Rarely in the field of human conflict has so much energy been expended in placating so few as in the Brexit negotiations over the backstop preventing a hard Irish border. It seems it’s OK for the Democratic Unionist Party to demand different reproductive and marriage rights from the rest of the UK (to name but two) while also demanding perfect regulatory alignment over cattle feed. Far from embodying the Union, the DUP erodes its Britishness.

Brexit, though, is just the latest example of embuggerment by an Irish minority buggering up a plan intended to benefit the majority. For 30 years, Northern Ireland was riven by one of the most prolonged insurgencies in modern European history. Some 20 years on from that conflict’s conclusion, whack-a-mole keeps muddling the search for a solution to dealing with its legacy: what to do about the 1,188 killings under reinvestigation and how to promote reconciliation. Arguments over legacy have so poisoned the political atmosphere that the return to devolved government now seems almost impossible. Precious little attention has been given to this legacy deadlock on this side of the Irish Sea. Until now, that is. Stirring MPs and the press from their slumber has been not the spectre of a new dark age cast over the province but the prospect of three elderly ex-soldiers facing prosecution over killings from the 1970s.

The much-lauded 1998 Good Friday Agreement made no provision for the investigation or prosecution of former soldiers, focusing instead on the early release of convicted terrorists.

Two ex-paratroopers are due to stand trial in Belfast next September for the murder of an IRA gunman in Belfast in 1972 as he evaded arrest. Notorious though 25-year-old “Staff Captain” Joe McCann was, he was unarmed when he was shot repeatedly, judging by the ten cartridge cases close by his body. By the time Soldiers A and C appear in the dock, they’ll be 70 and 68.

Then there’s 77-year-old great-grandfather Dennis Hutchings, who suffers from heart and kidney problems. He is due to stand trial in March for the attempted murder in 1974 of a mentally retarded  27-year-old, John Cunningham, who was unarmed and shot in the back as he ran from Hutchings’s patrol because, said his GP, he was “afraid of the army”. The doctor told Cunningham’s inquest that his patient required special care and he had previously found soldiers pushing him into an armoured car because he had been hiding in the bushes. The charge against Hutchings is attempted murder — which he denies — because both he and another soldier, now dead, opened fire and the Crown can’t be sure whose bullets killed Cunningham.

Prosecuting Hutchings is a “national disgrace” tweeted Tory MP and former soldier Johnny Mercer. “Dennis Hutchings . . . is an old man,” says the former head of the army Lord Dannatt. “He should be allowed to have his old age.” So outraged by this “unprecedented betrayal of our fighting men” is former Colonel Richard Kemp, who did eight tours of duty of Ulster, “that I am returning the hard-won Commission awarded to me by the Queen that I have prized for 40 years”.

I doubt Messrs Dannatt, Mercer and Kemp will be arguing in favour of giving 66-year-old John Downey his old age. In November the ex-IRA man was charged with the murder of two soldiers in 1972. In 2014, he was also charged with the murder of four members of the Household Cavalry killed by a nail bomb which tore through them and their horses during the Changing of the Guard in 1982. But Downey’s trial collapsed after it emerged that in 2007 he had received one of 200 letters sent to IRA suspects on the run confirming they were not currently wanted even though 95 were linked to some 295 killings. These “comfort” letters followed private assurances to Gerry Adams from Tony Blair, who later explained they were key to ensuring the IRA fully decommissioned their weapons.

Former London car bomber Gerry Kelly, now a prominent Sinn Fein politician, says Downey’s latest arrest is “an act of gross bad faith by the British government”. For most people in Britain, and indeed Ireland, Mr Kelly’s outrage will attract much less sympathy than the outrage by veterans and MPs over the arrest of Dennis Hutchings, because whatever crimes soldiers may have committed, people will struggle to see the remotest moral equivalence between the British Army and the IRA.

Thanks to the Irish “embuggerment” factor, however, when it comes to the legacy minefield it’s just not that simple, at least not if we want Northern Ireland to move on by looking to the future instead of where it is, still stuck fast in the past.

I fear this article may not earn me many friends among Standpoint readers. But let me try to set out some of the realities, however uncomfortable they may be for those who think that, because soldiers were lawfully on the streets with guns, that relatives of those killed by the army should not be afforded the same legacy voice as those killed by the IRA.

A total of 301 people were killed by the British Army, over half of them between 1970 and 1973. The salutary fact is that the army’s biggest single group of victims were not terrorists, but civilians, the vast majority republicans or nationalists. During this period, a little-known Royal Ulster Constabulary force order was in place. The GOC and the Chief Constable had privately agreed that interviews of soldiers involved in killings, disputed or otherwise, would be conducted, not by the CID, but by the Royal Military Police. Many RMP interviews were a “managerial” formality, rather than an investigation, with statements running to just a few lines. This cosy arrangement only ended at the insistence of the Northern Ireland DPP in late 1973. When the Northern Ireland Lord Chief Justice Lord Lowry heard about it, he wasn’t too impressed either: “We deprecate this curtailment of the functions of the police and hope that the practice will not be revived.” It wasn’t — but neither were the 150-plus “investigations” reviewed. Widows, sons and daughters have been in limbo ever since.

It follows that most of those who still support the prosecution of soldiers involved in disputed shootings do so because the criminal justice system was so flawed during the most violent years of the conflict. Former generals, MPs and ministers can harrumph all they want about the injustice of reopening cases that were closed back in the 1970s, but I’m afraid these republicans and nationalists have a point, at least in law. While the conflict raged, ministers repeatedly maintained it was not a war, but a straightforward “law and order” issue. British counter-insurgency strategy was about establishing the “rule of law” which — as Mrs Thatcher kept telling us — “must apply to everyone”. The uncomfortable truth is that for soldiers, a different law applied to them for many years.

Moreover, Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights obliges Britain to conduct “effective” investigations into killings by “state actors”, meaning the investigation must be “capable of leading to the punishment of those responsible” though not necessarily requiring punishment. So far, those substandard RMP investigations that have come before the courts have been adjudged not to have met our Article 2 legal obligations.

