Earlier this week the Times had a leader column entitled ‘Protect Prevent’. As a defence of the government’s counter-extremism strategy it was all well and good, but it missed a very crucial point. It said:

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‘The success of Prevent has been undermined, however, by a failure of public relations. The government failed to cast it as an essential part of child protection, allowing the charge of “spying” to gain credence. Similar policies designed to prevent sexual abuse or physical violence against children would never be open to that charge.’

But this charge of ‘spying’ did not simply ‘gain credence’. Nor were other charges against the Prevent strategy mere ‘public relations’ failures. Such charges only gained traction because from the institution of the strategy there was a concerted and near-unanimous push by almost every organised Muslim group in the UK as well as most self-appointed and elected community representatives to delegitimise Prevent. That isn’t because they don’t like a particular detail of the strategy. It is because they clearly do not want any strategy in this area. That is either because it attempts to deal with a problem they do not see as being a problem or because for reasons of communal pride they wish to brush the issue under the carpet.

The reason why similar policies designed to prevent sexual or physical abuse of children would not be open to the same charges is simple: there is no open or organised grouping of child abusers or child exploiters in the UK who would gain traction with the media and the wider public by consistently presenting themselves as the victims of a government policy precisely designed to protect vulnerable children. Any group which consistently campaigned against any and all child exploitation laws would also quite rightly be deemed suspect by the media and others. Were the Paedophile Information Exchange or Nambla to crop up in Britain and speak out against laws designed to prevent children being groomed by paedophiles then one suspects that the media would not go to them for their opinion and the public and politicians would not find their case persuasive. Yet when people clearly opposed to any government initiative aimed at tackling radicalisation in the Muslim community emerge everyone takes their criticisms at face value.

This morning provided a good example. The Labour MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, Rushanara Ali, is not what I would call a ‘progressive’ or even particularly a ‘moderate’ Muslim. For instance, when Israel has had to protect itself from rocket fire from the Islamist group Hamas Ms Ali can be found foaming at rallies about the indiscriminate ‘slaughter’ of ‘Palestinians’, rather than targeted strikes against Hamas rocket-launch sites and arms dumps.

In the wake of the news that one of the three Bethnal Green schoolgirls who went to join Isis last year has been killed by a Russian airstrike on Raqqa, Ms Ali was on the Today programme this morning. And what did Ms Ali choose the opportunity to call for? Why a ‘full review of Prevent’ of course. ‘Many have concerns about how Prevent is being implemented,’ she said, ‘concerns about young Muslims being stigmatised.’ What she failed to mention is that the case of schoolgirls from her constituency heading to join Isis has next to nothing to do with the Prevent programme which has in any case received as much push-back from schools and universities as any other policy of recent governments, partly at the instigation of people like Ms Ali.

All this is, in any case, woeful buck-passing. If you had to call for anything in the wake of the news from Syria I would think a much better thing to call for would be an investigation into how people who should take some responsibility for the radicalisation of such young people consistently evade any and all such responsibility.

For instance, after the three Bethnal Green schoolgirls went to Syria, the father of one of them – Abase Hussen – was all over the media looking teary, hugging a teddy bear and berating the police for not stopping his daughter from going to Syria. How might she have imbibed her radical ideas, he was asked. ‘Total mystery’ was the gist of his reply each time. Mr Hussen soon appeared in front of Keith Vaz’s media-hungry Home Affairs Select Committee and used the opportunity to blame the police again. Soon the police were hauled before the same committee and given a very tough time of it. Why didn’t they know what Mr Hussen claimed not to know about the girl sleeping in the next door room to him? One might at this stage point out that one of the criticisms of Prevent is ‘spying’ yet each time the authorities miss something they are asked why they don’t spy more than anyone possibly could. But 'police failure’ is always such an easy thing to grandstand over.

But what was this? A couple of weeks later and a video emerged of sweet old teddy-cuddling Mr Hussen at a demonstration outside the American Embassy in London in 2012. Led by Anjem Choudary and standing alongside one of the killers of Lee Rigby (and this time without his teddy) the video of the demo shows a shrieking Mr Hussen next to a burning American flag while standing behind a banner that reads, ‘The followers of Mohammed will conquer America’.

Anyone wondering how extremist ideas might infiltrate into the mind of a young girl could do with looking into what people like Mr Hussen actually believe, where in the community they get their ideas from and what can be done to stop the spread of the same. It might also ask how people like Mr Hussen are able to so constantly fool decent liberal-minded societies into believing that everything to do with radical Islam is the fault of our liberal societies rather than the fault of the people whole espouse and believe radical Islamic teachings. But as I say, too few people want to do that. Instead the Muslim community and almost every elected and unelected representative uses every opportunity to attack Prevent and slip any and all personal or communal responsibility for a problem they more than anyone know is there.