As an ordinary Leeds lass who spent two decades embroiled in a foreign terrorist organisation in the 1980s and 90s, I was deeply disappointed by the NUT’s vote to reject the Home Office’s Prevent strategy (Report, theguardian.com, 28 March). Last week, in a presentation to the Suffolk Prevent conference, I was able to explain in detail the mechanisms behind how radicalisation takes place. That the psychological manipulation involved in radicalisation is similar to that which underlies domestic violence and child sexual exploitation. That the different belief systems espoused by various violent extremist groups are almost irrelevant because their radicalising behaviour is the same.
The audience response was overwhelmingly positive. They understood Prevent not as a political or ideological assault on their communities, but first and foremost as a safeguarding issue. They unequivocally understood that schools and colleges need to make space for challenging conversations and that through listening to explanations like the one I give as a former terrorist, everyone in the public sector can gain the confidence needed to effectively fulfil their obligations under Prevent. I can only assume that NUT members’ reaction is due to the undeniably patchy and poor Prevent training which is being delivered by people who don’t have a clear grasp of the issue. But as somebody who might have been rescued if the Prevent and Channel programmes had existed when I was radicalised, I can only say that it would be a disaster if the fallout from weak and incoherent training is allowed to blight the future of the Prevent duty.
Anne Khodabandeh (Singleton)
Leeds
–
Congratulations to the NUT for coming out against the government’s ludicrous Prevent strategy. Prevent is a paranoid and counterproductive initiative which has traumatised innocent children in the name of “fighting terror”. In January police questioned a 10-year-old boy for writing a essay in which he mistakenly wrote he lived in a “terrorist house” instead of a “terraced house”. In March a four-year-old boy who mispronounced the word “cucumber” as “cooker-bomb” was threatened with counter-terrorism measures.
Last September a 14-year-old pupil at Islington’s Central Foundation used the term “ecoterrorism” in debate during a French lesson. A few days later he was interviewed by two adults, without his parents’ knowledge, who asked him if he was “affiliated with Isis”. The experience left the boy “scared and nervous”. The fact that he – an Asian Muslim – was singled out from the class as a potential terrorist was not lost on his white, non-Muslim colleagues who had also spoken of “ecoterrorism”. Prevent is racist nonsense which is stopping young people doing what they should be doing in school – learning about and discussing the world.
Sasha Simic
London
To understand the motives behind suicide bombing many people try to excuse or approve it. It seems easier to assume that suicide bombers are just malicious characters who hate their victims but terrorism is not a simple phenomenon with easy explanations. Actually a wide variety of motives and factors are involved. For analyzing these motives and factors the Mujahedin khalq Organization (the MKO) is a significant example of such terror acts. The group may be one of the first role models of suicide bombers for extremists through the history.
After the 1979 revolution in Iran, when the MKO began to fight the newly established Islamic Republic government, the MKO suicide bombers assassinated dozens of the Iranian officials and civilians. The suicide bombers were glorified in the group’s journal as suicide martyrs.
In a copy of this correspondence provided to Panorama, the UN Ambassador informs former Prime Minister Berisha about two meetings held in Geneva as part of the effort to find a solution for the residents of Camp Ashraf in Iraq. According to this correspondence, on March 15, 2012, Ambassador Qerimaj held a meeting with Volker Türk, director of the Department of International Protection at the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in which Albania was asked to take a group of refugees, to accept their placement in a temporary base, and to give financial assistance to the UNHCR project.
March 16 however marks the anniversary of the day in 1988 when Iraqi war planes and artillery pounded the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq with mustard gas and the deadly nerve agent sarin. Some 5,000 people – mainly women and children – died on the day, and up to 12,000 have lost their lives since. A packed rally in Westminster allowed Kurds and sympathisers to remember this tragedy inflicted on them by Saddam Hussein.
cult-like objectives. The Cult has barred members from contacting their families. In the cult of Rajavi, love is forbidden. The outside world is not permitted. It is the most significant example for modern slavery. Members are deprived from free will.
