied during the 1970s. Journalist Samuel Britten wrote that
the society’s manifesto, The British Moment, ‘comes wrapped in a Union Jack cover, and all the emphasis is on
British policy. Why, then, take the name of a US senator with a very mixed bag of views?’93 Another outpost
of British establishment neoconservatism is Policy Exchange, which has become the UK’s most prominent
right-wing think tank since its foundation in 2002. One recent episode serves to demonstrate its ideological
persuasion and raises questions about its credibility. In October 2007, under the supervision of its research
director, US neoconservative Dean Godson, Policy Exchange published a report on British mosques which
alleged that 25% of the institutions surveyed stocked politically radical material. A BBC investigation
subsequently concluded that some of the receipts used to support the report’s case had been fabricated.94
Furthermore, in 2005, Freedom House published a similar report about US mosques titled Saudi Publications
on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques, which was criticised for looking at a small number of mosques and
then suggesting that all mosques harboured hate propaganda.

The Zionist movement

Establishment neoconservatives are almost invariably strongly pro-Israel. Significant proportions of the
funding for establishment neoconservative think tanks and policy groups is provided by Zionist foundations
and/or pro-Israel philanthropists. This connection with Zionism is important and shows the overlapping
nature of the establishment neocon perspective with that of the Zionist movement. However, the Zionist
movement itself maintains a range of groupings. They are separate from the neoconservative movement,
though some parts are closely interlocked and in some cases are inseparable. We should specify that when
we use the term ‘Zionist movement’ we are referring to organisations that are either formally members of
the transnational Zionist movement – headquartered in Israel in National Institutions House – or groups
that, while not formally linked to the core of the movement, are, nevertheless, closely aligned. The four key
organisations making up the leadership of the Zionist movement, in addition to the Israeli government, are
the Jewish National Fund, Keren Hayesod, the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation. Here is the
account given on the website of the World Zionist Organisation’s website of the National Institutions:

Israel’s National Institutions, the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency for Israel, Keren
Kayemeth LeIsrael [Jewish National Fund] and Keren Hayesod, are the organisations established by the
Zionist Movement to help bring about the founding of a Jewish state.

Since 1948, the National Institutions have worked cooperatively to advance the Zionist enterprise,
complementing and interacting with one another in areas as diverse as aliya [migration of Jews to
Israel], land reclamation, settlement, strengthening Jewish life in the diaspora, Zionist education,
rescue of endangered Jewish populations, partnering with Jewish communities around the world,
combatting anti-Semitism, fundraising, Israel advocacy and fashioning Israel as an exemplary society
as an expression of the Zionist ideal.

91. Statement of Principles, Henry Jackson Society. https://henryjacksonsociety.org/statement-of-principles/. Accessed 21

February 2020.
92. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Obituary – Maurice Cowling, The Guardian, 6 September 2005. https://web.archive.org/
web/20160305212226/http://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/sep/06/guardianobituaries.obituaries
93. Samuel Britain, Two Views of Foreign Policy Morality, Financial Times, 14 August 2006. https://www.ft.com/
content/014a32e4-2af0-11db-b77c-0000779e2340
94. Peter Barron, 'Disastrous misjudgement?', BBC News - The Editors, 13 December 2007. https://web.archive.org/
web/20170408190543/http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/12/disastrous__misjudgement.html

30
Each of the National Institution’s headquarters are housed in a structure on King George Street in downtown
Jerusalem.95

We can note that the World Zionist Organization (WZO) states in its own words that the four national
institutions work ‘co-operatively’ to advance the Zionist ‘enterprise’ – including ‘Israel advocacy’ – in
communities ‘around the world’.

Three of the four – the exception being the Jewish Agency – have subsidiary or affiliate member organisations
in the UK and other countries. Thus, the JNF UK is the UK affiliate of the Jewish National Fund; the UJIA is the
UK affiliate of Keren Hayesod and the Zionist Federation is the UK affiliate of the World Zionist Organization.
The Jewish Agency, by contrast, has offices in a number of countries including the US, Canada, India, South
Africa and the UK. These four organisations and all of their members and subsidiaries are, therefore, formal
members of the Zionist movement.

All are signed up to the principles of the Zionist movement, including specifically, the Jerusalem Programme
adopted in 1951 to redefine the role of the movement after the successful creation of the State of Israel. The
Jerusalem Program is argued by critics to support the settlement of occupied land in the East Jerusalem
and other parts of the West Bank. In fact, it declares the ‘bond’ of the Jewish people to ‘Eretz Yisrael’ – a term
meaning a ‘greater Israel’ extending beyond the 1967 borders including to the West Bank and beyond – and
‘settling the country as an expression of practical Zionism’. This is the ‘official platform’ of the WZO and ‘the
Zionist movement’ to which all members sign up.96

In each of the countries that we examine as case studies the movement is active through affiliates of the
groups above. Thus Table 3.1 lists the affiliates of the WZO, JNF and KH in each of the case study countries.

WZO97 JNF KH98

Fédération des Organisations Keren Hayessod - Appel Unifié pour
KKL-France
Sionistes de France (FOSF) Israël (France)
Zionist Federation of Italy/ Keren Hayesod - Appello Unificato per
KKL Italy
Federazione Sionistica Italiana  Israele (Italy)
Zionist Federation of Holland/
JNF Holland Collectieve Israel Actie (Holland)
Federatie Nederlandse Zionisten
Federación de Comunidades Judías Hayesod - Hamagbit Hameujedet
KKL-JNF Spain
de España (Spain)
Zionist Federation of Great Britain &
JNF UK United Jewish Israel Appeal (UK)
Ireland

Table 3.1 The main Zionist affiliates in France, Italy, Holland, Spain and the UK

The WZO also has a number of other affiliated members such as political parties, youth groups and global/
international Zionist organisations such as B’nai B’rith International (BBI), all of which have a variety of
members and affiliates – often in a significant number of countries.

In addition, there are other groups that are engaged in activities of particular relevance to the question of
95. World Zionist Organization ‘The National Institutions’ http://www.wzo.org.il/congress/index.
php?dir=site&page=content&cs=3010&langpage=eng. Accessed 6 May 2019.
96. WZO, ‘Jerusalem Program.’ http://www.wzo.org.il/The-Jerusalem-Program. Accessed 6 June 2019.
97. Powerbase, ‘World Zionist Organization’, https://powerbase.info/index.php/World_Zionist_Organization
98. Powerbase ‘Keren Hayesod-United Israel Appeal’, https://powerbase.info/index.php/Keren_Hayesod_-_United_Israel_
Appeal

31
Islamophobia. One example is the now defunct Realité EU – a London-based outfit which sought to pressure

the European Parliament to toughen its stance on Iran.  It closed down after covert links to the US-based Israel
Project were exposed. The Israel Project is associated with BBI through sharing its office in Washington DC.
The latter organisation is also an affiliate member of the World Zionist Organization.99

Another is the Brussels-based Transatlantic Institute, founded by the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
and headed by Commentary contributor Emanuele Ottolenghi, who has called on Europe to ‘use its mighty
economic, financial, and commercial clout to squeeze Iran.’ The AJC has been known for its anti-Muslim
rhetoric even before 9/11, and the same orientation can be seen in the activities of its front groups.100
Commentary itself, the neoconservative flagship magazine, was the house journal of the AJC until 2008 when
it was taken over by a new publisher.

Other examples in Europe are groups like the Geneva-based UN Watch, whose work is aimed at discrediting
European-based international organisations. It is also affiliated to the American Jewish Committee (AJC). UN
Watch is ostensibly devoted to ‘formulating policy recommendations addressed to member states and the
United Nations system’. However, the group’s work has been repeatedly criticised for its excessive bias toward
Israel.101 We can note that the AJC – unlike the BBI – is not formally a member of the Zionist movement, but it is
nevertheless clearly a ‘pro-Israel’ grouping.

A final example further illustrates the overlap between the neocons and the Zionist movement and the various
levels of formal membership of the latter.

Friends of Israel Initiative

According to a statement on its website, the Friends of Israel Initiative (FOII) – headed by former Spanish
Prime Minister José María Aznar – was a response to ‘the unprecedented campaign of delegitimisation
against Israel waged by the enemies of the Jewish State and, perversely, supported by numerous international
institutions’.102 The statement goes on to warn: ‘Israel is an inextricable part of the West. We stand or fall
together.’ 103 The initiative was launched in Paris on 31 May 2010,104 on the same day that Israeli troops attacked
– in international waters – the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza
Strip, killing nine civilian activists.

In a 17 June 2010 article for The Times, Aznar – who is a board member of News Corporation, the owner of the
paper at the time105 – blamed the ship’s sponsors for Israel’s attack. He wrote that: ‘In an ideal world, no state, let
alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey, would have sponsored and organised a flotilla whose sole purpose
was to create an impossible situation for Israel: making it choose between giving up its security policy and the
naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.’106 Aznar argued that ‘Israel is our first line of defence in

99. Tom Mills and David Miller, Réalité-EU: Front group for the Washington-based Israel Project? Spinwatch, 30 October 2009.
http://spinwatch.org/index.php/component/k2/item/529-realite-eu-front-group-for-the-washington-based-israel-project
100. American Muslims for Palestine, American Jewish Committee, https://www.ampalestine.org/sites/default/files/
attachment/2016/11/American%20Jewish%20Committee.2014.UPDATED.pdf. Accessed 13 April 2020.
101. Ian Williams, ‘Casting the First Stone,’ Guardian "Comment is Free" blog, April 4, 2007. http://deadlinepundit.blogspot.
com/2007/04/casting-first-stone-full-text.html
102. ‘Welcome to our new site’, Friends of Israel Initiative, n.d. http://friendsofisraelinitiative.org/about-wellcome.php. Accessed 5
April 2020.
103. ‘Welcome to our new site’, Friends of Israel Initiative, n.d. http://friendsofisraelinitiative.org/about-wellcome.php. Accessed 5
November 2015.
104. ‘Aznar, Trimble to launch new pro-Israel project’, The Jerusalem Post, May 31 May 2010.
105. Dan Milmo, ‘Former Spanish MP to join Murdoch board’, The Guardian, 22 June 2006. www.theguardian.com/media/2006/
jun/22/newscorporation.rupertmurdoch. Accessed 16 May 2014.
106. José María Aznar, ‘Support Israel: if it goes down, we all go down’, The Times, 17 June 2010. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/
article/support-israel-if-it-goes-down-we-all-go-down-n596dwkh09d. Accessed 5 November 2015.

