British Effort to Identify Potential Radicals Spurs Debate Over Profiling

New York Times ^ | February 9, 2016 | KIMIKO DE FREYTAS-TAMURA

[reaganaut1]

LONDON — The boy’s teachers were growing increasingly concerned. He was speaking admiringly in school of Jihadi John, the notorious British executioner with the Islamic State, and expressing a desire to travel to Syria.

Twice, the teachers referred the boy — a teenager from Blackburn, in northern England — to a government program called Prevent set up to spot early signs of extremism and intervene before it was too late.

On both occasions, the boy — struggling with his studies after his parents separated and socially withdrawn because of a degenerative eye disease that blurred his vision — refused to participate in sessions intended to keep him from becoming radicalized.

The need for such programs has become all the more apparent in the wake of the Paris attacks in November, which were carried out primarily by European citizens who became radicalized at home. Britain’s program is viewed as something of a model by other European countries and the United States.

But encouraging fellow citizens to identify potential radicals has also raised questions about racial and religious profiling and the balance between security and civil liberties, igniting a debate here over whether Prevent holds the risk of further alienating Muslims in Britain.

At the same time, the British program has exposed the limitations of an approach that relies on voluntary cooperation from those who are identified as potential threats. In the case of the boy in Blackburn, whose name has not been publicly disclosed because of his age, the police later arrested him after they found that he had made a detailed plan for an Islamic State-inspired massacre in Australia.

Last October, he was sentenced for inciting terrorism overseas and became, at 15, the youngest person to get a life sentence in Britain in a terrorism case.

[reaganaut1]

What is there to debate? Muslims commit terrorism at much higher rates than non-Muslims, and the police should allocate their finite resources accordingly. And you should avoid large-scale Muslim immigration in the first place.

It's strange that they can sentence a 15-year-old to life in prison in the U.K. but not release his name.

[PIF]

The Brits still equate terror with the IRA so muslims are just not on their radar as terrorists in the same way.

[freeangel]

Oh, please!! If it looks like a duck and waddles like a duck and QUACKS like a duck.... They should be shot like a duck!

[I want the USA back]

Try this.
M00slimb.
Male.
Age 16 - 40.
Bearded.
Practices its “religion.”

[katana]

I seem to recall the British had no qualms about profiling people for possible IRA links, nor should they have. One difference, of course, was that the IRA wasn’t operating out of Catholic churches with the direct participation and encouragement of parish priests. Some Catholic Irish might have sympathized and even participated but bombing for Jesus is no part of Catholic or any Christian doctrine. Islamic plots on the other hand come straight out of the mosques under Quranic sanction with imams leading the way.

[fella]

Profiling works just ask the Israels.