There is, however, a growing chasm between the desire for prosecutions by republicans and nationalists against soldiers, and by unionists against the IRA — and the realistic prospect of securing convictions against either. Prosecutions are already very rare and getting rarer by the year because witnesses are dead and dying and documents and forensics lost or tainted. This mismatch has led to an explosion of legacy-linked civil litigation in Belfast, because when aggrieved parties don’t get criminal justice — or, alternatively, when they regard themselves as being unjustly prosecuted — they turn to the civil courts.

The result is that Northern Ireland’s civil justice system is approaching meltdown. The courts are now awash with hundreds of writs, seeking judicial review of DPP decisions not to prosecute, or to prosecute, decisions over the backlog of conflict related inquests, disclosure of intelligence, public interest immunity certificates, damages for unlawful injury and challenges to the issue of non-jury certificates. This is unsustainable: without a legacy agreement there will be no end to it and the civil justice system will eventually collapse.

This should tell us something — that the demand for legal accountability is not pre-eminently the product of cynical, mischievous, subversive, Brit-hating republicans and nationalists. It’s human nature to keep on demanding answers to questions which the state has either avoided answering or answered incompetently.

Last month the inquest opened into ten people shot dead by the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment in Ballymurphy in August 1971 in the three days following the introduction of internment without trial. An 11th man died later. At the time, the army said the ten were either members of the IRA or killed in crossfire. Credible eye-witness accounts of soldiers firing at unarmed people and the nature of the victims suggest the army’s version is implausible. The dead included a mother of eight searching the streets for her children, and a priest who was shot while carrying a white flag and administering the last rites to a dying man who was also unarmed. Six months later, 1 Para shot dead 13 innocent people in Londonderry on “Bloody Sunday”. A 14th died four months later.

What motivates the Ballymurphy families’ quest for justice, is no different from what has motivated those families who for decades have demanded answers to the criminal justice system’s two biggest single failures of the entire conflict: not a single member of the IRA has been convicted of the two largest acts of mass murder: the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings which killed 21 people; and the 1998 Omagh car bombing by republicans opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, killing 29 including two unborn children. Of those 29 dead, nine were children and three generations from one family.

In these two terrible events, more than 420 people were injured, many with life-changing injuries: lost limbs, blindness and paralysis. In both incidents, the police solemnly promised the relatives of the dead and survivors that no stone would be left unturned. Yet in both massacres two very big stones were left unturned.

In the case of the pub bombings, the West Midlands Police reopened the investigation in 1991 following the release of the six Irishmen (The Birmingham Six) who the Court of Appeal found had been wrongly convicted 16 years earlier.
By 1993, “Operation Review” had identified five prime suspects for the bombings, including the two men who planted the bombs. The police assessed that one of the planters was a 34-year-old ex-British soldier, James Francis Gavin.

During my own recent investigation into the pub bombings for ITV, I discovered that Gavin had been well within the grasp of the West Midlands Police just six weeks after the bombings. On January 8, 1975, he was arrested. Traces of explosives were found in a car he drove. Yet inexplicably he was released and within hours had fled to Ireland. No doubt the police’s lenient attitude to Gavin was influenced by the belief that they’d already got the real culprits. The Birmingham Six had been charged after four of them “confessed” — despite the fact that these “confessions” were wreathed in contradictions because they’d been beaten out of them by the police.

But then a bit of physical coercion in the 1970s was par for the course, even for the courts. Dismissing the Six’s first appeal in March 1976, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, mused whether the men had been knocked about “beyond the ordinary”, his curiosity aroused by a photograph of a black eye “the origin of which I had forgotten but do not think it matters much anyway”. This was the same Lord Chief Justice whose whitewash of 1 Para at Bloody Sunday four years earlier was overturned by Lord Saville in 2010.

In 1993 Gavin was interviewed by the police in the Irish Republic, where he was serving life for the murder of a man the IRA believed was an informer. Questioned about his role in the Birmingham pub bombings, Gavin declined to answer any questions. After “Operation Review” submitted files on him and his four fellow prime suspects, the DPP announced in 1994 there was insufficient evidence to charge any of them, at which point “Operation Review” appears to have pretty much given up. “The file . . . is now closed,” announced West Midlands Chief Constable Ron Hadfield.

John Ware (right) confronts Michael Patrick Reilly in a recent programme for ITV’s “Exposure” (© ITV/REX/Shutterstock)

It shouldn’t have been. Although four of those five prime suspects were in the Irish Republic and beyond UK jurisdiction, the prime suspect for Gavin’s fellow bomb planter was living in Belfast. His name is Michael Reilly. He is now aged 63.

In 2012, at the behest of the families, “Operation Castors” reviewed the pub bombings file. “We are assessing what future opportunities we might have to resolve the case,” said a police spokesman. I can think of one golden “opportunity” that appears not to have been taken — the use of lawful police subterfuge aimed at getting “alongside” a suspect by contriving a set of circumstances in the hope that it might trigger an admission or provide new leads. West Midlands Police will neither confirm nor deny that such a plan was ever given serious consideration in Reilly’s case, but I’m doubtful that it was.

The opportunity to construct a long-term plan around Reilly, his friends, habits, and lifestyle has been available to the police for a quarter of a century. He has lived and worked in Belfast since his release from jail in Birmingham for his part in a series of fire-bombings that pre-dated the pub bombings. His solicitor says he denies any involvement in the pub bombings, and “does not intend to respond any further” to my “unfounded allegations”.

I do not accuse Reilly of planting the bombs. I am, however, satisfied he is one and the same man who twice confessed to the former MP and minister Chris Mullin that he did. In 1986 Mullin wrote an excellent book arguing that the Birmingham Six were innocent, based partly on conversations with those who admitted their guilt to him, on condition he never named them while they were alive. In Reilly’s case, he provided Mullin with meticulous detail about the bombing operation.

Today Mullin still refuses to confirm or deny Reilly was that man, cryptically referring to him only as the Young Planter. “I haven’t named this individual and, so long as he is alive, I will not do so,” says Mullin.

Reilly, however, has been West Midlands Police’s prime suspect for Mullin’s “Young Planter” since 1993 when they interviewed him three times in Belfast. Beyond denying his involvement in the pub bombings, he declined to comment.

