Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
01-08-2024
LONDON/ NEW YORK: The threat from international and domestic terror presents a “breadth of challenge greater than it has ever been”, according to senior US and UK police officers who oversaw the successful prosecution of Anjem Choudhry.
The Islamist preacher from east London is starting a life sentence for directing a group banned under UK terror law, and encouraging support for it online.
The officers say his case highlights the continuing danger posed by radicalizers and the violent groups they support but they also say counter-terrorism forces are now battling a wide diversity of threats – including from a worrying number of people who don’t support an underlying ideology, but are simply drawn to violence.
Young people being attracted to online extremism through conspiracy theories, the actions of “hostile states” such as Russia, and the “toxicity of our political environment” are also concerning, they warn.
Following Choudhry’s trial, the media spoke exclusively to Matt Jukes, the UK’s head of counter-terrorism policing, and Rebecca Weiner, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism at the New York Police Department.
They told us that alongside extremist groups energized by events in the Middle East, the new security threats were sparking multiple investigations.
It is a “palpably different picture than it was,” says Assistant Commissioner Jukes.
Deputy Commissioner Weiner singles out online extremism as probably the most important aspect of what she terms an “everything, everywhere, all-at-once threat environment”.
Suspects with ‘no settled view of the world’
With two wars Israel-Gaza and Ukraine being fought in what Weiner calls “a tsunami of disinformation”, she says it is hard for people to understand what is true and what is not “and that is playing out in the realm of violence”.
People are being “overwhelmed with false narratives” and fed conspiracy theories, she says.
A disturbing aspect of this, says Jukes, is the increasing number of those turning to terrorism because of a fascination for violence, rather than ideological fanaticism.
He says in 20% of cases his officers now handle, terror suspects have no settled view of the world: “We are seeing people literally flip from searching for neo-Nazi material online to searching for Islamist material.”
This is a real shift, he says, with people having previously gone from a single ideology, to extremism, and on to violence.
Young people are viewing “dehumanizing content”, including extreme pornography says Jukes and being asked in online groups “to prove themselves by producing more and more extreme content”.
This includes terrorist material created using artificial intelligence, he says, with gaming being one of the “gateways” into extremism online.
The age profile of those drawn into this extreme environment is coming down – and he worries about “very young people who only need to take up a knife or use a vehicle as a weapon to carry out a deadly attack”.
Nearly one in five of those arrested as terror suspects in the UK in the past year were under 18. Counter-terror police on both sides of the Atlantic have also been kept busy since last October’s attack by Hamas on Israel, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage. More than 39,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Fifty police investigations have been launched in the UK into support or encouragement of terrorism. There has also been a big increase in anti-Semitic and Islamophobic hate crime. (Int’l News Desk)
