UK must dismantle Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood at home to protect the nation and its Jews

Hamas has been well established in the UK for decades. We know who the key players are, we know the NGOs which serve as support groups, and we know what media outlets they rely upon to propagandise. We also know that rather than being treated as a foreign terrorist group that is unwelcome here, their leaders have been given citizenship and council houses.

This is not just a Hamas issue. After all, those aligned with al-Qaeda also used the UK as a base in the 1990s at the state’s invitation. The difference is that after 9/11, we quickly understood that was an obvious security risk.

We do not treat Hamas with the same level of seriousness. That is in part because Hamas has not yet launched attacks inside the UK. But it is very open about its genocidal intent with Jews and British citizens have carried out suicide attacks on its behalf in Israel. If the government wants to demonstrate it takes Jewish concerns seriously, it must surely unpick Hamas’s architecture in the UK.

This is not a new idea. In his Independent Review of Prevent in 2023, Sir William Shawcross said the same. This work did not take place satisfactorily and I would suggest Jewish leaders ask for it to do so now.

All the while, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood – Hamas’s parent organisation – continues to grow. I pushed consecutive governments to do more on the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK and offered highly specific suggestions. With the exception of an occasional Minister, it was never a priority. That was a shame because the Muslim Brotherhood’s segregationist, Palestine-centric ideology is now so well socialised across communities that its influence is largely self-perpetuating.

Second: end the hate preaching. The post 7/10 landscape has demonstrated just how much easier this is said than done. The anti-Jewish, pro-terror and conspiratorial vitriol unleashed in mosques up and down the country is now prevalent across social media. I saw first hand just how often mosques that had hosted some of the most malevolent extremists and antisemites relied on public funding to operate via, for example, protective security funding. This was never leveraged properly to induce better behaviour from such mosques.

What made this particularly frustrating was that they were almost always registered charities. British Muslims who wanted to give to humanitarian causes in Gaza were donating to a part of the world that was controlled by Hamas. Yet it is an open secret that the charitable sector lacks visibility into how the money is being used. It is impossible to believe that none of that money has ended up with Hamas. This seems to be accepted because the greater good is for aid money to flow into Gaza. Whether that cost-benefit analysis works for British Jews seems a reasonable question to ask.

The Charity Commission must now be given the powers it needs to tackle this extremist abuse. At present, investigations take too long and punishments are insufficiently punitive to induce change. Accepting that some institutions have been set up specifically to subvert democratic values and are unreformable would also be welcome. Closing down charities with ties to the Iranian government, for example, will be no loss to our philanthropic culture and could help demonstrate to British Jews that a hostile state that loathes them is no longer able to operate so brazenly on British soil.

Another sensible step would be to take a more proactive approach to keeping hate preachers out of the country. Towards the end of the Sunak government, a task force was established in an attempt to do precisely this. We know there are clerics who frequently visit the UK and who preach an antisemitic version of Islam. We should not tolerate it any longer.

Third: curb the endless protests about Palestine. While the right to protest must be carefully guarded, the cumulative impact of two years’ worth of single issue protests must also be considered.

I was heartened to see the Home Secretary commit to granting the police more powers to put conditions on repeat protests. However, further powers are required for the government to be able to act further in this area.

To those for whom Gaza is the defining moral issue of their time, I invite them to imagine how enthusiastic they would be about the protesters who attended last month’s Unite the Kingdom frequently take over central London for the next two years and chanting solely about immigration.

The police should be given greater powers to apply to the Home Secretary to ban protests outright. Lord Walney has done some of the thinking around this in his report into political violence and disruption. His conclusion was that even if a protest does not risk “serious public disorder” the police should be able to assess whether it “will likely result in intimidation from threatening or abusive conduct, or where there is a demonstrable cumulative impact on serious disruption.”

Furthermore, time and again, actions that appeared to constitute hate crimes or support for terrorism at these protests lead to relatively few criminal charges. This helps explain why there is discussion over whether a new offence is needed to prohibit praising or glorifying acts of terrorism without calling for their emulation. The jury is out but I am surely not the only one, for example, questioning whether calls to “globalise the intifada” could reasonably be understood as incitement to hatred and violence. Regardless of the legalities, I am struck by how seemingly unencumbered by the possibility of legal or professional consequences those chanting this are.

Fourth: no more funding for, or engagement with, extremists. I was previously part of an effort driven by No 10 to develop a set of core principles to ensure that the government would no longer engage with or fund extremists.

After the 7/10 attacks, this issue was brought into ever greater contrast, with a variety of unsavoury characters demonstrated to be advising the police and the Crown Prosecution Service on managing the Gaza protests; and the police and local authorities visiting mosques known to host antsemitic hate preachers. This work was done in the hopes of bolstering community cohesion but does no such thing: all it does is expose how poorly understood extremism is for certain arms of the state.

The engagement principles were published shortly before the General Election and never ended up being embedded. The problem, therefore, endures.

Fifth: make combatting antisemitism central to counter extremism efforts. The body I formerly ran, the Commission for Countering Extremism, ensured that it was for a period of time. Antisemitism was so central to all the extremist threats that I assessed imperilled us most – Islamism, Far Right, Far Left – that I thought there was no other option.

However, since the end of my term, the CCE is in no man's land. A recruitment process was launched, paused, and has yet to be revived. That means that the in-depth antisemitism training we rolled out to government officials and Prevent practitioners throughout the country is no longer taking place. It means the counter extremism training packages made available to civil servants which spelt out the ideological challenge posed by extremism is in stasis.

Instead, the state is tilting in the other direction. For example, the collective, and understandable, desire to prevent a repeat of the horrors of Southport last summer means that Prevent is putting ever greater emphasis on those dubbed "Violence Fixated Individuals”: those who are ideology agnostic and whose obsession revolves around the act of extreme violence itself.

Stopping the next Southport is vital and, as I told a recent Home Affairs Select Committee, politicians may decide Prevent is best placed to do it. However, that also means that Prevent is not so much a counter-terrorism programme as opposed to a violence reduction programme with a counter-terrorism component. It will be inundated with referrals from front line staff who are – reasonably – increasingly confused about what Prevent’s actual mission is. My fear is that the end result of this will be that Prevent stops finding needles and starts producing hay.

I believe the entire country will be placed at greater risk if the government's understanding of ideology begins to deteriorate. Yet such is the centrality of antisemitism to extremist doctrine of all stripes, I would suggest it is Britain’s Jews who are uniquely imperilled.

Robin Simcox was the government’s independent adviser on extremism between 2021-25