However, I discovered from a 1975 police statement that Reilly does appear to have known there were going to be bombings. A statement from his father Henry discloses that his son had warned him to stay out of Birmingham city centre that night. When Reilly was questioned about this, his statement records him admitting he knew “something was going to happen”. In his book, Mullin quotes his young planter as telling a similar story.

Had the West Midlands Police devised a plan to get alongside Reilly — even monitoring his conversations at home if necessary — they might well have learned more about how he knew that “something was going to happen”, who played what role, perhaps implicating the other prime suspects still at liberty in Dublin, and of course any further evidence either corroborating — or undermining — their case against him.

Today such subterfuge operations are typically executed under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 and are signed off by chief officers and scrutinised by the Surveillance Commissioner. True, they’re expensive, highly intrusive, require careful and patient planning and close supervision, and don’t always bear fruit. In Reilly’s case, however, the fact that he does not live in a republican area and had a respectable job offered the practical prospect of a successful penetration.

Deep-cover RIPA operations were deployed by outside police investigations into two separate but high-profile Northern Ireland murders. Why not in the case of Birmingham with 21 times the number of victims?

In the case of the Omagh bombing, the failure to lock up anyone has been almost entirely due to the arcane protocols restricting intelligence-sharing between Britain’s electronic eavesdropping centre, GCHQ and the police. In 2008, for BBC Panorama, I discovered that within hours of the massacre GCHQ had sent the cellphone numbers of the bomb team to the intelligence services in Belfast. GCHQ had tracked the bombers’ journey to Omagh, and their escape back across the border. With the mobile numbers came the names and addresses of their registered owners.

Some 70 miles away in Omagh, standing with his back to one of Europe’s biggest post-war crime scenes, the Detective Chief Superintendent charged with catching the bombers had very little to go on. The failure to share the vital intercept intelligence with detectives, robbed them of the chance to make arrests within the so-called “Golden Hours” — the 24 hours immediately after a crime when forensic and other opportunities are at a premium.

Judged by the failure to bring the IRA to book in cases like Birmingham, Omagh, and the 200 comfort letters to the IRA, the prime minister’s recent criticism that legacy investigations were “patently unfair” to “our armed forces” might seem fair comment. At first glance PSNI statistics do indeed look biased. While republican groups killed nearly six times (2,152) the numbers killed by the army and the police (362), the PSNI are reviewing almost every killing by the security forces (354) compared to only 530 by republican groups.

But there is no bias. The criminal justice system resolved the majority of killings by republicans by locking up thousands of them. Even so, the majority of PSNI investigations into conflict-related killings are still mostly on armed republican and loyalist groups (70 per cent) — not soldiers (30 per cent ). The prime minister got it so badly wrong that the PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton felt he had to put the record straight. “Our figures are out there,” he said. “The facts speak for themselves.”

Still, I hear you say, soldiers were on the streets lawfully with guns, the IRA were not. Soldiers were required to act within an ethical code and within the law. The IRA did neither, often engaging in acts so evil and barbarous as to forfeit any claim to the “armed struggle” mantle the seek for posterity. What else explains, as Colonel Kemp so powerfully puts it, the “thugs who prowled the streets of Londonderry using power drills to disable teenage boys who stepped out of line”? Or, the decision to bomb a Cenotaph on Remembrance Day, killing 11 people; or the use of civilians as proxy bombs, holding their family hostage while forcing them to drive to a security force base with a bomb strapped to their vehicle detonated on arrival — a tactic adopted by FARC in Colombia, and by IS in Syria.

On this view, the police should continue to relentlessly pursue old IRA men for the death and suffering they inflicted — and lay off old soldiers. In other words, there should be an amnesty for soldiers, something the Defence Select Committee last year urged the government to consider. At first, the government agreed to include this “alternative approach” in the latest of its interminable rounds of legacy “consultations” in Northern Ireland on how killings should be investigated, documented and the “truth” about them “recovered”.

This, too, soon ran headlong into the “embuggerment” factor. An amnesty for soldiers alone doesn’t meet our legal “Right to Life” obligations under Article 2. Impunity for the state against civil or criminal proceedings is viewed as the “epitome of impunity” contrary to international law because states have a duty to end impunity for “state actors”.

And there’s also the continuing Article 2 obligation to conduct an effective, independent and transparent investigation into past killings  for those wanting details of how their relatives were killed by the state. So the state can’t just drop everything and remain passive about its own conduct while pressing on with prosecuting its adversary.

This explains why, having first been open to the possibility of a statute of limitations for soldiers (an amnesty by another name), the government has now withdrawn it from its latest consultation.

The only way an amnesty for soldiers is likely to be lawful is if the other armed combatants — both IRA and Loyalists — were  also given amnesties. As Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley says, “A statute of limitations would not be possible under international law without extending it to terrorists. That is something I could not support.” It is, however, something which the Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson says he could support. “It is clear to me that our veterans need the protection of a statute of limitations in respect of Troubles-related offences,” Williamson wrote to the prime minister. “If this means a wider amnesty, so be it.”

Left to themelves, IRA leaders, many of them now Sinn Fein politicians, might very well embrace an all-encompassing amnesty. But Sinn Fein are hostage to their very substantial electorate, who have made it clear they will not tolerate the idea of soldiers not being brought to book. The DUP, on the other hand, loves the idea of the IRA being brought to book but can’t stomach the notion of this happening to any more soldiers.

So, when it comes to legacy, opposition to the wider amnesty, albeit for opposite reasons, is one of only two things that Sinn Fein and the DUP do agree on. They also agree that any “legacy” mechanism should put victims and survivors first. But of course what constitutes a “victim” soon runs headlong into the vicissitudes of tribal antipathy, paranoia and bloody-mindedness because it requires the relative of a soldier shot in the back by a republican to accept that that self-same republican was as much of a victim if he or she was later shot dead — armed or unarmed — by a soldier. Conversely, it requires the relative of an IRA bomber shot in the back by a soldier to agree that that soldier was as much of a victim if he or she was later shot dead by the IRA. Since republicans are responsible for the lion’s share of killings, they have most to gain by accepting this definition of “victim”, so most of them do. Since Unionists have most to lose, by and large they don’t. 

The government’s solution to reconcile the entire labyrinth of competing “embuggerment” factors is a complex web of criminal and non-criminal organisations and an ever-lengthening list of acronyms.

