Counter extremism leader warns of Gaza radicalisation

Dame Sara Khan tells The National of concerns UK does not have a strategy to deal with rising dangers

Dame Sara Khan says disillusionment in western democracy is a major problem. Alamy

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The West’s response to the war in Gaza has caused a degree of anger that will inevitably lead to a rise in radicalisation among young Muslims, the UK’s leading counter-extremism expert has warned.

Dame Sara Khan told The National she had never known such hostility from Muslims, outraged that the western democracies they have embraced appear to have taken the rule of law “with a pinch of salt” when it comes to the more than 48,000 Palestinians killed in the conflict.

Israel’s actions in Gaza, which countries such as the US, UK and Germany have failed to suppress, are “going to have a consequence”, she said.

She said middle-class Muslims, such as her banker and lawyer friends, were incensed at “how cheap Palestinian life seems to be” in the eyes of the West. “In the case of Palestinian lives, these laws and rules don't seem to matter,” the UK’s former commissioner for countering extremism said.

This was deeply worrying for the majority of Britain’s four million Muslims, she said. “It’s something new, I've really never seen that level of anger.”

She said it was breeding "disillusionment” in western democracy and predicted it would cause “a whole load of societal problems that are going to come down the pipeline very soon”.

She is concerned for the younger generation who have seen the grim images from Gaza. “This is a reality we will have to deal with in the next couple of years.”

Accepted extremism

The UK is not prepared for that reality, she argued. Ms Khan was appointed the UK’s first counter-extremism commissioner in 2018, carrying out a series of reports assessing the threat of extremism, and strategies and legislation to combat it. In 2021 she became the Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience, publishing the Khan Review on how to build resilience against extremism. She held the posts until December last year.

"The government doesn't even have a counter-extremism strategy and hasn't had one for four years,” she said. “My last review also showed the lack of any strategic approach to protect and promote social cohesion.”

That lack of vision alarms her due to the rise in extreme ideas and policies that have become so commonplace that they are now almost acceptable, she said.

“Some things that were first confined to the fringes are now much more mainstream. That accelerating and evolving extremism landscape is something the UK government, and I suspect a lot of other governments, are not really addressing because there's so much focus on terrorism.”

Ms Khan, a senior adviser for Crest Advisory, a crime and justice specialist firm, accuses authorities of not paying enough attention to extremist organisations who fall just below the threshold to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation yet promote the same ideology. “They’re in effect allowed to operate with impunity, even though they are radicalising people,” she warned.

"I did a review of the law four years ago with Sir Mark Rowley [now Metropolitan Police Commissioner], where we evidenced gaps in legislation which allowed extremists to operate freely. The government has still not closed this loophole."

Conspiracy

Among her concerns were Islamist extremist groups promoting “the war on Islam conspiracy theory”. This flourished during the coronavirus pandemic, which she said “without a doubt unleashed a whole wave of support for conspiracy theories”.

The growing acceptance of such theories and disinformation was leading to an “accelerated societal threat landscape” where trust and confidence in the police, media, government and the law was ebbing away.

When that happens, “people will then start looking towards authoritarian or alternative voices”, she said, which has arguably already occurred in several European countries with the rise of the far right.

Many of those right-wing parties – in Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands – are built on anti-immigrant messages predominantly and unashamedly against Muslims.

The misinformation and distrust also contributed to the anti-immigration riots in Britain last summer, largely sparked on social media, particularly by far-right influencers.

"Within hours these individuals spread the false claim that the Southport murderer was an illegal immigrant and Muslim, neither of which was true. Yet disturbingly, people were prepared to believe this – why? This demonstrates how, for some, the perception of Muslims is inherently negative."

Even worse, she points out, is how recent YouGov polling shows that incorrect information has flourished. In August 2024, 11 per cent believed the killer of three girls in Southport was a Muslim despite it emerging he was from a Christian background. In January that figure rose to 24 per cent, demonstrating the dangerous nature of disinformation and conspiracy theories. "Truth becomes meaningless," she said.

Toxic misinformation

In her recent paper, labelled The New Extremism Landscape, the counter-extremism expert highlighted the growing numbers of believers of more outrageous ideas.

For example, while 4 per cent of those who consumed news through traditional media believed in the Great Replacement Theory, which incorrectly states there is a plot for Muslims to replace Europeans through mass migration, that rose to 55 per cent for those who obtained their news from Telegram.

As a mother of two teenage girls and a toddler, like many modern parents Ms Khan worries about the deeply corrosive element of social media.

The problem, which she accuses the British government and other western states of not taking it seriously enough, is the damaging effect of malign online information, she said.

“Social media has been pivotal in spreading these conspiracy theories, and the speed and the scale in being able to reach people in a way that is just so toxic is unprecedented,” she said.

“It contributes to the erosion and undermining of democratic rights and that erosion of social cohesion certainly contributes to hate crime, and this erosion of social cohesion is exploited by extremists of all persuasions.”

Democratic decline

Ms Khan, who was made Dame of the British Empire (DBE) in 2022 for services to counter-extremism, argued that disinformation contributes to “polarising societies and feeding division” and has in part led to the UK’s “chronic democratic decline”.

While Ms Khan, who co-wrote The Battle for British Islam: Reclaiming Muslim Identity from Extremism, accepted there was legitimate debate to be had on immigration, she warned it was “imperative on our politicians to talk about in a way that isn't using inflammatory, divisive language”.

She lamented, too, that for a subsection of the British population, “no matter how much” Muslims contribute to public life “some will always view Muslims through a suspicious lens”.

She said “you can either flee and live in fear, or you can stand up and fight”, which is a sentiment she urges her children to follow. “Stand up, push back and fight for your equal rights as a British citizen of this country and our democracy.”