32
a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos’. He added that: ‘If Israel goes down, we
all go down.’ 107 This apocalyptic language developed into a narrative of civilisational decline, in which Aznar
complained of a lack of ‘moral and strategic clarity’ in the West:

To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by
the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by
a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the
most fanatical incarnation of their faith. To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments,
would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears. 108

The UK launch of the FOII was at the British House of Commons in July 2010.109 The event was hosted by the
Henry Jackson Society and sponsored by Tory MP Robert Halfon, who at the time was political director of
Conservative Friends of Israel. It was also attended by Aznar, former president of the Italian Senate Marcello
Pera, and British historian and Henry Jackson Society signatory Andrew Roberts, both co-founders of the
FOII.110 Henry Jackson Society signatory David Trimble – former First Minister of Northern Ireland – is another
co-founder of FII. His role was widely seen as compromising his appointment as an observer to the Turkel
Commission, charged by the Israeli government with looking into the Mavi Marmara affair.111 Although his
international profile as a Nobel Peace Prize winner was rooted in his role in the negotiation of the Good
Friday Agreement, he was strongly critical of attempts to export the model of the Irish peace process to
other conflicts.112 Some of the other co-founders of the FOII include: the Italian-American billionaire Robert
Agostinelli; John Bolton, hawkish former US ambassador to the UN; Alejandro Toledo, former president of
Peru; George Weigel, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre; Fiamma Nirenstein, right-wing
Italian politician, journalist and author; and Carlos Bustelo, the Spanish Industry Minister from 1977 to 1980.113
According to The Jewish Chronicle, Israeli government advisor Dore Gold backed the establishment of the
FOII.114 Gold was an advisor to Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon and has been
president of the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs since 2000.

The role of the Zionist movement in fostering Islamophobia

The role of elements of the Zionist movement in fostering anti-Muslim ideas is manifold. We can start by
noting the well-known anti-Arab prejudice of the leaders of the Zionist movement and founders of the state
of Israel. This was an ideology that helped to justify the expulsion of the Palestinians – and their continued
exile – and the oppression of those who remained within the borders of Israel in 1948. There is a wealth of

107. José María Aznar, ‘Support Israel: if it goes down, we all go down’, The Times, 17 June 2010. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/
article/support-israel-if-it-goes-down-we-all-go-down-n596dwkh09d. Accessed 5 November 2015.
108. José María Aznar, ‘Support Israel: if it goes down, we all go down’, The Times, 17 June 2010. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/
article/support-israel-if-it-goes-down-we-all-go-down-n596dwkh09d . Accessed 5 November 2015.
109. Tom Mills, 'Friends of Israel Initiative: The neoconservatives’ eastern front', PULSE, 19 July 2010. https://pulsemedia.
org/2010/07/20/friends-of-israel-initiative-the-neoconservatives-eastern-front/
110. ‘HJS Event: The Friends of Israel Initiative, Henry Jackson Society’, Archived at the Internet Archive, 5 November 2011.
http://web.archive.org/web/20111105030415/http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/stories.asp?pageid=49&id=1657 . Accessed 12
May 2019
111. Tom Griffin, Hilary Aked, David Miller and Sarah Marusek, The Henry Jackson Society and the degeneration of British
Neoconservatism: Liberal interventionism, Islamophobia and the ‘War on Terror’, Glasgow: Public Interest Investigations, 2015. p.36.
112. Tom Griffin, ‘An Irish lesson for the Middle East?’, openDemocracy, 18 April 2009. www.opendemocracy.net/blog/
ourkingdom-theme/tom-griffin/2009/04/15/an-irish-lesson-for-the-middle-east . Accessed 18 May 2014.
113. ‘Founder members’, Friends of Israel Initiative, n.d. http://www.friendsofisraelinitiative.org/about-advisors.php . Accessed 16
May 2014.
114. Marcus Dysch and Ron Csillag, ‘Lord Trimble’s ‘Israel-friendly’ reputation, The Jewish Chronicle, 17 June 2010. http://www.
thejc.com/news/world-news/33209/lord-trimbles-israel-friendly-reputation . Accessed 17 May 2014.

33
data indicating the factual basis of this claim.115116 A recent study of the racist right in Israel – by an academic
based in the country – makes the point that their politics on ethnic cleansing are actually mainstream Zionist
ideas. ‘The idea of “transfer” (a euphemism for ethnic cleansing), which appeared before the establishment of
the Zionist movement itself, had been promoted and pursued secretly or openly by the majority of the Zionist
leaders from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion.’117

Such ideas are fed by the settler movement, in its ongoing attempts to justify further dispossession and
violence.118 There are currents of pro-settler opinion in the US , which are informed at least in part by this
context in Israel.119 These past and ongoing forms of racism are fundamental to the way in which the Israeli
state was created and the way in which it operates today. They are accompanied by:

• Denial of the existence of Islamophobia and indeed of anti-Arab racism too;

• Denial that Islamophobia is a form of racism and/or
• Denial of an equivalence in principle between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as forms of racism.

For example, B’nai B’rith International (BBI) – which is a formal member of the Zionist movement – has
contributed to the anti-Muslim atmosphere by denying Islamophobia. In a 2001 press conference to highlight
the then-upcoming World Conference on Racism, BBI presented a paper claiming – even before 9/11 - that
Islamophobia is an invention.120 It decried the attempt ‘to link anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and anti-Arabism,
as manifestations of racism’ as ‘phenomena of equal gravity’. The author of the paper Manuel Prutcschi wrote:
‘History and reality in no way justify such a contention.’ Prutcschi went on to explain his reasoning:

There neither is nor can there be such phenomena as ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Arabism’. The equation of anti-
Semitism with ‘Islamophobia’ and ‘anti-Arabism,’ which in effect are inventions, is a fundamental element in
the campaign to attack, delegitimise and indeed dismantle the State of Israel.

Furthermore, the link between the two:

diminishes anti-Semitism, on the one hand, by turning it in effect into one instance of racism among many.
It contends, on the other hand, that Muslims and Arabs are as much victims as Jews and raises so-called
“Islamophobia” and “anti-Arabism” to the level of gravity and importance of anti-Semitism in any analysis of
world racism. The result of this false linkage is that it provides radical Arab and Islamist (from Islamism that,
in contrast with Islam the religion, is a sweeping totalitarian political ideology) regimes and groups with an
instrument with which to neutralise any criticisms directed at them.121

The EU branch of B’nai B’rith advanced a similar position in 2015 arguing that the EU’s Fundamental Rights
Agency should not hold a conference that implies an equivalence between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia:

115. Terry, J. J. (1976). Zionist Attitudes Toward Arabs. Journal of Palestine Studies, 6(1), 67-78.
116. Abdo, N. (1992). Racism, Zionism and the Palestinian Working Class, 1920–1947. Studies in Political Economy, 37(1), 59-
92.; Christison, K., & Christison, B. (2015). Zionism as a Racist Ideology: Reviving an old theme to prevent Palestinian ethnicide.
In Globalization of Racism (pp. 117-133). Routledge.; Kovel, J. (2007). Overcoming Zionism. Pluto Press: Ann Arbor and London.; Massad,
J. (2003). The ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle. Interventions, 5(3), 440-448.; Razvi, M. (1985). Interrelationship
between Zionism, Imperialism and Racism. Pakistan Horizon, 38(3), 75-83.; Said, E. W. (1979). Zionism from the standpoint of its
victims. Social Text, (1), 7-58.; Sayegh, F. A. (1965). Zionist colonialism in Palestine (Vol. 1). Beirut, Lebanon: Research Center, Palestine
Liberation Organization.; Sayegh, F. (2012). Zionist colonialism in Palestine (1965). settler colonial studies, 2(1), 206-225.; Yuval-Davis, N.
(2007). Zionism, antisemitism and the struggle against racism. Soundings, (36), 122.
117. H. Sa'di, A. (2009). Beyond the Pale? Avigdor Lieberman and Demographic Racism in Israel. Holy Land Studies, 8(2), 143-158.
118. Massad, J. (2003). The ends of Zionism: Racism and the Palestinian Struggle. Interventions, 5(3), 440-448.
119. Salaita, S. (2006). Anti-Arab racism in the USA. Pluto Press: London, Ann Arbor, MI.
120. Islamophobia Called 'Invention' at B'nai B'rith News Conference, PR Newswire, 21 August 2001.
121. Manuel Prutcschi, ‘Antisemitism, Islamophobia and Anti-Arabism: The False Link,' Canadian Jewish Congress 3 August
2001, WCAR Cauces pages. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 16 June 2002 on 6 February 2020. https://web.archive.org/
web/20020618194906/http://www.icare.to/caucus/jewish.html

34
 Jewish organisations worldwide expressed shock and dismay over the weekend following the
announcement that the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency is planning on holding a conference that
implies an equivalence between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It was ‘inappropriate’ to ‘juxtapose
hate directed against Muslims with anti-Semitism as if both were one and the same’.122

This is the kind or argument still made by far right and neocon commentators such as Douglas Murray, for
example.123 It is a position which downplays – or at worst denies – Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism.