The criminal route would see an Historical Investigations Unit (HIU) with police powers continuing to investigate unsolved killings and sending reports to the DPP; where no prosecutions were possible, the non-criminal route would kick in with a written HIU report for the victims or their relatives. There would also be “information recovery” by an “Independent Commission for Information Retrieval” (ICIR) open to relatives who want to find out what happened to their loved ones. Information would be retrieved from paramilitaries, government and the security forces through trusted interlocutors; “truth and reconciliation” would be fostered by an Oral History Archive (OHA) compiled from public record material and those who want to tell their stories; reconciliation initiatives would be promoted through the creation of an Implementation and Reconciliation Group (IRG).

However, although Northern Ireland’s political parties agreed to this legacy structure in 2014 after 12 weeks of talks, four years on there is still no earthly prospect of it functioning, because politicians in Belfast are simply incapable of agreeing how to implement it. Yet year after year the government continues to give them a veto over legacy even though Westminster is sovereign.

This veto means that absent an Article 2-compliant “legacy” process — agreed by the parties — the law must continue to take its course. Some conservative and unionist politicians mutter that having authorised the prosecution of Dennis Hutchings and Soldiers A and C, the then Northern Ireland DPP, Barra McGrory QC, was playing politics. That would only be true had McGrory not prosecuted when advised by the police there was a case to answer. Instead, he has had no choice but to dispassionately apply the rule of law.

Even if — miracle of miracles — the parties did reach agreement, the chances of the legacy bureaucratic behemoth functioning with frictionless borders are almost zero. However rare prosecutions by the HIU may be, as long as armed groups, including the security forces, remain at risk of prosecution, they’re as likely to unburden themselves to the ICIR as turkeys voting for Christmas.

How, then, to decriminalise legacy while keeping intact a robust legal process that delivers legal accountability without collapsing the civil justice system which is wh
Since stepping down as DPP in 2017, McGrory has come up with a radical proposal. Tear up the government’s consultation system, end the political parties’ veto over agreement on a legacy process, and pass primary legislation suspending all legacy-linked civil and criminal court-based processes — including inquests. Retain the HIU, but switch its inquiries from criminal prosecutions into a new custom-made judicial process — working title, The Legacy Commission — staffed by judges.

Instead of HIU reports going to the DPP, they would go to the Legacy Commission with findings or recommendations about who or what was responsible for a death. HIU reports whose evidence fell below the civil standard (balance of probabilities) — which would be the vast majority — would be turned into written reports for families. The rest would go to a hearing, much like an inquest, where the presiding Commissioner would have the power to make findings concerning individual or collective responsibility. However, that finding would be the end of the matter with no appeal other than by judicial review.

This will win McGrory no friends among republican nationalist or Unionist politicians; all the more reason why their veto over breaking the stalemate should be removed. And, of course, so dependent on the DUP is the government that nothing is likely to change until the parliamentary arithmetic changes.

For any government, though, the attraction of McGrory’s proposal is that it would still be Article 2-compliant by providing an effective investigation process into conflict killings by the state. Punishment is not a condition of Article 2 compliance. It would also be much cheaper in the long run because the process would be finite and would end the spectacle of old soldiers — possibly old police officers too — going to prison.

For the former combatants, the absence of any criminal sanction might incentivise some to come forward to the ICIR to unburden their secrets. With more soul-baring, hopefully there would come the start of tangible reconciliation because they would set an example. “My fear,” says McGrory, “is that if we continue to try to shoehorn the legacy problem into the justice system, we risk self-destruction.”

McGrory is right. A genuine peace process cannot also be a police process that continues until the last soldier and terrorist die. Ending the police process offers the only realistic path to peace and reconciliation.

Thanks to Brexit, the legacy clock is ticking, for Brexit has revived old enmities, however much Brexiters may wish to downplay this. Anything that re-emphasises the border — which Brexit does — reawakens the tensions over identity and provides a rallying point for republicans, dissidents and non-dissidents alike. In the 1970s, I saw at first-hand how the border strained Anglo-Irish relations to breaking point, and the nonchalance with which the most ideological Brexiteers have casually airbrushed the border’s toxic history is, to me, quite bewildering, as it is to the PSNI Chief Constable. “For those that say we or others are overplaying the border for Brexit in policing terms — they’re simply wrong,” he says. Brexiteers forget — if they ever realised — just how hard-won the Good Friday Agreement was.

The post The Troubles cast a shadow over Brexit appeared first on Standpoint.

By 2005, Dr Siddiqui’s entire outlook had changed: he reflected gloomily that Islam in Britain was on a collision course with the rest of the country. It was, he mused, as if the protection afforded to Muslims to practise and proselytise every aspect of their faith — short of physical jihad — counted for little. Islam seemed to have become all about “rights and no obligations. I think, by and large, this is the direction the Muslim community is taking, leading to victimhood, a grievance culture. We don’t seem to be grasping what makes a people respectable, lovable, likeable. You know, if you are a problem person, who wants to know you?”

How prescient he was. Judging by the reaction to the latest collision between Islam and the values of British society, critical self-reflection still eludes this country’s most politically active Islamic organisations.

Last autumn a survey suggested that thousands of state primary schools had adopted the hijab as part of their official school uniform. Another survey showed that for 42 per cent of Islamic faith schools, including some that are state-run, the hijab was compulsory.

For many Muslim women, the hijab is a modesty garment historically connoting the idea that women are sexual objects for men otherwise incapable of controlling themselves. Responding to these polls, the Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, wondered if little girls were being conditioned to become sexually modest before puberty to ensure they remained modest for the rest of their lives instead of allowing them an unfettered choice when old enough to make an informed decision. Were schools, especially those funded by the state, colluding in this conditioning? Was community peer pressure to conform perhaps contributing to the rise? In which case, said Ms Spielman, Ofsted could give headteachers “the confidence and strength to act”.

Individual freedom is a core British value, and the Chief Inspector is the ultimate custodian of child welfare in schools, so to most people these would seem to be perfectly reasonable questions to explore.

The polls came on the back of Dame Louise Casey’s review into integration, which found that women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage especially face “a double onslaught of gender inequality, combined with religious, cultural and social barriers preventing them from accessing even their basic rights as British residents”. In conversation Dame Louise characteristically puts it more bluntly: “The level of misogyny within some of that community was jaw-dropping.” Or as Churchill might have put it, the influence of Islam “paralyses the social development of those who follow it” because “in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property.”

