CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Shawcross has now disagreed publicly. The Home Office had, he said, ‘ignored’ key recommendations to beef up Prevent’s performance and the glass remained only ‘half full.’ I have some experience of bureaucratic sleight of hand at work when it comes to reviews and recommendations. When I was tasked by the Government to look into the Prison Service’s colossal and unforgivable failures in containing Islamist extremism a few years ago, I made 69 recommendations which were mysteriously repurposed into 11 without my consent; eight were finally accepted."
After a series of terror attacks earlier this year in Austria and France, the European Union, its member states, and the United Kingdom are taking new steps to reduce online extremism and stem the dissemination of terrorist propaganda.
According to a new report by the United Kingdom’s Commission for Countering Extremism (CCE), extremists of all spectrums, including neo-Nazis and the far right, have been exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to launch broad misinformation campaigns...
Three years ago, Darren Osbourne drove a van into a crowd of worshippers outside The Finsbury Park Mosque, killing one and wounding ten people. Osbourne was not a devout ideologue. He had become radicalized in less than a month through the rapid...
The terrorist attack in Streatham, London, carried out by Sudesh Amman has brought again to the forefront the radicalizing, violent teachings of Islamist propagandist Abdullah al-Faisal. Reports indicate that Amman possessed copies of Faisal’s...
The suicide attack that claimed the lives of at least 22 people outside the Manchester Arena on May 22 fits a pattern of terrorists targeting crowded areas to maximize civilian casualties, CEP said, in releasing updated reports on terror targets and...
In February 2015, Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana, and Amira Abase—aged between 15 and 16—traveled from Bethnal Green (East London) to Syria to join ISIS, following the same route taken three months earlier by their friend, Sharmeena Begum. While the...
(New York, N.Y.) — Counter Extremism Project CEO Ambassador Mark D. Wallace, CEP Senior Advisor Ambassador Edmund Fitton-Brown, and CEP Senior Advisor Professor Ian Acheson issued the following joint statement marking 20 years since the July 7, 2005...
(London, UK) – The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) today publishes a stark new assessment by Professor Ian Acheson, Senior Advisor, warning that the current threat posed by violent extremists and extremist-adjacent offenders in UK prisons is...
Hashem Abedi, 28, inflicted "life-threatening" injuries on the officers at HMP Frankland in County Durham on Saturday. He is being held at the jail for his role in the deadly bombings eight years ago and his latest attack has outraged many, including former prison governor Ian Acheson. Mr Acheson, who carried out a review of Islamist extremism in jails in 2016, called Abedi "the second most dangerous prisoner in the UK" and claimed he should be left in total isolation because "we don’t have the death penalty". "The only other alternative is extreme custody - if it turns him mad then so be it," he told the Times.
The Counter Extremism Project Presents
Marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Counter Extremism Project's ARCHER at House 88 presents a landmark concert of music composed in ghettos and death camps, performed in defiance of resurgent antisemitism. Curated with world renowned composer, conductor, and musicologist Francesco Lotoro, the program restores classical, folk, and popular works, many written on scraps of paper or recalled from memory, to public consciousness. Featuring world and U.S. premieres from Lotoro's archive, this concert honors a repertoire that endured against unimaginable evil.