The ‘Islamist’ terror threat

Historically speaking, the Israeli government has fostered the idea of a terror threat emanating from the
Palestinians and Arabs more generally. Later, this morphed into the threat from specifically ‘Islamic’ or
‘Islamist’ terror.

Thus there is not just considerable overlap between the view of the US and other Western states with those
of Israel, but we can also observe a significant effort by Israel to spread the gospel to the US and beyond.124
As Deepa Kumar shows, the effort to tie Arabs to terrorism was prosecuted at the Jerusalem conference
on international terrorism in 1979: ‘At this stage the emphasis was on the PLO and the conflation of Arabs
with terrorism. Only one presenter spoke about “Islamic terrorism”, and overall, Islam was marginal to the
conference.’125 That speaker was Mordechai Abir, whose talk was entitled ‘The Arab World, Oil and Terrorism’.
He was later associated with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.126

He continued to be keen on the thesis that Muslims were driven by resentment of non-Muslims and by
backwardness. In a 1994 interview he told chairman of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs Manfred Gerstenfeld:

Since the 19th century, Abir says, some Western philosophers, such as Ernest Renan in France, have
accused Islam of being reactionary and standing in the way of the modernisation of the Moslem world.
This, Renan said, was the cause of Moslem backwardness in modern times and the Moslems’ inability
to develop and improve their standard of living. Moslem reaction prevents the adjustment of its
followers to the new world. The present reality, Abir notes, bears this out.127

The lack of reference to Islam ‘changed’ at the second conference held in Washington DC in 1984.128 In his
opening address Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned specifically the threat of ‘Islamic (and Arab) radicalism’.129
There was a specific session on the ‘Islamic world’ amongst four sessions on the first day. The others dealt
with terrorism and democracy, totalitarianism and the international network of terrorism. The session on
‘terrorism and the Islamic world’130 was chaired by Bernard Lewis. He is sometimes referred to as one of the
‘gang of four’ scholars in the field who ‘believed that Western policy towards the Arab world was distorted

by sentimental illusions – notably, that it mistook the tyranny imposed by Arab nationalist regimes for
122. Eric Fusfield, B'nai B'rith Dismayed EU Conference Diluting Focus On Anti-Semitism , B’nai B’rith International, 4 June 2015.
https://www.bnaibrith.org/in-the-news/bnai-brith-dismayed-eu-conference-diluting-focus-on-anti-semitism. Accessed 10 April 2020.
123. Douglas Murray Coffee House: The false equivalence between ‘Islamophobia’ and anti-Semitism The Spectator. 8 March 2019
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/03/the-false-equivalence-between-islamophobia-and-anti-semitism/.
124. Brulin, R. (2015). Compartmentalization, contexts of speech and the Israeli origins of the American discourse on
“terrorism”. Dialectical Anthropology, 39(1), 69-119.
125. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the politics of empire. Chicago: IL, Haymarket Books, 2012, p. 119.
126. Powerbase, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, https://powerbase.info/index.php/Jerusalem_Center_for_Public_Affairs
127. ‘Islamic Fundamentalism, The Permanent Threat An Interview with Mordechai Abir’. In Manfred Gerstenfeld Israel's New
Future - Interviews (1994). https://jcpa.org/phas/phas-abir-94.htm. Accessed 12 April 2020.
128. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the politics of empire. Chicago: IL, Haymarket Books, 2012, p. 119.
129. Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the politics of empire. Chicago: IL, Haymarket Books, 2012, p. 119.
130. Powerbase, ‘Second Conference on International Terrorism’ https://powerbase.info/index.php/Second_Conference_on_
International_Terrorism

35
progress’.131 The three panellists in that session were the other three members of the ‘gang’: Professor John
Barrett Kelly – then at the Heritage Foundation, having left academia a decade earlier to act as a consultant
for Gulf State dictators;132 PJ Vatikiotis – then at SOAS in London – and Elie Kedourie, who was at LSE in
the same city.133 All four were of course also highly critical of Islam. Lewis is known for his Islamophobia –
effectively denounced on many occasions by Edward Said.134 Kelly, though, thought Lewis to be ‘much more
admiring and much more tolerant of Islamic civilisation than I have allowed myself to be’.135 As a result, ‘both
US neocons and Zionists worked together to convince Western policymakers that “Islamic terrorism” would
replace communism as the West’s next great threat. By tying Islam to terrorism, neocons would gain political
cover for their imperialistic ambitions in the Middle East, and Zionists would benefit from garnering Western
sympathies for their struggle against Palestinian “terrorism’”.136

On top of conjuring a singular ‘threat’, there is the empirical record of the role of pro-Israel individuals and
groups in funding and spreading Islamophobia. All the recent studies in this area have portrayed a ‘network’
of groups pushing Islamophobic themes. There is a very marked preponderance of pro-Israel groups among
these networks and indeed much of the most explicit Islamophobia is funded by individuals and foundations
that also fund mainstream Zionist organisations,137 or indeed other activities intended to suppress solidarity
work with the Palestinians.138 However, it is the case that some mainstream Zionist organisations themselves
– including those that are formally part of the Zionist movement – are also engaged in this. We can point to
the case of the UJA Federation of New York. UJA-JFNY is a formal part of the Zionist movement through its
affiliation to the US national JFNA, which controls 30% of the votes for the governing body of the Jewish
Agency for Israel – one of the four ‘national institutions’.139

131. J B Kelly, Fighting the Retreat from Arabia and the Gulf: The Collected Essays and Reviews of J.B. Kelly, Vol. 1 Amazon.co.uk
Paperback – 15 Jun 2013 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fighting-Retreat-Arabia-Gulf-Collected/dp/0988477831
132. Powerbase, John Barrett Kelly. https://powerbase.info/index.php/John_Barrett_Kelly
133. Powerbase, ‘Second Conference on International Terrorism’ https://powerbase.info/index.php/Second_Conference_on_
International_Terrorism
134. Edward Said (2003). Orientalism. Rev Ed. London: Penguin.; Said, E. W. (2008). Covering Islam: How the media and the experts
determine how we see the rest of the world Rev. Ed. Random House.
135. Deepak Lal, Wisdom on the Greater Middle East, Quadrant, 11th September 2016. https://quadrant.org.au/
magazine/2016/07-08/wisdom-greater-middle-east/
136. Paul Larudee ‘The Israeli Government Role in Promoting Islamophobia Internationally’, Dissident Voice. 9 May 2018. https://
dissidentvoice.org/2018/05/the-israeli-government-role-in-promoting-islamophobia-internationally/
137. Hilary Aked, ‘The undeniable overlap: right-wing Zionism and Islamophobia’, Middle East Eye. 29 September 2015. https://
www.opendemocracy.net/en/undeniable-overlap-right-wing-zionism-and-islamophobia/
138. Belen Fernandez, ‘Follow the money: Zionist backlash and Islamophobia’, Al Jazeera.
26 Mar 2015. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/03/follow-money-zionist-backlash-islamophobia-150322115201245.
html
139. Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism, Jews SAY NO! and Jewish Voice for Peace–New York City, The Shame of the
UJA-Federation of New York How Its Jewish Communal Fund Supports Anti-Muslim Hate Groups https://static1.squarespace.com/
static/58c44a5d1b10e3fe89e2756c/t/5bfd61d8032be46a2c1e7d24/1543332316405/Defunding+Islamophobia+report+Nov.+28.pdf

36
Furthermore, there is a strong overlap between the foundations which bankroll the key Islamophobia
networks and those that send money directly to 1. the settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 2.
groups that support the infrastructure of settlements; and 3. the Israeli military.140141142143

Of course, there are elements of the Zionist movement and the wider pro-Israel movement that do not deny
Islamophobia. Indeed, the UK-based Community Security Trust (CST) pointed out in 2011 that ‘there is no
reason why someone cannot support Israel in the Middle East and also oppose hate crimes against Muslims in
Britain’. The CST also claimed that it should not be ‘taken for granted that somebody who is a “Zionist” is ipso
facto anti-Muslim’. This is quite correct, and we should acknowledge that groups like the CST do not openly
demur from publically opposing anti Muslim ‘hate crimes’.

However, this does not mean that they or other pro-Israel organisations that claim to oppose Islamophobia
should not be subject to scrutiny. In the case of the CST, the same article we have just cited says elsewhere
that:

A worrying trend within these efforts to tackle Islamophobia, are the attempts by some people to
associate Zionism with Islamophobia, and to blame rising Islamophobia on ‘Zionists’, however this is
defined. This is a conspiracy theory, which originates with Islamist groups, but is no longer limited to
those circles. It refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of any concerns about political Islamism, which
it conflates with Islam and Muslims in general. It has nothing to do with fighting Islamophobia, but
repeatedly shouts down any other voices in that debate.

This is a bizarre formulation, which seems to claim that there is no association of any sort between Zionism
and anti-Muslim racism. It’s not unusual for a whole range of groups to argue that Zionism is racism or, in a
gentler formulation, that ‘inherent’ in its ‘practice’ is ‘a reliance on racialist judgments about who can fully
participate in the benefits and practices of a national community’.144 It is odd to state that it is only ‘Islamist’
groups that make this argument, since this is not true, and is arguably itself Islamophobic. The idea that
debating the relation of Zionism to racism is somehow a strategic move to distract from ‘concerns about
political Islamism’ arguably strays back into the territory of Islamophobia denial which it would appear that
the CST had left.

