Recruiting Muslim spies
BBC - Radio 4 - News and Current Affairs - Recruiting Muslim Spies
This is a BBC Radio 4 programme about attempts by the British security services to recruit Muslims as informants, supposedly to help them track down terrorists. People allege that they have been pressured to join by threats related to their immigration status or past criminal activities, and on one occasion setting up an arrest in Pakistan as an attempt to force them into joining. The reasons why Muslims are reluctant to become spies is obvious - it’s against Islam and specifically forbidden in the Qu’ran, which is made clear in the programme, but another aspect not discussed in the programme is the fact that employees of the security services are required to lie about their occupation to even their close family, by telling them they work for the Foreign Office or the Government Communications Bureau. Given Muslims’ past experience with the security services elsewhere, particularly in the USA where people were set up by government agents recruiting for fake terrorist plots, I don’t believe MI5 et al will have much luck in recruiting Muslims to inform on each other.
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