When Prevention Becomes The Problem: Britain’s Counter-Terrorism Paradox And The Rise Of Anti-Muslim Hate.

LONDON — On 29 April 2026, a man wielding a knife attacked two Jewish men in Golders Green, north London, an area home to one of Europe’s largest Jewish populations. Within 24 hours, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC) raised the UK’s national threat level from “substantial” to “severe”, meaning an attack is considered highly likely within six months. Home Secretary Maha Mahomed told the public the assessment reflected “the latest intelligence and extremist threats’ long-term rise”.

The Golders Green attack did not occur in a vacuum. It landed in a country where near-record antisemitic incidents had already been logged throughout 2025, where synagogues had been attacked, and where official parliamentary reports had warned the government was “flying blind” in the face of widening extremist threats.

But the attack also exposed a deeper and more uncomfortable reality: Britain is being torn apart by two mutually reinforcing hatreds. As antisemitic violence climbs, so too does Islamophobia, often fuelled by the very political forces that claim to be defending the country against extremism. The result is a nation trapped in a spiral of communal fear, where each act of terror tightens the grip of bigotry on its next target, and where the state’s own counter-terrorism apparatus is accused of amplifying the prejudices it purports to fight.

CONTEST And Prevent: The Architecture Under Strain.

Britain’s counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, rests on four pillars: Pursue, Protect, Prepare, and Prevent. Prevent, the “upstream” pillar, is designed to catch radicalisation before it crystallises into violence. In 2024–25, a record 8,778 people were referred to Prevent, the highest figure since data collection began in 2015, with over half involving young people under 18.

The numbers should alarm. But they also obscure a more disturbing picture: a programme designed to keep Britain safe that is increasingly accused of racialising and pathologising Muslim identity, while simultaneously failing to confront the ideological drivers of Islamist extremism.

The Littlewood Diagnosis: “We’ve Lost The Uphill Battle”.

Charlotte Littlewood, a former Prevent practitioner in Waltham Forest and now lead UK researcher at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, offers a bleak assessment. “I think we’ve lost the uphill battle at this stage,” she told The Times of Israel in March 2026. “In the post-October 7 climate, with a new government and a lot of institutional amnesia… we are just awash with very clever human rights language on the issue, and it’s just too toxic to do anything about”.

Littlewood identifies a triple failure: institutional amnesia about Islamist ideology among counter-terrorism officials; political fear of alienating Muslim voters in key constituencies; and a psychological hesitancy among frontline professionals who “will stumble and second-guess themselves on something to do with Islamism” while having no such qualms about reporting far-right threats. The result, she argues, is skewed data that systematically under-represents the Islamist threat.

“The facts clearly demonstrate that the most lethal threat in the last 20 years has come from Islamism,” the 2023 independent review commissioned by the Conservative government had warned. Yet Littlewood says the government’s new plan “side-steps” those findings entirely. “While Islamist actors are emboldened… the appetite to tackle the issue is detrimentally low”.

The Prevent Machine And The Muslim Child:

If the state is reluctant to name Islamist ideology, it has no such hesitation in scrutinising Muslim communities. According to research from the health campaign group Medact, a racialised Muslim individual in the UK is at least 23 times more likely to be referred to a mental health hub for “Islamism” than a white British individual is for “far right extremism”. Ofsted guidance for Prevent explicitly states that autistic children are at increased risk of radicalisation because they are “more likely to develop special interests” and “more likely to experience social isolation”, in effect, medicalising Muslim identity and neurodivergence as proxies for terrorist risk.

A leaked internal Home Office report seen by the Financial Times in early 2026 revealed that desperate healthcare practitioners, facing waiting lists of over 500,000 young people for mental health services, with some children waiting more than two years for an autism diagnosis, were referring patients to Prevent, not because they suspected radicalisation, but because Prevent-referred patients must be seen within a week. “Sometimes practitioners made referrals to Prevent to try to expedite mental health and neurodiversity support and diagnosis,” the report stated.