We can note the list of keywords on the CST website as an indication of the kinds of concerns that the CST
has in this area. The term ‘Islamophobia’ does not appear – though ‘anti-Muslim hatred’ does. As can be seen
from the table there are eight items under this heading. As it happens, only one of these includes the term
Islamophobia in its title, and that is one falsely claiming one of the authors of this report had accused the CST
of spreading Islamophobia.

140. Sarah Marusek and David Miller, ‘The brothers who funded Blair, Israeli settlements and Islamophobia’, Middle East Eye. 13
August 2015. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/brothers-who-funded-blair-israeli-settlements-and-islamophobia. Accessed 12
April 2020.
141. Marusek, S. (2017). The Transatlantic Network: Funding Islamophobia and Israeli Settlement. In Massoumi, N. Mills, T. and
Miller, D. (eds) What Is Islamophobia, 186-214.
142. Rabab Abdu, ‘The Islamophobia and Israel Lobby Industries: Overlapping Interconnection and Anti-Racist Policy
Recommendations’ in Carter Center (Eds) Countering the Islamophobia Industry: Toward More Effective Strategies. May 2018. https://
www.cartercenter.org/resources/pdfs/peace/conflict_resolution/countering-isis/cr-countering-the-islamophobia-industry.pdf
143. Steven Salaita, ‘Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia: 9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of National Pride,’CR:
The New Centennial Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Fall 2006, 245-266.; Hatem Bazian, ‘The Islamophobia Industry and the Demonization of
Palestine: Implications for American Studies’ American Quarterly 2015, 67(4), 1057-1066. https://www.academia.edu/19795109/
The_Islamophobia_Industry_and_the_Demonization_of_Palestine_Implications_for_American_Studies; Bulkin, E., & Nevel, D.
(2014). Islamophobia & Israel. Route Books.
144. Steven Salaita, ’Why Americans should oppose Zionism’ Electronic Intifada, https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-
americans-should-oppose-zionism/9003

37
 Term Number of Term Number of items
items
Anti-Semitism 426 Extremism 12
Anti-Muslim hatred 8 Hizbollah 16
Hate crime 56 Iran 28
Racism 19 Islamism 50
Terrorism 95

Table 3.2 Number of items on the CST blog

For an organisation claiming not to be Islamophobic, their subjects of interest are remarkably similar to
those of avowedly Islamophobic groups. Compare the number of items on ‘racism’ (19) and ‘hate crime’ (which
includes all kinds of hate crime) – 56, with those on ‘Extremism’ (12). ‘Terrorism’ (95), ‘Hizbollah’ (16), ‘Iran’ (28)
and finally ‘Islamism’ (50).

We can note that Islamism is itself a problematic term, which is repurposed in the service of Islamophobia by
a number of authors. First, we can note its use in the form of ‘pan-Islamism’ by Bernard Lewis in his essay The
return of Islam in 1976. Second, we can note the Zionist academic Martin Kramer published a book in 1980
titled Political Islam145 – which reportedly coined that phrase.146 Third, a crop of French scholars including
Jean Francois Clement in 1980 and 1983, Olivier Roy in 1983-4 and Gilles Kepel, who wrote about it in 1984
but had started using the term four years earlier. Roy and Kepel had, over the years, multiple conflicts of
interest in their relations with the US and French state including advising the French Foreign Ministry and
military intelligence in the former case and President Chirac, in the latter.147148 As the Lebanese scholar Gilbert
Achcar notes, the term was ‘first applied to the new generation’ of Islamic activists (which Achcar describes as
‘fundamentalists’) ‘by authors who despised them’.149

Before the reinvention, the word had meant either a person who follows Islam – ie a Muslim, ‘an academic
who studies Islam’ or the more recent and unwieldy ‘Islamicist’. Kramer and his close friend Lewis were to
help weaponise the word ‘Islamist’, turning it into a catch-all term that brought latent Islamophobia into
respectability in Europe and the US in the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. Kramer spent 25 years
running the Moshe Dayan Center in Tel Aviv before moving to the US and in 2001 took up the editorship of
Middle East Quarterly150 – the magazine of the Middle East Forum one of the core elements of the Islamophobia
network in the US. Later, he worked with the pro-Israel think tanks the Washington Institute for Near East
Policy and latterly in 2012 was President-designate of the nascent Shalem College – a new teaching institution
built on the site of a former Arab college on occupied territory in the West Bank.

The aim to ‘link Islamism to “extremism” and “violence” in a supposedly conspirative effort by Muslims to
create a pan-Islamist entity to rule the world’151 is a venture not too dissimilar to racism. It refers to the idea
that Muslims draw on their faith in analysing and acting in the real world as if this was some sort of aberration
– a throwback to medieval times. But as Smith notes: ‘Religions are not just expressions of individual belief;

145. Martin Kramer, Political Islam, Sage, 1980.

146. John O. Voll, Tamara Sonn, ‘Political Islam’, Islamic Studies, Oxford Bibliographies. 14 December 2009
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0063.xml
147. Olivier Roy, In Search of the Lost Orient: An Interview, 2017, Columbia University Press.
148. Powerbase, ‘Gilles Kepel’, https://powerbase.info/index.php/Gilles_Kepel
149. Achcar, G. (2013). Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism. London: Saqi.
150. ‘Martin Kramer - New Editor of Middle East Quarterly’, Press Release, Middle East Forum, August 1, 2001 https://www.
meforum.org/443/martin-kramer-new-editor-of-middle-east-quarterly
151. Andreas Krieg Laying the ‘Islamist’ bogeyman to rest, Lobelog.
October 10, 2019 https://lobelog.com/laying-the-islamist-bogeyman-to-rest/. Accessed 13 April 2020.

38
they are claims about how society should be organised, and they are institutions that organise it. Religion is
political.’152 In fact it is not at all unusual for oppressed groups to turn to religion as a means to cope with or
resist oppression.153

So, while it is possible that defenders of Israel can also be firm opponents of Islamophobia, it is by no means
straightforwardly the case that all who claim to oppose anti-Muslim racism, should be taken at their word.

The ‘decent left’

In the years following the 9/11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, liberal hawks of the U.S Democratic Party
developed close links to a coalition of British journalists, academics, and bloggers who supported the Iraq War
– many of whom self-identified as the ‘decent left’.

The ‘war on terror’ led to a renewal of old Cold War battles on the European left between pro-NATO, pro-
Iraq War Atlanticists and their traditional opponents in the peace movement. A new element was the role of
European Muslim communities in the grassroots mobilisations that produced the massive demonstrations
against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In Britain, the ‘pro-war left’ blog Harry’s Place attacked the alliance of Muslim and left groups involved
in organizing the anti-war protests.154 So too did the Labour Friends of Iraq, which endeavored to heed
academic Alan Johnson’s call for the creation of a ‘decent left’. This was a term borrowed from Michael Walzer
– professor at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Studies who is best known for his efforts to
revitalise the “just war” theory.155

Mirroring some of these developments across the Atlantic were the Social Democrats USA, who held a
conference in Washington, D.C. in May 2003. This looked at the role of the European left ‘in encouraging the
strident attacks on the United States that have been mounted in Europe and elsewhere over the past year’ and
looked for a repeat of the days when ‘American and European intellectuals and sections of the labor movement
rallied to found such institutions as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and Encounter magazine’.156

One notable European effort to recreate a European-wide pro-war coalition was the network of British
intellectuals who published the 2006 Euston Manifesto. This coalition of bloggers, journalists, and academics
found themselves ‘increasingly out of tune with the dominant anti-war discourse’, in the words of one of their
number, Norman Geras.157 Supporters of Harry’s Place, Labour Friends of Iraq, and other pro-war left groups
were strongly represented among the signatories to the manifesto, which condemned those on the left ‘for
whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic ‘anti-
imperialism’ and/or hostility to the current U.S. administration’.158

152. Blake Smith, ’Why We Say ‘Islamism’ and Why We Should Stop‘ Quillette. February 11, 2018 https://quillette.com/2018/02/11/
say-islamism-stop/
153. Blake Smith, ’Why We Say ‘Islamism’ and Why We Should Stop‘ Quillette. February 11, 2018 https://quillette.com/2018/02/11/
say-islamism-stop/
154. What War, What Left?, Harry's Place, 29 November 2002. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 18 August 2016. https://web.
archive.org/web/20160818084130/http://www.hurryupharry.org/2002/11/29/what-war-what-left/. Accessed 10 April 2020.
155. Alan Johnson, The Worst Advertisement: The Socialists and the Iraq Election, Labour Friends of Iraq, 29 January
2005. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 18 August 2016 https://web.archive.org/web/20160818084130/http://www.
labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk/archives/000203.html. Accessed 10 April 2020.
156. Everything Changed: What Now for Labor, Liberalism and the Global Left?, Social Democrats USA, 17 May 2003. Retrieved
from the Internet Archive of 18 August 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160818084130/http://www.socialdemocrats.org/
May17InstituteTranscript.html. Accessed 10 April 2020.
157. Norman Geras, Introducing the Euston Manifesto, guardian.co.uk, 13 April 2006. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 22
January 2013 on 13 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20130122130448/http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/
apr/13/introducingtheeustonmanifes.
158. The Euston Manifesto, eustonmanifesto.org. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 18 August 2016, https://web.archive.org/
web/20160818084130/http://eustonmanifesto.org/the-euston-manifesto. Accessed 6 March 2020.

