For me it's very clear. if somebody is about to break the law, if somebody is preparing to break the law and commit a crime, that comes under “protect” and not under “prevent”. That should be the police's responsibility. The police should get involved in protecting our communities and, if somebody has committed a crime, pursuing the criminals and ensuring that they face the due diligence.
When it comes to prevention, when it comes to people who are sympathizers and empathizers, we need effective programs of de-radicalization. We have them in the U.K. If somebody doesn't meet the thresholds for de-radicalization, we need processes of rehabilitation. These could be just young kids who are nine years old who are looking at videos and thinking they are very cool. They just need some critical thinking and some effective interventions.
Then we come to the wider part, which is societal. This must not come from the police at all. What we need to do as a society is to make Islamism.... President Obama made a speech which I thought was [Technical Difficulty—Editor], but he missed the point. He said that an extremist ideology is at play, but then he didn't name the ideology. What happened then? Other people—the far right, the far left, and everybody else—started naming the ideology, and people started thinking it was Islam per se.
We must be very clear on what it is we don't stand for as a society. We don't stand for totalitarian or fascist ideologies, and we know what to do against them. Islamism needs to be just as unpopular as Fascism and Communism have been. We need to educate and empower our civic society in schools and everywhere else to take that struggle forward.