Maajid Nawaz On What's Really Causing Radicalisation

5 March 2017, 15:23 | Updated: 5 March 2017, 16:18

Here Maajid Nawaz passionately sums up what's really causing Islamic extremism.

The most comprehensive study of terror convictions in the UK has revealed a 10th of the UK's Islamist terrorists come from just five council wards in Birmingham.

On his Sunday afternoon LBC show Maajid Nawaz explained why.

He said: "To claim that terrorists are radicalised in bedrooms, sidesteps that problem of community responsibility. This report found that, in fact, 80 per cent of convicted terrorists in the UK were affiliated to, inspired by, or directed, or linked to extremist networks, in other words, were not lone wolves. This lone wolves myth needs to be debunked. 

"The vast, overwhelming majority of terrorists are linked to networks that exist within our communities. Another myth is that it's solely a male phenomenon. Again, attempting to sidestep a very real and uncomfortable truth that whole and entire communities are involved.  

"Women are being radicalised, and though still less than men, the number of women being radicalised has trebled. This is not solely a male phenomenon. The rate of radicalisation among women has trebled, and that makes us feel uncomfortable.  

"It's why we try and avoid this, and invent myths, such as: 'Oh the lone wolves who are being radicalised in their bedrooms on the Internet, and it's only young men'. No. It's women as well. And they are growing at a faster rate, it's trebled. 

"And why is that uncomfortable? Because of the next myth. The next myth is, that these women are able to radicalise their children, and that is incredibly uncomfortable for us to accept, but we've seen it.  

"We've seen it happen. When ISIS depicts young kids executing at point blank range their prisoners by shooting them in the heads, these are children.  

"Somebody is radicalising children and we don't want to accept this is happening, because it's too sad, and uncomfortable, and horrible for us to contemplate.  

"But the truth is that the world is a horrible place and that's what's going on out there. We have to accept the facts when they are presented to us in the face, because the truth is, the reality is, that the only one thing that stands out in this report, something that my regular listeners will know, they've heard me speak about regularly on this show. 

"The one pattern that stands out among all others, is that those areas that are not successfully integrated, like those five wards in Birmingham, are producing a disproportionate number of terrorists. 

"The key is integration, and I come back to this topic time, and time again, because the first people it harms not to be integrated successfully in this country, are the very people that the multiculturalists of the 90s claimed that they were wanting to defend and support. 

"Britain's Muslim communities have fallen behind on every conceivable metric of success you can imagine. We are disproportionately represented in our country's prisons, we are under represented in our country's universities, we are under employed in our country's and our community's females are facing with a triple, are faced with a triple paralysis.

"They are discriminated against because they're women, they are suffering because they are people of colour, and because they're Muslim, they're being held back by the men in their communities who tell them they can't work, because they have to be housewives, because that's what they think the religion demands. 

"So this failure to integrate means that the community itself suffers, and then one of the manifestations of that suffering...is that those areas where there is a concentrated Muslim ghetto, that isn't mixing with the rest of the country, like those five wards in Birmingham, that has a less of a Muslim population than London, but is highly more concentrated in Birmingham, and therefore is more insulated. 

"Those insulated communities end up producing people that don't understand the values of our country. And it's therefore easier to recruit them to terrorist organisations."