39
Prominent neocon William Kristol warmly welcomed the manifesto as ‘reminiscent of the much-missed
liberal anti-totalitarianism of the early Cold War period’.159 Others, meanwhile, questioned its credibility. US
writer D.D. Guttenplan suggested that the project had ‘been shaped far more by the crew at Dissent magazine
(and which shares Dissent founder Irving Howe’s fixation on the mote in the eyes of the left rather than the
beam blinding American foreign policy) than anything native to these shores’.160

The close links between the US Social Democrats and the British Eustonites has also been reflected in
Alan Johnson’s online magazine Democratiya, which consists largely of contributions from the two groups.
Anticipating criticism for publishing an interview with well-known neocon Joshua Muravchik, Johnson
attacked what he called ‘neoconitis’ as an ‘obstacle to grown-up political debate on the decent left’. He added:
“We should have the self-confidence to establish for ourselves our points of contact with, and our critical
distance from, neoconservatism.’

As an example of neoconitis, Johnson cited ‘the reaction of the Muslim Council of Britain in October 2007 to
the finding by a think tank, Policy Exchange, that anti-Semitic and anti-Western hate literature was on sale at
a quarter of UK mosques’. He failed to mention that the evidence used in the report by Policy Exchange had
been challenged by the BBC, as having been fabricated.161

The counter-jihad right

Just as some US neoconservatives, in seeking to forge new alliances, have overlooked the anti-Semitism of the
Christian right, so too have they embraced sections of the European far-right to create a populist ‘counter-
jihad’ movement.

As Devon Gaffney Cross has worked to forge ties between US and European neoconservatives elites, her
brother Frank Gaffney has concentrated on building links with Europe’s populist right. Gaffney’s Washington,
D.C. think tank the Center for Security Policy is committed to ideological warfare and has links to a variety
of right-wing transatlantic and pan-European initiatives, such as the International Free Press Society and
the Counterjihad Europa network.162

These organisations have contributed to the growth in Europe of what security analyst Toby Archer has
called ‘counter-jihad discourse’ – a tendency that some left-leaning US analysts have called ‘Islamophobia’. In
a September 2008 article for the Royal United Services Institute, Archer argued that this perspective ‘mixes
valid concerns about jihad-inspired terrorism with far more complex political issues about immigration
to Europe from predominantly Muslim countries. It suggests that there is a threat not just from Islamic
extremists but from Islam itself ’.163

One remarkable feature of the European counter-jihad movement is the extent to which it has developed links
with far-right organisations with roots in Europe’s fascist past. Examples include the Sweden Democrats and

159. William Kristol, ‘A Few Good Liberals’, The Weekly Standard, 1 May 2006. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-
standard/a-few-good-liberals
160. D.D. Guttenplan, No sects please, you're British, Comment is free, 17 April 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2006/apr/17/nosectspleaseyourebritish. Accessed 13 April 2020.
161. Alan Johnson (Ed.) Global Politics After 9/11: The Democratiya Interviews, p.xxiii. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 18
August 2016 on 13 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20160818084130/http://fpc.org.uk/fsblob/901.pdf
162. Tom Griffin, ‘The Neocons, the BNP and the Islamophobia Network’, Spinwatch, 17 September 2009. https://web.archive.org/
web/20120229192111/http://www.spinwatch.org/-articles-by-category-mainmenu-8/317-islamophobia/5318-the-neocons-the-bnp-
and-the-islamophobia-network
163. Toby Archer, Countering the ‘Counter-Jihad’, RUSI Monitor, 15 August 2008. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 23
February 2015 on 13 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20150223225923/https://www.rusi.org/publications/monitor/articles/
keywords:counter-jihad/ref:A48A5851376CB9/

40
the Belgian Vlaams Belang, both of which were involved in the counter-jihad Brussels conference in 2007.164

Among the organizers of the conference was Christine Brim – later a senior vice-president at the Center for
Security Policy. In November 2007, Brim suggested that other far-right parties in France and Britain could
be enlisted in the counter-jihad: “We suggest looking for the possible movement of Le Pen’s political party
Front National towards the center-right, as they may change their platform to pro-active support to improve
the situations of European Jews and Israel. The same trend is happening in Austria, and with the BNP [British
National Party] in the UK.’165

Although this overt flirtation with fascist parties would be anathema to establishment neoconservatives
and the ‘decent left’, elements of the counter-jihad faction continue to accumulate political currency. Toby
Archer cited the work of journalist Melanie Phillips and Conservative politician Michael Gove, arguing that
‘these writers are far from the angry, often racist, bloggers of the far right, but their writings are used to bring
intellectual credibility’ to the counter-jihadist discourse on Islam and Islamism.166

However, the most sophisticated statement of the counter-jihad perspective on contemporary Europe comes
from the Euro-focused neoconservative Christopher Caldwell. In his recent book, Reflections on the Revolution
in Europe, Caldwell concluded: “When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is
anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the
latter”.167

Caldwell’s observation unintentionally recalls the deep historical roots of the Eurocon worldview. Just as
neoconservatism’s progenitors, the authoritarian political philosophers of the 1930s, blamed liberalism for the
weakness of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, so European liberalism – not Islamic extremism –
is the real object of Caldwell’s contempt.

Conclusions

Overall, the various social movements that coalesce around promoting anti-Muslim hatred and intolerance
are heavily networked and overlapping with each other. But there is a continuum which runs from the fascist
right to the Islamophobic left. To be sure, there is no cordon sanitaire insulating neoconservatives or self-
identifying leftists from avowed racists and actual fascists. Some neocons work very closely with the far-right,
some leftists and secularists work closely with anti-Muslim bigots or hardline Zionists. But others don’t: there
is a mosaic of interactions. What we see, however, when we turn to the policies adopted in EU member states,
is the broad influence of neoconservative ideas in the adoption of new counterterrorism measures from 2002
onwards. We examine these next.

164. Speaker Biographies, Counterjihad Europa. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 18 August 2016 on 13 april 2020. https://
web.archive.org/web/20160818084130/http://counterjihadeuropa.wordpress.com/conferences/counterjihad-brussels-2007/
counterjihad-brussels-2007-biographies.
165. ‘Haaretz: Jews for Le Pen’, Centre for Vigilant Freedom, 22 November 2007, Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 29
January 2008 on 13 April 2020. http://web.archive.org/web/20080129225347/http:/www.vigilantfreedom.org/910blog/2007/11/22/
haaretz-jews-for-le-pen/.
166. Toby Archer, Countering the ‘Counter-Jihad’, RUSI Monitor, 15 August 2008. Retrieved from the Internet Archive of 23
February 2015 on 13 April 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20150223225923/https://www.rusi.org/publications/monitor/articles/
keywords:counter-jihad/ref:A48A5851376CB9/
167. Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, London: Allen Lane, 2009, p.286.

41
4
The spread of
neoconservative ideas
and policies in the EU
In the EU in general and in many of the member states, the neoconservative perspective on counter-terrorism
policy is now embedded in official doctrine and practice. The adoption of policies on radicalisation and on
extremism – whether violent or non-violent – are signals of the adoption of policies that signal a change from
a law enforcement perspective on terrorism and political violence towards one in which non-violent ideas,
values and practices come to be seen as suspect.

In this chapter we review the changes in counter-terrorism policy seen in the EU and in the key case study
states that we are examining.

The UK - 2003/4

The Netherlands and the UK were the first countries to develop ideas associated with ‘radicalisation’. The
UK government started developing its strategy in 2003. The strategy, known as ‘CONTEST’, was, according
to a later Parliamentary report, ‘initially a slender document’168 and was kept confidential until 2016, when a
redacted version was released. It is dated 1 April 2004 and lists the four main strands of the strategy Pursue,
Prevent, Protect and Prepare. Under the ‘Prevent’ strand is the unmistakeable aim: ‘Prevent the radicalisation
of Muslim Youth in the UK.’169 The extent to which theories of ‘radicalisation’ were developed in response
to state agendas is well illustrated by the introduction to an academic collection on ‘violent radicalisation’
edited by Magnus Ranstorp, another member of the EU Expert Group on Violent Radicalisation. Ranstorp
recalls that in 2003 he ‘happened to share a unique speaking platform with Sir David Omand, Tony Blair’s
Cabinet Intelligence and Security Coordinator, at the British Defence Academy in Shrivenham’.170 Omand
that day unveiled the UK’s new counter-terrorism strategy, which would later influence policy on ‘terrorism’
and ‘radicalisation’ elsewhere in Europe and North America. ‘For Sir David, myself and others present at the
Defence Academy that day,’ Ranstorp writes, ‘it was clear that preventing violent radicalisation had to be an
overarching priority to complement the tactical intelligence, law enforcement and military firefighting efforts
occurring across different theatres around the world.’ This policy has been developed since 2004, moving
further in the direction of neoconservative doctrine, for example in 2011, when even ‘non-violent’ alleged
‘extremism’ became a target.

The EU – 2005

The EU adopted a common counter-terrorism strategy very soon after the British. EU leaders issued a joint
declaration after the Madrid bombings on 11 March 2004. The declaration ‘calls for the development of an EU
long-term strategy to address all the factors which contribute to terrorism’.171 This appeared on 30 November
2005 and was strikingly similar to the UK strategy, resting as it did on four pillars, three of which were

168. Home Affairs Committee, 2009 Project CONTEST: The Government's Counter-Terrorism Strategy - 7 July https://
publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmhaff/212/21204.htm
169. SACC Whitehall releases 2003 Counter Terrorism Strategy 13 December 2016. https://www.sacc.org.uk/press/2016/
whitehall-releases-2003-counter-terrorism-strategy
170. Ranstorp, M. (2010). Introduction’ in Ranstorp, M. (Ed.) Understanding violent radicalisation: terrorist and jihadist movements in
Europe. Routledge.
171. Note from the General Secretariat, ‘Declaration on combating terrorism’ Council of the European Union 29 March 2004,
7906/04. http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-7906-2004-INIT/en/pdf. Accessed 13 April 2020.

