The Muslims Are Coming! by Arun Kundnani

Author:Arun Kundnani
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

It is not the Government’s role to look for the “true voices of Islam” or of any other religion or belief. Since religions or communities of belief are not homogenous entities it seems advisable to acknowledge and take into account the diversity of voices … The contents of a religion or belief should be defined by the worshippers themselves.26

A specialists’ unit was established at the Home Office in 2007 to develop an expertise in the ideological campaigning aspects of Prevent. The Research, Information and Communication Unit (RICU) had twenty-nine staff members by 2009 and a budget of over £4 million.27 Each week they sent out a briefing to local Prevent officials across the country, providing a list of current issues thought to be of concern to Muslims and the key points of the government’s narrative, so that the latter could be effectively communicated and the legitimacy of the war on terror shored up in public discourse. RICU also trained local authorities on techniques of strategic communication for countering radicalization, produced briefings on using appropriate terminology, conducted polling on Muslim attitudes, and commissioned academic research on the identity of young Muslims, how young Muslims used the Internet, and the impact of different counterextremism messages on domestic and foreign Muslim audiences.28 In many ways, RICU was a revival of the Information Research Department (IRD) that was established at the Foreign Office in 1948 and continued to operate throughout the cold war. The IRD’s aim was to fight a battle of ideas against communism and anticolonial nationalism by seeking to influence what journalists and intellectuals wrote. IRD officials fed confidential information on alleged communists within the UK labor movement during briefings of the media and various government agencies, and worked with the CIA to covertly fund cultural activities aimed at discrediting communism.29 Dean Godson, a neoconservative who while research director at the Policy Exchange think tank had a strong influence on Prevent policy, wrote a 2006 article in The Times in which he called for a revival of such cold war techniques in the war on terror.

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