Sarah St Vincent, of Rights and Security International, described the practice as health professionals “so desperate to get help for their patients that they’re referring them to a secretive policing programme that could impact them for the rest of their lives”.

Academic research published in January 2026 by Caasha Abdirahman at the University of East London examined the experiences of thirteen Muslim practitioner-psychologists within the NHS. Participants described Prevent as a policy that “pathologised, racialised and marginalised Muslim identity, influencing how Muslim service users and clinicians are perceived and treated within clinical environments.” The “overwhelming majority” concluded that Prevent’s “theoretical foundations and operational use are incompatible with NHS principles”.

In March 2026, Medact published yet another damning report, Ill-defined: The First Decade of the Prevent Duty in the NHS, which revealed that 61% of all “Islamist” Prevent referrals made from the health sector never met the threshold for further action. For every 10 Muslim patients flagged to counter-terrorism police, the report indicated, six were wrongly profiled as potential security threats based on little more than their religious identity and healthcare needs.

The Islamophobia Surge: When Counter-Terrorism Becomes A Weapon.

If Prevent functions as a soft dragnet over Muslim communities, the political environment in which it operates has become increasingly hostile. The surge in anti-Muslim hate and violence in Britain since October 7, 2023, has been dramatic and, by many measures, under-recognised precisely because of the simultaneous spike in antisemitism.

In the 18 months following the Hamas attack and Israel’s military response in Gaza, Tell MAMA, the organisation that monitors anti-Muslim hate, recorded a 140% increase in Islamophobic incidents across the UK. Mosques reported receiving threatening letters and having pig heads left at their entrances. Muslim women wearing hijabs were spat on, shoved off buses, and told to “go back to your country.” In one incident in Leicester, a man attempted to set fire to a mosque while worshippers were inside for evening prayers.

The intensity of the abuse prompted a coalition of over 100 Muslim organisations, led by the Muslim Council of Britain, to write to the government in January 2026 demanding that Islamophobia be treated with the same urgency as antisemitism. Sir Danny Gregory, Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, told The Times of Israel that the government’s approach had been dangerously uneven.

“When a Jewish community member is attacked, the Prime Minister condemns it within hours,” Gregory said. “When a mosque is firebombed, we wait days for a statement, and it is often couched in generalities about ‘all forms of hate.’ British Muslims feel like second-class citizens when it comes to protection.”

The figures bear this out. In 2025, the Community Security Trust recorded 2,283 antisemitic incidents, among the highest annual totals ever recorded. But Tell MAMA recorded 3,411 anti-Muslim incidents in the same period, and unlike CST, which has substantial government funding and institutional support, Tell MAMA operates on a shoestring budget and acknowledges its figures are likely a significant undercount.

The Arsonists In Uniform: How Right-Wing Politicians And Activists Fuel Islamophobia.

What distinguishes the current wave of Islamophobia from previous spikes is the extent to which it is being driven not merely by street-level bigots but by organised political forces, politicians, activists, and media figures who have made anti-Muslim rhetoric a central plank of their public identity.

Charlotte Littlewood identifies the emergence of Islamist-far-right tactical alliances, noting that the platform 5 Pillars has hosted interviews with Nick Griffin of the BNP, Mark Collett of Patriotic Alternative, and Jayda Fransen of Britain First. But the traffic is not one-way. Far-right figures, too, have weaponised the threat of “Islamism” to justify an ever-widening assault on Muslim communities as a whole.

Tommy Robinson, the founder and former leader of the English Defence League and the current leader of Advance UK, has spent the post-October 7 period rebranding himself as a defender of Jews and Israel, a posture that Littlewood dismisses as cynical and opportunistic. “He has always been very divisive and dangerous,” she said. “I think he flip-flops according to what he wants to achieve politically at that time, and he jumps into any mess he can to stoke up as much tension as possible”. Robinson’s social media output, which reaches millions, systematically conflates Islamist extremism with Islam itself, describing mosques as “hate compounds” and the Quran as a “book of war.”