42
identically titled: ‘Prevent; Protect; Pursue; Respond.’172 Following that, the EU developed a range of counter-
terrorism policies focusing strongly on radicalisation and extremism.

These included the creation in 2006 of the Expert Group on Violent Radicalisation and, in 2008, its
successor: the European Network of Experts on Radicalisation. The 2004 declaration included an agreement
to appoint a counter-terrorism co-ordinator. The first appointee was Gijs de Vries – a former MEP and Dutch
minister with the conservative Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie. His successor Gilles de Kerchove was
appointed as a counter-terrorism coordinator on 19 September 2007.

Later, in 2011, the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) was created and alongside that, working in
the same area is the EU Internet Forum.173 In 2017, the Commission set up a High-Level Commission Expert
Group on radicalisation. The group delivered its Final Report on 18 May 2018, leading to the creation of an
EU Cooperation mechanism. Membership of the group includes all member states , the RAN, the EU counter-
terrorism co-ordinator and five other EU agencies.174 Most recently, the RAN and the EU Internet Forum have
set up the Civil society Empowerment Programme, which is an attempt to develop the counter-narrative
campaigns that are the preferred counter-terrorism mechanism of policy based on the idea of radicalisation.

The Netherlands - 2005

The Netherlands reportedly started to develop their strategy in 2002, notably with a document by one of the
Dutch intelligence agencies discussing the issue of recruitment in the Netherlands of fighters abroad, with the
expressed concern that in the future such processes may have an impact in the Netherlands itself.175

However, as a leaked US government cable noted, ‘the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a
Dutch-born Islamic Extremist in November 2004 was… a… traumatic wake-up call… Minister of Integration
Rita Verdonk was given primary responsibility for [combatting] radicalism nationally, along with a €40
million budget for this purpose. On August 19, 2005 Verdonk unveiled a comprehensive programme entitled
‘Empowerment and Integration Policy, Prevention of Radicalization from the Perspective of Integration
Policy.’176 ‘In August 2007, then Minister of Interior Guusje ter Horst rolled out a national plan titled
Polarisation and Radicalisation Action Plan 2007– 2011… The Action Plan was conceived as a national strategy
outlining goals, actions and responsibilities for countering polarisation and radicalisation for the 2007– 2011
quinquennium.’177 Since then, there have been periodic updates and revisions, but the basic policy shape has
stayed the same. In 2014, The Comprehensive Action Plan to Combat Jihadism was published178 and later the
National Counterterrorism Strategy for 2016-2020.179 This once again took a similar approach to the UK and

172. Council of the European The European Counter Terrorism Strategy. 30 November 2005.
https://register.consilium.europa.eu/doc/srv?l=EN&f=ST%2014469%202005%20REV%204
173. European Commission, EU Internet Forum: Bringing together governments, Europol and technology companies to counter
terrorist content and hate speech online, Press release, 3 December 2015. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/
IP_15_6243
174. Register of Commission Expert Groups, ‘High-Level Commission Expert Group on radicalisation (E03552)’ 1 August 2017.
https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/index.cfm?do=groupDetail.groupDetail&groupID=3552
175. Recruitment for the Jihad in the Netherlands: From Incident to Trend. Den Haag: Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheids-
dienst, December 2002. https://english.aivd.nl/binaries/aivd-en/documents/publications/2002/12/09/recruitment-for-the-jihad-in-
the-netherlands/recruitmentbw.pdf
176. The Netherlands: Combating Extremism Through Engagement And Outreach, Wikileaks. Date: 2005 September 30, 16:10
(Friday). Canonical ID: 05THEHAGUE2651_a https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05THEHAGUE2651_a.html
177. Lorenzo Vidino and James Brandon, Countering Radicalization in Europe, London: ICSR, 2012. https://icsr.info/wp-content/
uploads/2012/12/ICSR-Report-Countering-Radicalization-in-Europe-1.pdf
178. The comprehensive Action Plan to combat jihadism: Overview of measures and actions. Ministry of Security and Justice National
Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment, 29 August 2014. https://web.archive.org/
web/20190629181144/https://english.nctv.nl/binaries/def-a5-nctvjihadismuk-03-lr_tcm32-83910.pdf
179. National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (NCTV), National Counterterrorism Strategy for 2016-2020. July
2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20190629181132/https://english.nctv.nl/binaries/LR_100495_rapportage_EN_V3_tcm32-251878.
pdf

43
EU strategies under five headings: ‘Procure; Prevent; Protect; Prepare; Pursue’ – four of which are identical to
those in the UK strategy.

France - 2014

According to a 2014 study by Ragazzi, the French approach to counter-terrorism has lagged behind those of
the UK and the Netherlands, but it has recently:

announced a plan to “combat radicalisation” and a series of measures to prevent recourse to violence.
Although the term is not entirely new in French political parlance, it marks a departure from a
counter-terrorism policy justified mainly by a judicial approach and enforced in great part through
administrative measures. 180

This has led the French state – like the UK and the Netherlands before it – to become ‘involved in areas of
diversity management such as education, religion, and social policy’. 181

Ragazzi asks what is behind this novel shift. And he states that his study shows that the ‘concept of
radicalisation serves as an effective discourse to legitimise the extension of police action beyond its usual
purview’.

But this is to empty the political content out of the shift. It sees the change as an instrumentalisation of a set
of ideas for increasing police powers. While this may be true, it fails to account for the ideological back story
that has been pushed by a social movement with a particular politics. The shift by the French government to
‘radicalisation’ as a phenomena started in 2013/4 – a decade after the shift occurred in the Netherlands and the
UK.

Ragazzi gives a number of reasons for the significant delay in the adoption of neoconservative counter-
terrorism policy which conclude that:

1 British and Dutch strategies are in direct contradiction with certain principles of France’s counter-
terrorism, justified on the basis of its model of secularism. For French counter-terrorism officials,
setting up formal partnerships with imams and community religious institutions is out of the question,
just as it is difficult to imagine local police-mosque or police-Muslim association collaborations.
2 The French counter-terrorism apparatus has been designed around a strong legal core, which its
officials call a “strictly legal approach” by virtue of which it is not up to the state to anticipate or
intervene in the processes leading to recourse to violence, but should focus on what is covered or not
by the penal code.

Radicalisation was not entirely absent from French security discussions. Though both the White Paper on
Security in the Face of Terrorism (2006) and the 2013 White Paper did mention ‘radicalisation’, it was not
the main basis of the strategy. According to one account: ‘It wasn’t until the Merah affair (2012) that French
counter-terrorism strategy began to change. This episode in fact convinced government authorities that the
security perspective alone… was not sufficient.’ The new strategy was announced in April 2014.182 But, as
Ragazzi notes, the appointment of Manuel Valls as Minister of the Interior in 2012 was decisive, as it was only
then ‘that the issue of political violence has been posed in such terms.’ Valls subsequent elevation to the post of

180. Ragazzi, F. (2014). Towards ‘policed multiculturalism’? Counter-radicalization in France, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom. Les etudes du Ceri, 10. https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/sites/sciencespo.fr.ceri/files/Etude_206_anglais.pdf
181. Ragazzi, F. (2014). Towards ‘policed multiculturalism’? Counter-radicalization in France, the Netherlands and the United
Kingdom. Les etudes du Ceri, 10. https://www.sciencespo.fr/ceri/sites/sciencespo.fr.ceri/files/Etude_206_anglais.pdf
182. Conseil des ministres Le plan de lutte contre la radicalisation violente et les filières terroristes, 23 avril 2014. https://www.
gouvernement.fr/conseil-des-ministres/2014-04-23/le-plan-de-lutte-contre-la-radicalisation-violente-et-les-fi

44
Prime Minister cemented the transformation. Valls has made his views on Zionism and Israel clear. In a March
2013 speech to the Pro-Israel group CRIF, he said that anti-Zionism was ‘synonymous’ with anti-Semitism.183
In May 2016, after being honored at Tel Aviv University as ‘one of the few Prime Ministers who has supported
Israel and who is Zionist’, Valls responded: ‘I never said I was a Zionist… It’s not my problem at all. My problem
is to say that anti-Zionist discourse is the first step, the door to anti-Semitism.’184 In 2018, he tweeted ‘Anti-
Zionism means denying Israel and its existence. Today, it is the mask of anti-Semites.’ [Original: ‘L’antisionisme,
c’est nier Israël et son existence. Aujourd’hui, c’est le masque des antisémites.’]185

In 2015, Valls claimed in relation to attacks in France that this is a ‘war of civilisation’. This made him sound,
according to one report, ‘like an American neoconservative to the ears of many of his fellow socialists’.186
Valls ‘stance in what could loosely be called identity debates, such as his efforts to strip French jihadists of
their citizenship’, meant he was ‘essentially seen as a neo-conservative’.187 Valls is an important node in the
transnational neoconservative network. His journey to a pro-Israel and neoconservative position has been
accompanied by two key friends from university where they were socialists. These were Alain Bauer, the
criminologist, consultant and political adviser and Stéphane Fouks, who is currently executive chairman of
Havas Worldwide – one of the largest advertising, PR and communications conglomerates in the world and an
international political adviser.188

They all met at the university in Tolbiac in the 1980s… All were part of the Rocky left, ‘the second left
reality’, which sought to ‘get out of fantasies and illusions’,

Their friendship and professional and political entanglement continued as they joined the freemasonry:
‘Bauer was initiated at the age of 18, Valls joined him in 1989, before leaving them in 2002.’ The reference
to freemasonry is an important link in this network, as will become clear. Alain Bauer rose through the
organisation to become the Grand Master of the Grand Orient de France lodge of the freemasons between
2000 and 2003. In 1991, the Grand Orient created a new grouping called the Comité Laïcité République
(CLR), which campaigns for secularism and has given prizes to a number of individuals who function in
wider Islamophobic networks. In March 2016, the CLR in turn gave rise to Printemps Républicain. Talking
about Valls, its founder Laurent Bouvet said that ‘we obviously have convergences, but we do not agree on
everything’.189

Bauer, like ‘many neoconservatives, comes from the liberal and anti-communist left’.190 His dizzying career
included spells in the US military industrial complex with SAIC, an academic career, the abolition of party
political difference in becoming security adviser to Sarkozy, and a business career as a consultant taking
advantage of opportunities for the outsourcing of security services.