The response to Spielman’s comments that she would like to inquire into the rapid expansion of the hijab for small girls was a spasm of venomous hate mail, including a “we-know-where-you live” and “can-get-you-any-time” threats mainly, she says, from “Islamic extremists and the hard Left”.

Worse was dished out to Neena Lall, the head teacher of St Stephen’s primary school in East London, when she dared to ban the hijab for 4-7-year-olds — again, out of concern for the welfare of the children under her care. The youngest girls tended to fiddle with their hijabs which affected their concentration in class. Lall was also concerned their scarves were working loose and might get caught around their necks while using playground equipment. She also worried about the impact on the children of fasting during Ramadan. Up to 19 hours without food had left some feeling faint and unable to concentrate. So parents were asked to feed their children before sending them to school.

Here’s a flavour of the response to Lall’s decision: “Having been exposed as an Islamophobe culturally ignorant, prejuidiced [sic] against Muslims, can you please confirm when you will resign from your post.”

Here’s another: “You are disgusting Islamophobic Nazi-like thinker (though a slave to racism doesn’t think) . . . the demand is simple, REMOVE THE BAN FROM THE GIRLS YOU PAEDOPHILLIAC PERSON . . . may you never be happy . . . how many shoes did you lick to be where you are today?”

And this: “Have you got as problem with Muslims? I think you are in the wrong job you coward. Stupid cow!”. This email was headlined “You Horrible VILE rat.”
British Muslims have now had almost a generation of being told by a myriad of activist organisations claiming to represent them that almost any restriction or even implied criticism of Islam is motivated by an irrational fear and even hatred of Islam, otherwise known as Islamophobia.

Hatred of Islam is indeed irrational, but apprehension about the long-term impact of a large and expanding politicised faith that seems intent on integrating on its own terms seems entirely logical. A culture war is far more dangerous to the cohesive health of this country than occasional attempts at mass murder, although not of course for those killed or injured. And the problem is that it is becoming almost impossible to reconcile our differences in civilised public debate.
Typical of the reaction to those like me who have scrutinised the more regressive versions of Islam since 9/11 is to play the man and not the ball. The latest bout (“rabid Islamophobe”, “piece of Islamophobic shit”, “sinister”, “white supremacist”, “racist”, “witchfinder general”, etc) followed my recent investigation for Channel 4 into the organisation claiming much of the credit for leading the campaigns against Neena Lall and Amanda Spielman.

That organisation is called Mend (Muslim Engagement and Development), which claims to be Britain’s most active and successful grassroots Muslim organisation.

Mend proclaims an exemplary ambition to “enhance civic engagement” by Muslims and to “foster social cohesion and community resilience to all forms of extremism”. There is no suggestion that Mend orchestrated the flood of poison against the Chief Inspector of Schools or Neena Lall, head teacher of St Stephen’s primary school. However, Mend activists were busy on the ground and their boss Sufyan Ismail has boasted privately that Lall “felt the wrath of the local Mend group and the parents”. I have yet to see Mend publicly condemn the cruder manifestations of this wrath, inflamed by unwarranted claims from them and fellow activists that Islamophobia had motivated Lall’s decision to ban the hijab for 4-7-year olds.

Ismail is a wealthy 42-year-old entrepreneur from Blackburn who travels in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. Common to all his companies is the letter E, which he says stands for “ethical” because “at the heart of our operations” is a “core value . . . integrity.” One subsidiary was OneE Tax Ltd, which was involved in what he describes as “tax planning” rather than “tax avoidance”, which went into voluntary liquidation shortly after launching Mend.

Since 2010, Ismail has been trying to persuade politicians to engage with organisations like Mend because, he says, its values are representative of his fellow British Muslims. In November that year he briefly succeeded after an organisation he created called “iEngage” was appointed secretariat to the newly-launched All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia (APPG). However, reports emerged of iEngage defending Islamists regarded by the government as extremists. According to the Community Security Trust, which protects British Jews from anti-Semitism, iEngage displayed a “troubling attitude to anti-Semitism”. In July 2011, MPs voted 60-2 to remove iEngage from the APPG.

Three years later Ismail rebranded iEngage as Mend. Again its main focus was tackling Islamophobia. While Islamophobic incidents recorded by the police have been growing, Mend’s claims are alarmist. A 2014 Mend prayer urged British Muslims to “make sure that the threat of Islamophobia doesn’t reach a state where neighbours start murdering one another, such as what we saw in Bosnia, or even in the Central African Republic today”. In January this year Mend’s Head of Policy, Isobel Ingham-Barrow, said she was “sorry to say” that when it came to Islamophobia, “we may already be close” to creating the same “conditions” that led to the extermination of more than six million Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany.

The notion that Islamophobia here is inching towards genocide on the scale of Bosnia, let alone the Holocaust, is patently absurd. Mend presents statistics for anti-Muslim hate crime by adding religiously-inspired attacks against Muslims to racially-inspired attacks, whether or not the perpetrator knew the victim was a Muslim — despite the Metropolitan Police warning that “the two figures should not be summed”. Anecdotally, the actual instances of Islamophobic hate crime — as distinct from those reported to the police — would appear to be growing. However, the police do not consider the reality is anything like as bleak as Mend suggests. “Sometimes the outside world internationally can look in and think, ‘Goodness me; there is all that hate crime’,” says the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick. “‘Have they got gangs of armed thugs going around with shaved heads attacking people?’ No, we haven’t. We have a base level of two or three crimes per borough per day online and off, the vast majority of which are at the less serious end of the spectrum, and I do not believe the problem is getting worse. But I am not complacent about that.”

This is not to minimise the trauma to individual Muslims from vile baiting, being spat at, called names or having a garment ripped off. But the danger of talking up Islamophobia in such an alarmist way is that it risks creating a siege mentality among Muslims. Day in, day out, Mend feeds Muslims a relentless diet of news and dramatised videos of Islamophobic attacks (not always accurate) as if to emphasise: “You do know your fellow non-Muslim citizens hate you, don’t you?” Its leader Sufyan Ismail has himself told Muslims that “society hates us.”