In February 2026, Robinson led a march through central London under the banner “Defend Our Nation,” which attracted an estimated 15,000 supporters. Counter-protesters from Stand Up to Racism faced violent scuffles, and police made 27 arrests. A week later, a mosque in Birmingham was vandalised with graffiti reading “Tommy was right.” The Times of Israel contacted Robinson for comment but received no response.

Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, has pursued a more coded but arguably more consequential line. In parliament and on his GB News programme, Farage has repeatedly framed Britain’s terrorism problem as one of “imported” Muslim values incompatible with British life. Following the Golders Green attack, Farage tweeted that “mass migration from the Middle East has brought with it ideologies that hate our way of life”, a statement that made no distinction between Islamist extremists and the overwhelming majority of British Muslims who condemn terrorism.

During a House of Commons debate in March 2026, Farage was challenged by Labour MP Zarah Sultana, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Muslim communities under the cover of opposing extremism.” Farage responded by calling Sultana’s comments “the usual deflection from those who refuse to name the problem.” Reform UK’s polling rose to 22% in the weeks following the exchange, its highest level in six months.

Suella Braverman, the former Home Secretary, has emerged as perhaps the most aggressive voice on the Conservative right. In a series of interventions through 2025 and early 2026, Braverman has called for a ban on “political Islam,” described multiculturalism as “a catastrophic failure,” and argued that “Islamist extremism is not a perversion of Islam but one authentic interpretation of it”, a claim that blurs the line between extremist ideology and the faith professed by nearly four million Britons.

In a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2026, Braverman declared that “we are in a civilisational struggle” and accused the government of surrendering “British values to sectarian interests.” The Muslim Council of Britain condemned the speech as “a dangerous act of incitement from a former Home Secretary who should know better.” The Board of Deputies of British Jews issued a more cautious statement, thanking Braverman for her “longstanding support for the Jewish community” but expressing concern that “any characterisation of entire faith communities risks deepening the divisions that extremists on all sides seek to exploit.”

Douglas Murray, the author and associate editor of The Spectator, has used his considerable platform to advance a thesis that Islam is a “crisis” for Europe. Writing in the aftermath of the Golders Green attack, Murray argued that “the West has imported a problem it refuses to name… We are told to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, but the distinction grows thinner by the day.” Murray’s book The War on the West spent 37 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and has become a foundational text for those who see Islam itself as the enemy.

Anne-Marie Waters, leader of the For Britain party, has gone further still, calling for an outright ban on mosque construction and the closure of all Islamic schools. Though her electoral support remains marginal, her rhetoric has been cited in at least three cases of anti-Muslim violence in 2025, with perpetrators referencing her speeches in their manifestos or social media posts.

The Mainstreaming Effect: From Rhetoric To Violence.

The relationship between political rhetoric and street-level violence is notoriously difficult to prove. But the pattern in Britain since October 7 is hard to dismiss as a coincidence.

In August 2025, the worst antisemitic incident of the year occurred: a terrorist attack at Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester that killed two worshippers on Yom Kippur. The attacker, identified as a British-born man of Libyan descent, had reportedly consumed extensive far-right anti-Jewish material online, including content shared by figures who had also promoted Islamophobic narratives.

In October 2025, a 17-year-old white British male was arrested for plotting to bomb a mosque in Leeds. His online history showed engagement with Tommy Robinson’s content, Reform UK social media posts, and material from the far-right group Patriotic Alternative. When police searched his home, they found a copy of Murray’s The War on the West annotated with hostile marginalia about Islam.

In December 2025, a Muslim cemetery in Luton was desecrated, with over 60 gravestones toppled and pig blood poured on the site. The perpetrators, three men in their twenties who were later arrested, told police they were “defending Britain from Islamisation.” Their social media histories showed extensive engagement with Braverman’s speeches and Farage’s GB News monologues.