183. Dîner du Crif: Valls dénonce "l'antisionisme", "synonyme de l'antisémitisme" BFMTV, 07/03/2016 https://www.bfmtv.com/
politique/diner-du-crif-valls-denonce-l-antisionisme-synonyme-de-l-antisemitisme-957357.html
184. Translation by DeepL. [original text: ‘Vous êtes l’un des seuls Premiers ministres qui ait soutenu Israël et qui soit sioniste’;
‘Je n’ai jamais dit que j’étais sioniste… Ce n’est pas du tout mon problème. Mon problème c’est de dire que le discours antisioniste est
le premier pas, la porte ouverte à l’antisémitisme.’] Manuel Valls se défend d’être sioniste Réseau International, 24 Mai 2016. https://
reseauinternational.net/manuel-valls-se-defend-detre-sioniste/
185. Manuel Valls @manuelvalls Twitter, 5 February 2018. https://twitter.com/manuelvalls/
status/960576742388916224?lang=en
186. Marc Perelman, French terror attacks: A 'war of civilization'? France24, 01/07/2015 - 15:39Modified: 01/07/2015 - 15:39.
https://www.france24.com/en/20150630-face-off-france-terrorism-valls-factory-attacks-yassin-salih-war-civilisation
187. Rachel Donadio Why France’s Former Prime Minister Wants to Be a Mayor in Spain, The Atlantic, 5 April 2019.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/04/manuel-valls-europe-barcelona-france-spain/586486/
188. Havas ‘Stephane Fouks’ https://www.havasgroup.com/d95a5ea7204-content/uploads/2016/12/BIO-Ste%CC%81phane-
Fouks-VA-.pdf
189. AFP, ‘Le Printemps républicain, deux ans de combats et de controverses’, L’Express, publié le 04/05/2018. https://www.
lexpress.fr/actualites/1/societe/retour-sur-le-printemps-republicain-deux-ans-de-combats-et-de-controverses_2005953.html
190. Mathieu Rigouste, Alain Bauer and the consortium of fear: A scared merchant's route, Les Mots Sont Importants. March 18,
2012 http://lmsi.net/Alain-Bauer-et-le-consortium-de-la

45
The French neoconservatives had, according to Rigouste, ‘for several years been campaigning for the
establishment of security and defence structures modelled on the North American model, which would, in a
sense, provide for outsourcing’.191

Alain Bauer, as security adviser for Sarkozy, ‘was the leading figure of the security approach that managed
to succeed politically in the ‘90s at the local level and in the 2000’s at the national level’.192 This helped to
turn ‘the French anti-terrorist model, mostly judicial since the 1986 anti-terrorist act based on criminal law –
individual sentences, judicial process and punitive measures – into a preventively coercive model… based on
preventive detention, internet censorship and mass surveillance’. 193

Spain – 2017-9

Despite the Madrid bombings, Spain did not adopt neoconservative-influenced counter-extremism and
counter-radicalisation policies until over a decade after the UK and EU had done so. As a consequence of the
Madrid attacks, in 2004 a ‘Special Safety Plan… was drawn up, and since 9 March 2005 the Prevention and
Anti-Terrorist Protection Plan… (Plan Especial de Seguridad) has been in place.’194 195

Though radicalisation was a part of the first integrated strategy against terrorism (Estrategia Integral contra
el Terrorismo Internacional y la Radicalización) which was ratified in 2012, Reinares and García-Calvo state
that:

an explicit broad political consensus concerning the fight against jihadist terrorism did not exist in
Spain until a decade following the Madrid train bombings.196

Reinares and García-Calvo note that ‘Spain’s approach to jihadism and the threat of jihadist terrorism
exhibited, since 2012, a remarkable shift from an essentially counter-terrorism approach, within which all
these developments took place, to one incorporating a prevention of violent radicalisation scheme.’ 197 The
government approved, on 30 January 2015, a Plan Estratégico Nacional de Lucha Contra la Radicalización
Violenta (PEN-LCRV, National Strategic Plan to Fight Against Violent Radicalisation).

Following this part of the ongoing attempt to bring Spain into line with the neoconservative approach was the
recruitment of Spanish cities to the ‘Strong Cities Network’. This venture was denounced by coalition of 21 US
civil liberties groups in 2015.198 Though it was launched at the UN in 2015, it is operated by the Institute for
Strategic Dialogue – a neoconservative-oriented UK-based think tank. Málaga joined in May 2016 and ‘serves

191. Mathieu Rigouste, Alain Bauer and the consortium of fear: A scared merchant's route, Les Mots Sont Importants. March 18,
2012 http://lmsi.net/Alain-Bauer-et-le-consortium-de-la
192. Felix Blanc, Security Pivot Towards a Police State in France, Dialogue on Europe, 5 February 2017. Populisms' Slippery Slope,
http://dialogue-on-europe.eu/security-pivot-towards-a-police-state-in-france/
193. Felix Blanc, Security Pivot Towards a Police State in France, Dialogue on Europe, 5 February 2017.
Populisms' Slippery Slope, http://dialogue-on-europe.eu/security-pivot-towards-a-police-state-in-france/
194. Zięba, A. (2015). Counterterrorism systems of Spain and Poland: Comparative studies. Przegląd Politologiczny, (3), 65-78, p. 73.
195. Committee Of Experts On Terrorism (Codexter) Profiles On Counter-Terrorist Capacity, Spain, Council of Europe, May 2013.
https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMContent?documentId=090000168064102c
196. Fernando Reinares, Carola García-Calvo Spain’s Shifting Approach to Jihadism Post-3/11 in Lorenzo Vidino (ed) De-
Radicalization in the Mediterranean Comparing Challenges and Approaches, ISPI, 2018 Milan: Ledizioni LediPublishing. https://www.
ispionline.it/sites/default/files/pubblicazioni/mediterraneo_def_web.pdf
197. Fernando Reinares, Carola García-Calvo Spain’s Shifting Approach to Jihadism Post-3/11 in Lorenzo Vidino (ed) De-
Radicalization in the Mediterranean Comparing Challenges and Approaches, ISPI, 2018 Milan: Ledizioni LediPublishing. https://www.
ispionline.it/sites/default/files/pubblicazioni/mediterraneo_def_web.pdf
198. Letter to Mayor Bill De Blasio, Brennan Center, New York. 21 September 2015. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/
files/analysis/092115%20Coalition%20Letter%20to%20Mayor%20Re%20CVE.pdf

46
as a pilot for the implementation of the Spanish national strategy against violent extremism.’ 199 In November
2017, the Alliance of European Cities Against Violent Extremism held a summit in Barcelona.200
Among those arguing for a radicalisation perspective are the authors cited in this summary, including
Fernando Reinares, who is the director of the Program on Global Terrorism at Elcano Royal Institute, a neocon
think tank based in Madrid. He is also adjunct professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and a
senior associate research fellow at the ISPI – the Italian neocon think tank.201

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Reinares prefers a ‘strong’ approach which he says ‘contrasts with weak
implementation of initiatives aimed at the prevention of violent radicalisation.’ 202 His colleague Rogelio
Alonso has also written of the ‘deficits’ of the strategy - published by the Spanish neocon think tank associated
with former PM Aznar.203

In early 2019, the Spanish government introduced a new terrorism strategy. The website of the Prime
Minister’s office carried the following account:

This National Counter-Terrorism Strategy is based around four main pillars: Preventing, Protecting,
Persecuting and Preparing a response. The “preventing” section develops the necessary strategic lines of
action for detecting and preventing the rise, development and spread of terrorism and violent extremism
by dealing with the root causes and protecting the most vulnerable individuals and groups.204

We can see here that Spain has come over more than a decade to a policy that echoes that originated in the UK
in 2003.