Still, Mend seems to have persuaded several MPs from all parties and some police forces that it is an appropriate organisation to advise on how to tackle Islamophobia. In Manchester, it has partnered with the police and the council on a joint “Ending Islamophobia Action Plan” which includes advising schools on how to “identify the difference between free speech and cyber-hate”; it has provided research to Manchester’s Mayor, Andy Burnham, about policing Muslim communities; in Cardiff it has trained the British Transport Police on Islamophobia; in Leeds they’ve trained NHS staff on Islamophobia; in London Mend says it is an official partner of the Electoral Commission; it claims to be the only Muslim group to have given oral evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into the culture and practices of the press; and across the country it has held events with police and crime commissioners. Mend representatives even sit on the odd local authority committee advising them how to implement the government’s counter-terrorism Prevent programme, aimed at preventing vulnerable individuals from being drawn into Islamist and far-right extremism. This, despite Mend campaigning for Prevent’s abolition as part of “state-sponsored Islamophobia”.

These well-intentioned politicians and public servants have been less than curious about the rebranding of iEngage to Mend. Some Mend staff and volunteers have promoted ideas that meet the government’s definition of extremism contained in its Counter-Extremism Strategy: support for organisations proscribed as terrorist, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and visceral attacks on fellow Muslims who have dared to suggest that Mend has not always practised the anti-hate principles it preaches. Some of the organisations Mend lists as its “strategic partners” are regarded by the Home Office Extremism Analysis Unit as being “extremist”. For example, Cage, the Islamist group that has campaigned to free convicted terrorists, famously described Jihadi John as a “beautiful young man”, and defended the right of a British jihadi to carry out a suicide bombing on a jail in Syria in which many are said to have been killed in order to free prisoners. Indeed, Sufyan Ismail says he has “personally donated to Cage over the years, and I continue to do so. Let’s get that on the record, and I don’t know how many people have donated as much as I have, but it’s not a small amount.” Like Cage, Mend wants “counter-terrorism legislation which is unnecessary abolished”.

In the immediate future Ismail says he wants Mend to focus on schools by hiring “schools content officers”, presumably to try to persuade schools to present Islam the way he views his faith. And if Ofsted does indeed launch an inquiry into the rise of the hijab among primary school girls, we can expect hostilities to resume. Mosques in Manchester, Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Bolton have advised parents not to allow their daughters to be questioned by school inspectors.

We are often told that wearing the hijab is a matter of personal choice for women. However, when Ofsted’s Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman suggested that parents who expect their children to wear the hijab before puberty might be sexualising them, the Greater Manchester mosques condemned her comments as “abhorrent”. Why?

If the hijab really is a matter of personal choice — and not widely regarded by Muslims as a sexual modesty garment — what explains the 2017 slut-shaming and terrorising of a 17-year-old hijab-wearing girl in Birmingham filmed twerking in the street? After the film was uploaded (receiving a million views), one Muslim wrote: “That’s so disrespectful is you [sic] are wearing hijab you are representing Islam dignity so how to act like a fool is a big disrespect.” Another: “She should be shot!!!!!!!!”. Another wrote: “Killing her oughta teach her!”. Two self-appointed male modesty guardians are reported to have been contacted by the girl’s family. So intimidated was the girl by the “community” opprobrium heaped on her for being immodest (“This is the work of the devil”) that she was recorded sobbing and begging forgiveness. “To all the girls that wear the hijab and wear abaya (Islamic cloak) I’m sorry for disrespecting it,” she wailed.

Others, like Dr Siema Iqbal, a GP who was until recently Mend’s Manchester co-ordinator, say many young Muslim girls simply wish to imitate their mother, or a relative. Perhaps. It’s also true that some mothers in highly-segregated areas worry what their neighbours might say “about their daughter being immodest or slutty” as one Muslim friend raised in such an environment told me.

To suggest that the hijab has not been adopted primarily as a religious symbol of sexual modesty ignores its evolution. While there are no specific references to the term hijab in the Koran, verse 24:31 does refer to the Prophet telling “believing women” to “lower their gaze and be modest”, to “wrap (a portion) of their headcovers” over their bosoms and not to “display their beauty” except to close male relatives.

By the 1950s, however, the hijab had become something of a museum piece in parts of the Arab world. A video of Egypt’s President Nasser at a mass rally in 1958 shows him mocking the hijab after the Muslim Brotherhood demanded he make it compulsory:

Nasser: And I met the head of the Muslim Brotherhood and he sat with me and made his requests. What were his requests? The first thing he asked for was to make the wearing of a hijab mandatory in Egypt. And demand that every woman walking in the street wear a large scarf.

Crowd: (Laughter.)

Nasser: Every woman walking —

Crowd: (More laughter.)

Man: Let him wear it! (Loud laughter and applause.)

Nasser: And I told him if I make that a law, they will say that we have returned to the days of Al Hakim bi-Amr Allah who forbade people from walking at day and only allowed walking at night.

Crowd: (Laughter.)

Nasser: And my opinion is that every person in his own house decides for himself the rules. And he replied: “No, as the leader, you are responsible.” I told him “Sir, you have a daughter at the school of medicine. She is not wearing a tarha [hijab].”

Crowd: (Loud laughter.)

Nasser: Why didn’t you make her wear a tarha?

Crowd:  (Rapturous applause — whistling.)

Nasser: If you are unable to make one girl who is your daughter wear the tarha, you want me to put a tarha on 10 million woman — myself!

Crowd and Nasser: (Both collapse with laughter amid more thunderous applause.)

That all changed with the arrival of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Resurgent Shi’ism forced Iran’s Sunni rival Saudi Arabia to regress into one the most rigid, and illiberal regimes since the Kingdom was founded and much of the Islamic world followed. Today, though, a more progressive breeze is wafting through Saudi Arabia, with clerics ruling that the abaya — a long-fitting robe for women — should no longer be compulsory.

In Iran reform is also in the air. True, women are still being arrested by hardliners for refusing to wear the compulsory hijab, but they have taken comfort from the words of President Rouhani: “One cannot force one’s lifestyle on the future generations.” As for the Gulf, parts of Dubai now look like Marbella with skimpily-clad women.

