Many of us who know and understand Islam and the power that its religious extremist narratives have over too many Muslims, expected the UK government’s PREVENT strategy to have a very high failure rate. But, few of us expected that the failure rate for those going through PREVENT ‘de-radicalisation’ programmes would be as high as 95%.

This is a truly astonishing level of failure. I thought that PREVENT de-radicalisation programmes (PDRP) would have had failure levels of somewhere around the 60% mark, which is bad enough, but 95%! I expected that there would be many Muslims who were resistant to the content of the PDRP and for there to be implementation issues, but for the failure levels to be so high is completely gobsmacking.

What is worse is that according to a Times report, relayed by Breitbart, the effectiveness of these courses was reduced by politically correct worries on the part of those delivering PDRP training. The training providers were said to be frightened to introduce the very themes of religious extremism to the Muslims they were trying to teach. In other words these trainers shied away, for reasons of cowardice and fear of giving offence to the Muslims, dealing with the difficult issues that should have been discussed and dealt with in these courses.

Breitbart said:

More than 95 per cent of government “deradicalisation” initiatives fail to work, with the people delivering them often too scared to mention religious extremist context and choosing to talk about “Islamophobia” instead, a government report has found.

The study, commissioned by the Home Office, raises serious questions about the effectiveness of the Prevent programme and exposes politically correct failings in tackling Islamist extremism in schools, clubs, and English-language classes.

Thirty-three deradicalisation programmes across the country, mostly part of Prevent, were accessed by the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), which is linked to the Cabinet Office.

According to their report, seen by Police Professional magazine and reported in The Times, only two initiatives were a success, with one defying political correctness and tackling difficult issues head-on and the other directly addressing extremism in religious texts.

I’m completely appalled by these revelations. We were told that PREVENT would help to divert people from violent religious extremist Islam but here we have those tasked with delivering this programme running scared of addressing the issue. It’s cowardice, shameful and complete cowardice. They are not tackling the Muslim extremism they are letting it fester and all for a quiet life and the self-satisfaction of not being called ‘racist’.

Breitbart added:

However, in another case in a school, researchers concluded it was ineffective because it was too restricted and treated groups of Muslim and non-Muslim students as the same, despite the obvious relevance of Islam.

The study also found that those delivering the work often shied away from sensitive topics and would often refuse to engage entirely when they were mentioned.

Some teachers were too afraid to even mention matters of race, religion, and radical Islam with students and sought to avoid politically correct accusations of discrimination, so key topics were sidestepped completely.

Agggh! What on earth is wrong with these people. There is an obvious relevance of Islam to the vast majority of violent extremism in this country, especially religious violent extremism. Therefore it makes little or no sense at all to leave this aspect out. Say for example, you had a person who was a modern day violent Jewish extremist (yeah unlikely I know). Imagine that this person has been going a bit mad and was banging on about how he had to ‘smite the Moabites’, or those who he perceives as ‘Moabites’. If you were going to try to talk him out of both his delusion and his extremism, then you would have to make reference to the Book of Kings in the Tanakh which mentions ‘smiting the Moabites’. To not mention or engage with the contents of the Koran is a gross dereliction of duty on the part of those delivering PREVENT training.

In the past I have expressed some doubts as to the calibre of some of those who were managing and delivering PREVENT courses. For example I was alarmed to find out that in one case, a known Islamopanderer had been appointed as PREVENT co-ordinator in a city that is a potential terror target due to its military bases. This job should have gone to someone who was ex-military or ex-police, not a former ‘Diversity Officer’.

It looks very much as if PREVENT has failed and its failure is very big indeed. This failure puts the government in a very bad position. Ministers have put a lot of store on PREVENT being able to stop Islamic terror before it starts, but now PREVENT has been revealed to be an abject failure.

It is of course entirely possible that some of these PREVENT courses were deliberately sabotaged by left wing teachers or by Islamic interests, but according to the Times and Breitbart, it does seem that cowardice is the main issue here. When you have PREVENT trainers who are scared of bringing up the very things they should have done then it shows just how worthless PREVENT has been.

A PREVENT course should have been designed and implemented as a method of guiding towards civilised behaviour those Muslims who had concentrated on more radical interpretations of Islamic scripture. It should not have become a course where the issues were not tackled and too much time was spent whining about ‘Islamophobia’.

Brietbart continued:

Other schemes placed too much emphasis on hurt feelings, offence, and so-called “Islamophobia” which had the counterproductive result of convincing Muslim participants to turn on the principle of free speech after being painted as victims, the authors say.

So, not just ineffective but counterproductive. This report on PREVENT is much worse than any of us could have ever imagined. Not only has the topic of violent religious extremism not been discussed or dealt with or even acknowledged, but those attending these courses have been spoonfed a false Islamic grievance narrative. These PREVENT courses have failed completely to achieve what was set out in the 2011 government report on PREVENT which was to ‘challenge the ideology that supports terrorism and those who promote it’. If the trainers can’t even bring themselves to mention Islam how on earth can they be expected to challenge Islamic religious ideology?

This is a humungous failure by PREVENT and represents an embarrassment for the Government as well as a huge waste of resources. According to a BBC report published last June, approximately 7,500 people were referred to PREVENT in the 2015/2016 period. Of this number only 10% or 750 had any PREVENT action taken as a result of the referral. This shows us that with a 5% success rate we get some idea of just how much money has been wasted on PREVENT. Assume for the moment that the period 2016/2017 has similar or slightly higher figures for referrals and actions, as that of 2015/16. this would give us a figure of 1000 PREVENT course participants for that time period. The cost of PREVENT, as estimated by the BBC because PREVENT did not when the BBC wrote the story, disclose their budget, was estimated to be £40 million. This means that it has cost £40 million to divert fifty people (5% of 1000) away from ‘extremism’ and there’s no real guarantee that those fifty individuals were even Islamic extremists. This fifty could even be relatively harmless patriots or similar who had been smeared as ‘far right’ and been referred to PREVENT because they’d been caught telling the truth about the ‘religion of exploding to pieces’. All this money may have been wasted and probably not a single potentially exploding/stabbing/shooting/ Islamic savage diverted from their desire to do a bit of exploding, stabbing or shooting. PREVENT looks like it has been one deep money pit,one which has failed to do what it was intended to do and which has been undermined by political correctness and cowardice. The PREVENT débâcle is utterly shameful.