These incidents are not isolated. Tell MAMA recorded 473 cases of physical assault against Muslims in 2025, a 37% increase on the previous year. Over 60% of victims were women, and in 82% of street-based incidents, the attacker made explicit reference to terrorism, Gaza, or “Islamist” ideology in justifying their violence. In other words, the perpetrators of Islamophobic violence are increasingly framing their actions as a response to the Islamist threat, creating a feedback loop where each act of jihadist terror fuels anti-Muslim hatred, and each act of anti-Muslim hatred deepens the grievances that extremists on both sides exploit.

The Government’s Fractured Response:

In March 2026, the government unveiled its long-awaited “social cohesion plan,” branded as Protecting What Matters, with up to £5.8 billion in investment for nearly 300 communities over the next decade. The plan included measures to block “hate preachers” from entering the UK, publish an annual “state of extremism” report, crack down on antisemitism on campuses and in the NHS, and empower regulators to shut down charities promoting extremism.

Jewish communal organisations offered a conditional welcome. Phil Rosenberg, President of the Board of Deputies, said the plan “builds explicitly on proposals the Board of Deputies has brought to government with our communal colleagues”. Keith Black of the Jewish Leadership Council stressed that “delivering this agenda will require clear leadership and sustained resourcing”. Danny Stone of the Antisemitism Policy Trust called it “a welcome step” but warned that “the key now will be implementation”.

Muslim organisations were more equivocal. Shabir Randeree of the British Muslim Trust said a new definition of anti-Muslim hostility was “a step forward” but warned: “We will not be afraid to raise our voice if we don’t see the positive change needed”. Sir Danny Gregory of the Muslim Council of Britain was blunter: the plan “mentions Islamophobia in passing while naming antisemitism specifically and repeatedly… British Muslims notice this disparity, and it confirms our fear that our safety is a secondary concern.”

Littlewood, for her part, identifies the absence at the heart of the plan: it contains no “renewed counter-extremism strategy” that explicitly confronts Islamist ideology, nor does it reckon with the way that right-wing anti-Muslim rhetoric now uses the language of counter-extremism as cover. “The government is trying to please everyone and satisfying no one,” she said. “It won’t name the Islamist threat for fear of being called Islamophobic. It won’t name the right-wing anti-Muslim threat for fear of alienating its base. So it names nothing and hopes the problem goes away.”

The Symmetry Of Hatred: Experts On The Feedback Loop.

The dynamic now gripping Britain is one that extremism scholars have long warned about. Dr. Julia Ebner, author of Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists, told The Times of Israel that Britain is witnessing “a textbook case of cumulative extremism, where Islamist and far-right extremism feed off each other.”

“Islamist groups point to anti-Muslim hate as proof that the West is at war with Islam,” Ebner said. “Far-right groups point to Islamist attacks as proof that Islam is at war with the West. Each side validates the other’s worldview, and ordinary British Muslims and Jews are the ones who pay the price.”

Fiyaz Mughal, founder of Tell MAMA, described a climate in which Muslim communities feel simultaneously over-policed by Prevent and under-protected from street-level hate. “British Muslims are expected to shoulder the burden of preventing terrorism through surveillance programmes that treat them as suspect communities,” Mughal said. “But when they are attacked because of that same suspicion, the state’s response is slow, muted, and couched in both-sides language that refuses to name the perpetrators.”

The Community Security Trust’s director of policy, Dave Rich, acknowledged the tension but argued that the government faces a genuine difficulty. “Antisemitism and Islamophobia are not equivalent in their causes, their manifestations, or their historical roots,” Rich said. “But they interact, and a rise in one often correlates with a rise in the other. The government needs a coherent strategy that addresses both without collapsing them into a single category or ranking them in a hierarchy of concern.”

The Grassroots: Communities Left To Fend For Themselves.

On the ground, the gaps in government policy are being filled by civil society organisations, often underfunded, overstretched, and struggling to bridge the chasm between communities.