Britain seems to be moving in the opposite direction with some pockets of our major cities and towns resembling — in appearance at least — a sort of caliphate.

Mend demands to know what evidence there is for the hijab sexualising young girls. How about the words of Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi-American owner of a New York headscarf company who inspired World Hijab Day, run annually since 2013? Khan says she wanted to “foster religious tolerance and understanding by inviting women (non-hijabi Muslims and non-Muslims) to experience the hijab for one day.” And what exactly is it that she invites them to understand about the hijab? The “recognition,” she says, that “millions of Muslim women who choose to wear the hijab . . . live a life of modesty.”

A Canadian Shia TV station, Ahlulbayt, that promotes World Hijab Day runs a similar project called “Global Hijab Awareness”. “Why does Islam encourage hijab?” asks its homepage Q&A. Answer: “It not only makes a woman feel confident and liberated but encourages society to not see women as objects of desire.” Women who haven’t yet worn the hijab should “get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station”.

Our well-intentioned Foreign Office celebrated World Hijab Day in February, and is reported to have offered free headscarves to women, inviting them to its Walk-In event — just to feel the power of its “liberation, respect and security”. Muslim women are often quoted as saying the hijab does indeed “empower” them. But how, exactly? By providing a deterrent to ogling men because they’re left with less to look at? How exactly does that represent empowerment of women? It seems to me that by encouraging women in the West to wear the hijab, the Foreign Office is disempowering those of their sisters in the East who have been arrested, threatened and even killed for not wearing it. “Kill her and throw her corpse to the dogs,” was one outraged response in 2016 to a young Saudi woman who posted a picture of herself on social media in public without wearing a hijab.

Of course, British Muslims are not alone in worrying about where a liberal permissive society might take their children. Equally, there is concern about how the hijab is being used by Islamist organisations to position conservative Islam in the mainstream.

Quite why a branch of the British government should be willing to help them do this in a country increasingly segregated by faith and culture is puzzling. Not to Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon though: “Women should be able to observe their faith — and wear what they choose,” she says on the World Hijab Day website. Sure, they should. Is there some suggestion that they cannot? The case made by Amanda Spielman and Neena Lall is not about the right of British Muslim girls who have reached puberty to wear the hijab: it is whether it is right for the state to collude in its imposition on 4-7-year olds, long before they reach puberty, instead of giving them the freedom to choose at puberty.

Some British Muslim leaders seem to want to reduce that choice. The Greater Council of Mosques in Greater Manchester insist that the hijab becomes a “religious obligation” at puberty and parents who put it on their pre-pubescent daughters “do so to accustom them to wear it in later life”. Mend boss Sufyan Ismail gives the game away when he says: “Our view was that if a girl does not wear the hijab before puberty then she won’t wear it afterwards.” So much for Mend’s claim that the right to wear the hijab in schools is about religious freedom. It also suggests scant parental regard for the famously quoted Koranic verse that there should be no compulsion in religion.

To Asra Nomani, co-founder of the US-based Muslim Reform Movement, the likes of Sturgeon and the Foreign Office “stand on the wrong side of a lethal war of ideas that sexually objectifies women as vessels for honour and temptation, absolving men of personal responsibility. This purity culture covers, segregates, subordinates, silences, jails, and kills women and girls around the world.”

Likewise the American author Yasmine Mohammed, who says she was beaten as a child for not memorising the Koran and was forced to wear a niqab: “The absurdity of #feminists in the West embracing modesty culture while their disempowered sisters in the #Muslim world risk arrest, imprisonment, and worse to free themselves from the #hijab would be comical if it wasn’t so tragic.”

The way that Mend wreaths its hijab campaign in the language of inalienable civil and religious rights isn’t a joke either — but it may fool many ordinary Muslims.

Arguing that a ban on the hijab at primary school would be a breach of the Equality Act 2010, Mend says: “One must ask whether Jewish boys wearing a kippah, or Sikh boys wearing a topknot or a turban, could be considered sexualised too, and whether they will be asked similar questions?” Must one? There is no equivalence. How could a kippah, a topknot or a turban be considered remotely sexualising for boys? None are intended to guard male modesty.

Mend flatly asserts that the right to wear religious clothes “is protected by the Human Rights Act 1998, which guarantees freedom of thought, belief and religion.” A school can, however, stop a pupil from wearing an article of religious clothing if it considers this necessary to the health and safety of the child — as the Chief Inspector of Schools thinks it may be and which in the case of St Stephen’s primary school, the head teacher adjudged it was.

Mend also cites the “UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities” because signatories are required to ensure “minorities can fully exercise fully and effectively all their human rights and fundamental freedoms without any discrimination and in full equality before the law’.”

What Mend doesn’t seem to have grasped is that none of these rights are unqualified, as the Department of Education’s guidance on school uniforms for governors, teachers and local authorities makes clear: “Pupils have the right to manifest a religion or belief but not necessarily at all times, places or in a particular manner.”

There are now some 511 schools across 43 local authority areas with 50 per cent or more pupils from Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic backgrounds. The Chief Inspector is concerned that some of these schools are in areas beset by community tensions. The DfE guidance says that “where a school has good reason for restricting an individual’s freedoms, for example, the promotion of cohesion and good order in the school, or genuine health and safety or security considerations, the restriction of an individual’s rights to manifest their religion or belief may be justified”.

In other words, the school must balance the rights of individual pupils against the best interests of the wider community — a consideration that was absent from the campaign directed by Mend and some of its “strategic partners” at the head teacher of Britain’s best performing primary school.

Neena Lall is a public servant who has devoted her professional life to enhancing the life chances of some of the most marginalised children in Britain: 70 per cent of her 800 children at St Stephen’s primary school in Newham, east London, are Muslim, some from very underprivileged backgrounds, many born to parents whose education and grasp of English is limited. What turned this Muslim community against the school that had done so much for its disadvantaged children is partly a consequence of years of being conditioned to believe the British state is intrinsically Islamophobic.

In January the Sunday Times reported that Lall had banned the hijab and fasting to help her Muslim pupils integrate into modern British society. It quoted her saying that when asked to raise their hands if they thought they were British “very few children” did. The report said St Stephen’s had “called on the government to take a firm stand on hijabs and fasting”.