Italy – failure – 2016/7

Italy appears to be an exception to the pattern of diffusion of CVE-type approaches. It has had a ‘lack of CVE
strategy and initiatives’ as Vidino notes:205

In general, Italy prioritises the criminal justice system in its approach to counter-terrorism. Italian
authorities have ample powers to conduct lengthy surveillance operations and pre-emptive raids.
Deportation of foreign suspects, in particular, has been the cornerstone of Italy’s counter-terrorism
strategy. In fact, two anti-terrorism laws, adopted in 2005 and in 2015, expanded the hypotheses for
administrative deportation of non-EU citizens. Since January 2015, authorities have deported around
300 individuals, including 34 from January to April 2018 alone.206

199. Fatima Lahnait, Senior Associate Fellow, Institute for Statecraft and Governance (London), Preventing violent extremism
to counter home-grown jihadism: Learning by doing, cidob.org, 02/2018. https://www.cidob.org/en/articulos/cidob_report/n1_2/
preventing_violent_extremism_to_counter_home_grown_ jihadism_learning_by_doing
200. Fatima Lahnait, Senior Associate Fellow, Institute for Statecraft and Governance (London), Preventing violent extremism
to counter home-grown jihadism: Learning by doing, cidob.org, 02/2018. https://www.cidob.org/en/articulos/cidob_report/n1_2/
preventing_violent_extremism_to_counter_home_grown_ jihadism_learning_by_doing
201. ‘Fernando Reinares’, Powerbase. http://powerbase.info/index.php/Fernando_Reinares
202. Fernando Reinares, Carola García-Calvo Spain’s Shifting Approach to Jihadism Post-3/11 in Lorenzo Vidino (ed) De-
Radicalization in the Mediterranean Comparing Challenges and Approaches, ISPI, 2018 Milan: Ledizioni LediPublishing. https://www.
ispionline.it/sites/default/files/pubblicazioni/mediterraneo_def_web.pdf
203. Rogelio Alonso ;The new Counter-Terrorism Strategy: Beyond rhetoric; FAES,
28/02/2019. https://fundacionfaes.org/en/analisis/936/the-new-counter-terrorism-strategy-beyond-rhetoric
204. ‘Government of Spain publishes National Counter-terrorism Strategy for first time’ lamoncloa.gov.es, 26 February 2019.
https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/lang/en/gobierno/news/Paginas/2019/20190226terrorismstrategy.aspx
205. Lorenzo Vidino, ‘Italy’s Lack of CVE Strategy and Initiatives’ in Lorenzo Vidino (ed) De-Radicalization in the Mediterranean
Comparing Challenges and Approaches, ISPI, 2018 Milan: Ledizioni LediPublishing. https://www.ispionline.it/sites/default/files/
pubblicazioni/mediterraneo_def_web.pdf
206. Lorenzo Vidino, ‘Italy’s Lack of CVE Strategy and Initiatives’ in Lorenzo Vidino (ed) De-Radicalization in the Mediterranean
Comparing Challenges and Approaches, ISPI, 2018 Milan: Ledizioni LediPublishing. https://www.ispionline.it/sites/default/files/
pubblicazioni/mediterraneo_def_web.pdf

47
A key ‘weakness of the current approach’, writes Vidino, ‘is that its hard-nosed, repressive tactics have not
been accompanied by an equally robust preventive approach… Unlike most European countries… Italy does
not do any kind of substantive preventive work’.

As can be seen from these passages, Vidino is among those arguing for a CVE approach. Vidino’s article
appears in a report published by the Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI) – a neocon-oriented
think tank, which has in the past collaborated with the hardline neoconservative European Foundation for
Democracy. This is the Brussels outpost of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – the Washington
DC-based think tank whose positions ‘consistently fell in line with the Bush administration’s militant “war on
terror” and policies espoused by Israel’s right-wing Likud party’. 207 In recent years, it has also been in receipt
of resources from the UAE which has co-ordinated its activities with those of Israel.208 Vidino himself is the
director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He is also connected with a range of
neocon outfits and has been listed as an ‘expert’ by the European Foundation for Democracy.209

Italy has not though been immune to attempts – including by the ISPI – to introduce neoconservative-type
approaches based on ‘violent extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’. Back in 2014, Vidino’s report called ‘Home Grown
Jihadism in Italy’ was published by the EFD/ISPI.210 The foreword was written by Italian member of parliament
and former magistrate Stefano Dambruoso, whose connections with the ISPI included participation in events
organised by the think tanks in 2015.211

It was Dambruoso, who along with his parliamentary colleague Andrea Manciuli, attempted to introduce a
comprehensive bill that sought to cover the many areas of CVE. Mancuili too had historic connections to ISPI
going back to at least 2015.212 Today, Andrea Manciulli is president of the Italian Atlantic Europe – the NATO-
affiliated think tank – and he is a senior associate research fellow at ISPI.213

On the launch of the attempt to have a bill passed in early 2016, the Office of the Italian Prime Minister Matteo
Renzi moved ‘simultaneously’ to create an ad hoc committee of academics and experts tasked with studying
radicalisation trends in the country and identifying CVE measures that could be implemented, which
complemented the Manciulli/Dambruoso bill.214 It is perhaps unsurprising that Vidino was appointed as a
coordinator of this National Commission on Jihadist Radicalization.215

Solfrini narrates the progress of the bill:

In the summer of 2017, the bill was approved by the Lower House of Parliament with a relatively large and
bi-partisan majority. Yet in December 2017, before the Senate had an opportunity to vote on it, Parliament
was dissolved, which ended the bill’s life and any chance of introducing a CVE strategy in Italy.216

207. Eli Clifton, ‘Exclusive: Documents Shed Light On Those Underwriting The Foundation For Defense Of Democracies’, Think
Progress, 19 July 2011. https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-documents-shed-light-on-those-underwriting-the-foundation-for-defense-
of-democracies-80976d047d1a/
208. Zaid Jilani, Ryan Grim hacked emails show top UAE diplomat coordinating with pro-Israel think tank against Iran, The
Intercept, 3 June 2017 https://theintercept.com/2017/06/03/hacked-emails-show-top-uae-diplomat-coordinating-with-pro-israel-
neocon-think-tank-against-iran/
209. European foundation for Democracy ‘Lorenzo Vidino’ https://europeandemocracy.eu/expert/lorenzo/
210. Vidino, L. (2014). Home-Grown Jihadism in Italy: Birth, Development and Radicalization Dynamics. Foreword by Stefano
Dambruoso. Milan: ISPI and European Foundation for Democracy. https://www.ispionline.it/it/EBook/vidino-eng.pdf
211. ISPI, ‘Stefano Dambruoso’ https://www.ispionline.it/it/bio/stefano-dambruoso
212. https://www.ispionline.it/it/eventi/evento/presentazione-atlante-geopolitico-2015
213. ISPI ‘Andrea Manciulli’ https://www.ispionline.it/it/bio/andrea-manciulli
214. Solfrini, Federico. ‘The Italian counter-terrorism formula: prevention and repression of radicalization’ Mediterranean Affairs.
23 February 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20190126081956/http://mediterraneanaffairs.com:80/italian-counter-terrorism/
215. Lorenzo Vidino (ed) De-Radicalization in the Mediterranean Comparing Challenges and Approaches, ISPI, 2018 Milan:
Ledizioni LediPublishing. https://www.ispionline.it/sites/default/files/pubblicazioni/mediterraneo_def_web.pdf
216. Solfrini, Federico. ‘The Italian counter-terrorism formula: prevention and repression of radicalization’ Mediterranean Affairs.
23 February 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20190126081956/http://mediterraneanaffairs.com:80/italian-counter-terrorism/

48
Concluding comments

The EU and many member states have – over the course of the period from 2002 to the present – adopted new
counter-terrorism policies that owe much to neoconservative ideas about radicalisation and extremism. This
has meant that policies supported by no significant evidence base and which undermine international human
rights standards – including causing and encouraging discrimination against and harassment of Muslims –
have spread across the EU.

49
5
Conclusions:
Evidence base and
democracy in
counter-terrorism policy
This report has noted that conservative ideas about Islam and political violence – often identified as
‘neoconservative’ – have been mobilised in Europe by a range of actors in the neoconservative movement.
Just like their counterparts in the US, the neocons are not only active in think tanks and policy groups but also
penetrate the counter-terrorism apparatus of the state in a varied and evolving way.

In chapter one, we saw the close involvement of UK neocon think tanks with the development of counter-
terrorism policy as well as the way in which policy makers in the state and indeed in the intelligence
community utilised and drew upon tendentious materials produced by neocon groupings.

In Chapter two, we saw the way in which individuals associated with the neoconservative movement played
an important role in penetrating and capturing the UK Charity Commission, which, henceforth spent time
targeting Muslim civil society groups using the discriminatory label ‘extremism’. This and other activities have
helped to undermine the possibility of a functioning Muslim civil society.

Chapter three switched attention to the European range of the neoconservative movement. We examined the
various parts of the movement – always conscious of the interlocking and overlapping nature of the various
networks we sketched. We focused first on the elite ‘establishment’ neoconservatism and then explored the
role of the Zionist movement – examining its main contours before exploring its specific construction to
Islamophobia. We looked next at the pro war or ‘decent’ left and at the far-right counter-jihad movement.

Chapter four then examined the way in which counter terrorism polices have spread across the EU. We noted
that the policy produced in the UK in 2003 was later taken up in a range of EU members states and indeed
by the EU institutions themselves. The spread of the policy has taken some time – over a decade between the
early adoption in the UK in 2003 and the introduction of similar policies in Spain in 2017-9 – and has not been
successful everywhere, as the case of Italy shows.

Nonetheless, it is clear that neoconservative counter-terrorism policies have been very widely adopted.
This has had the effect of significantly worsening Islamophobia and the pressure on Muslims in the EU.
Furthermore, it has also been a catastrophic failure in tackling ‘terrorism’.

Policy recommendations

If we are to be serious about dealing with Islamophobia across the EU, we have to do a lot more than focus on
‘hate crime’. Instead we need to do the following:

1 Start to dismantle the extensive institutionalised counter-terrorism apparatus built up under the
influence of neoconservative ideas and practice. This provides the primary cutting edge of anti-
Muslim harassment and discrimination.

50
2 Along with this is the rhetoric of ‘radicalisation’ and extremism’. This has negative effects in labelling
law abiding Muslims and Muslim groups as extremist and making it difficult for them to function as a
result of state surveillance and attack. It also helps to set them up for popular hatred and hate crime.
The rhetoric of radicalisation and extremism should be replaced with an evidence-based counter-
terror policy which incorporates international human rights standards.

51