In Manchester, the Heaton Park synagogue attack galvanised an interfaith response that had been years in the making. Rabbi Arnold Saunders and Imam Hossain Rahman, who had been meeting quietly for years through the Greater Manchester Faith Community Leaders’ Forum, appeared together at a vigil three days after the attack. “An attack on Jews is an attack on all of us,” Rahman told the crowd of over 2,000, many of them Muslim. “And I say the same when a mosque is attacked. We are bound together in this, whether we like it or not.”

But such alliances are fragile. In Leicester, months of tension following the October 7 attacks and the Gaza war had frayed long-standing interfaith relationships. A youth worker in the city, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, described a community “at breaking point.” “We have Hindu-Muslim tensions from the 2022 riots still simmering, we have Jewish-Muslim tensions from the Middle East, and we have white far-right groups trying to exploit all of it. And the government? We’ve had one visit from a junior minister in three years.”

In Tower Hamlets, east London, where Littlewood once worked as a Prevent practitioner, community activist Fatima Khan described the dual pressure British Muslims face. “We are told we must root out extremism in our communities, and we try, we really do. But then a government minister or a GB News host describes Islam itself as the problem, and our children ask us, ‘What’s the point? They hate us, whatever we do.’ That is the recruitment sergeant for extremists on all sides.”

The Lost Boys: Vulnerable Young Men And The Grooming Of Hate.

Perhaps the most overlooked dimension of the twin surges in antisemitism and Islamophobia is the shared vulnerability of the young men, and increasingly, boys, who are being drawn into them.

The Prevent statistics are stark: 36% of all referrals in 2024–25 involved children aged 11 to 15, 3,192 cases. Among them were Muslim boys referred for expressing extremist views, and white British boys referred for far-right radicalisation. The pathways to referral look different, but the underlying vulnerabilities are strikingly similar: social isolation, discrimination, mental health struggles, poverty, exposure to online propaganda, a desperate search for belonging and purpose.

James, a youth worker in Bradford who works with Counter Terrorism Policing’s intervention programmes (and who asked that his surname not be used), described the symmetry. “I work with a 14-year-old white boy who was sharing neo-Nazi content, and a 15-year-old British Pakistani boy who was sharing ISIS propaganda. When you sit down with them, the stories are almost identical. Absent fathers, bullying, hours alone online, and a need to feel powerful and important. The ideology is different, but the grooming process is the same.”

Yet the system treats them differently. The white boy, James said, was met with “understanding and a clear path to intervention.” The Muslim boy was “immediately treated as a security threat.” He paused. “I don’t think the professionals involved are bad people. But they are products of a system that sees Muslim boys as potential terrorists and white boys as misguided kids. That asymmetry is fuel to the extremists on both sides.”

“We Don’t Stand For Any Clear Values”

Littlewood’s most piercing critique is not about programme design or resource allocation but about the absence of a coherent moral framework that makes the case for liberal democracy itself.

“We need to build a stronger narrative with a cohesive set of liberal, centrist values, which build confidence in who we are,” she said. “Britain is not going to get less diverse, we are going to get more diverse, but for so long as we don’t stand for any clear values, and have not got to grips with who we are, our values can be dictated to us, and that’s what I think is happening.”

This, in the end, is the vacuum that both Islamist extremists and anti-Muslim demagogues are filling. The Islamist offers a narrative of global Muslim victimhood and divine purpose. The far-right influencer offers a narrative of national betrayal and the need for cultural defence. Both are coherent, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. But the liberal centre, the government, the institutions, the political mainstream, have not yet found a story that can compete.

When a knife-wielding man attacked Jewish worshippers in Golders Green in April 2026, he was not merely acting on his own radicalisation. He was acting within an ecosystem of hatred that Britain has allowed to fester. That ecosystem includes the Islamist ideologues who provided the core ideology, the far-right propagandists who exploit the aftermath to demonise millions of innocent Muslims, and the political leaders whose fear of confrontation and the false propagation of narratives has left the field to extremists on all sides.

The threat level sits at severe. And for British Muslims and British Jews alike, the question is no longer whether the next attack will come, but who will be the target, and who will be blamed.

Source: Multiple News Agencies