Governments across the world and most notably in the United Kingdom have put a lot of store in the practise of deradicalising those caught on the fringes of jihad activity. In the UK the PREVENT programme and its associated CHANNEL scheme are the main vehicles for deradicalisation or attempted deradicalisation. Of those referred to the PREVENT programme by those with a PREVENT duty such as teachers, police officers, nursery workers and other employees in both the public and private sectors, 44% of the concerns were about Islam related terror and extremism whereas 18% were referred because of concerns over far right extremism. The vast majority of those caught up in PREVENT are Muslims either plotting jihad and who are likely to become more extreme if not diverted.

There is much debate about the effectiveness of deradicalisation when it comes to jihadis. Some believe that it may work and has worked whereas others, such as myself, wonder how on earth a deradicalisation process can compete against a command to kill non-Muslims that these jihadis say come from their deity Allah?

If deradicalisation works then all well and good, but it has to work all the time and work every time. A failure of the deradicalisation process could, as happened in the Philippines back in January of this year, cause a massive loss of life.

According to a report on Fox News (h/t ROP), a husband and wife team carried out a suicide bombing of a church in the town of Jolu in Suly province. The bomb, which was targetted at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, killed twenty people and injured over one hundred others.

This atrocity was perpetrated by this man and woman who had already gone through a deradicalisation process organised by the Philippine government after the couple had been stopped at an airport in the country trying to get themselves and their children to Syria. It is believed that the couple were heading for ISIS controlled territory, as other jihadists from the Philippines and surrounding countries have done. This airport stop brought the couple, Rullie Rian Zeke and his wife, Ulfah Handayani Saleh, to the attention of the security authorities and were referred for deradicalisation.

This deradicalisation process did not work and people died as a result. This should give us a lot to worry about. If deradicalisation did not work in a country that is known to have some human rights problems and where those problematical to the government are not really handled that gently, how is it ever going to work in a more ‘rule of law’ country like the UK? I very much doubt that the sort of deradicalisation support programmes that exist in the UK and which divert participants into sport, employment and education and which have a ‘social work’ approach, will do that much to deter the rabid supporter of jihad. It is much more likely, human nature being what it is, that the determined and motivated participant, one who wants to game the system, will parrot the answers that the trainers and management of the Channel programme want to hear whilst continuing to hold views that include ‘kill the kufar’.

What happened in the Philippines shows what happens when deradicalisation fails. This pair of savages were considered by the Philippines’s government and law enforcement to no longer represent a security or terror problem. They were released back into the community after the course and quite quickly it seems, got recruited by ISIS operatives and carried out the attack on the Cathedral.

If deradicalisation can fail so badly in the Philippines then it can fail here and in other countries where deradicalisation has been seen as a panacea for curing the disease of Islamic extremism and jihad.