Lall insists — and those present confirm — that she commented on integration quite separately from her ban on hijab and fasting. However, the way a video of her interview was edited linked them seamlessly. “They are not my words,” she says.

An online volcano erupted. There was fury at the implication that the hijab was incompatible with being British. The embers were still smouldering from comments two months earlier by the Chief Inspector of Schools that the hijab might sexualise young children. Hafsah Dabiri, a presenter with the Islam Channel, popular with British Muslims, weighed in with an intemperate and near hysterical petition #Leaveourhijab: “We cannot and will not stand for this . . . to Neena Lall, we say Leave our Hijab! . . . It’s not a request or a plea, it’s demand.” With its half-hourly mantra “voice for the voiceless”, the channel has done much to embed a victim mentality into British Muslims.

Dabiri was joined by Mend, which issued this statement: “Mend is extremely concerned with these developments and has been in touch with both the school and Muslim parents.” It signed off with all the portentousness of a 10 Downing Street bulletin during a national crisis: “We will be issuing an update on the situation shortly.”

Mend resurrected Spielman’s previous concerns about the hijab, now accusing her of having caused “grave distress throughout British Muslim communities” with “potentially . . . severe repercussions impacting the rights and wellbeing of Muslim children and parents”. Meetings were held in the nearby Plashet Grove mosque with the young imam, Abdul Wahab. Meanwhile, Mend volunteers were on the ground “working with the parents” angry at the ban. Why so much anger with a school prized as a community crown jewel and the ban introduced just fourth months earlier with barely a peep?

A statement was signed by ten Newham councillors led by two pro-Mend brothers, one of whom was a trustee of the mosque. It accused Lall of having “unilaterally intervene(d) in matters of faith without the full consultation of parents”. Really?

School sources say reception class parents whose children were due to start in September 2017 were informed the previous June, three months before the ban was due to come into force. Formal notices were also sent to Key Stage 1 parents with parent governors instructed to deal with any questions. The father of one six-year-old girl was the only one to object. He met with the school, accompanied by Mend’s “Group Coordinator” for Newham, Tahir Talati. It was explained the ban was being introduced not on religious grounds but for the health, safety and welfare of the youngest children.

As for the fasting ban because some children had been observed close to fainting, the Muslim chair of governors, Arif Qawi, says he consulted with a total of six imams over three separate meetings. Aside from a handful of objecting parents, some parents were conflicted between their obligations as Muslims and the welfare of the children. Qawi says a few told him they were grateful for having the decision taken out of their hands.

When the school returned in September 2017, every class was reminded of the hijab ban at parents’ meetings. Lall also introduced an “open house” Q&A session for each year group with an invitation to come to the school to talk about anything they wanted. Few parents are said to have taken up the offer. As Ofsted reported: “The decision to remove the hijab from the Key Stage 1 uniform was . . . implemented with little fuss in September 2017 following careful consideration by the governors.”

So far, so passive. Four months on and parents were said to be up in arms. The Newham councillors said the hijab and fasting bans had “understandably aroused great anger and concern amongst parents and the community” and “clearly divided” the school “from the very community they look to serve”.

What led to this “community” volte-face? The proximate cause was the Sunday Times report eliding the bans with British values. But for some, there was also fat to pour onto the fire.

On December 7, Imam Abdul Wahab wrote a high-handed letter to parents. Wahab ran a two-hour after-school madrassa attended by many of the children five days a week. This clashed with a school trip to an outdoor educational centre in Essex which included the kind of activities that kids love. Wahab warned parents that if their children went on the trip they would “most likely lose their position in the madrassa” because it was “absolutely crucial to provide one’s child/children with an Islamic education” which was “an obligation”. Fearful of expulsion from the madrassa, staff reported some children as “visibly upset and distraught” when told by their parents they couldn’t go.

Both Lall and her chair of governors, Arif Qawi, were furious at what they saw as Wahab’s attempt to interfere with the school curriculum broadening the children’s horizons. In her response to Wahab, Lall explained that these school trips helped to produce “marked improvement in academic results” and “significant improvement in confidence and independent skills”. She reminded the imam that “primary school education in this country is required by law, whereas the religious classes are a matter of choice.”

She copied in Qawi. Thinking it was only a draft, he replied to Lall, not realising his reply was being copied to Wahab too:  “Not strong enough . . . crucify the unholy bastard . . . I know neither of the authorities (DfE or Newham Council) have the balls to do the right thing. However . . . I will put an end to this disgusting Mullah menace permanently . . . the children must be protected against these religious imposters at all costs. If the community is too scared and weak, I’ll take the flak.”

An angry Wahab called in Mend, who complained to Newham Council, who contacted the school. Qawi’s own life has been a rich tapestry: he is well-versed in Islamic jurisprudence from his time at Islamic schools in Saudi Arabia, followed by Harrow, and Sandhurst as a military cadet sent by the Pakistan army. He was a Tank Commander in the first Gulf War, and then had a successful career in business. He is also a fluent Arab speaker.

During one of his discussions with imams on the fasting ban, Qawi says an imam “pulled out his latest fancy Apple iPhone” and quoted from a religious text in an attempt to show that fasting was compulsory. Qawi recognised the quote as coming from a Hadith (the reported words of the Prophet) rather than the Koran. “I said, ‘Sorry, that is NOT the Koran. It’s 238 years after the Prophet’s death.’ I said, ‘Son, I’ve forgotten more than you’ll ever know’.”

While Neena Lall sometimes tired of Qawi’s aversion to political correctness, she found him to be a singularly selfless chair of governors despite it being an unpaid role. Of all his predecessors, she regarded Qawi as being by far the most committed. Qawi’s apology to Wahab three days before Christmas was also contrite: “Dear Wahab, I am extremely sorry for using the language I used . . . I should not have insulted you in the manner I did.” He signed off saying he hoped this would “draw a line under the matter”.

It did not. When the hijab row erupted three weeks later, Newham Council dispatched Shaykh Yunus Dudhwala, Head of Chaplaincy and Bereavement Services at St Barts NHS Trust, to try to broker a peace.

There was talk of Qawi’s email calling Wahab an “unholy bastard” being released to the “community” with the potential to inflame relations with the school beyond repair. Dudhwala suggested one way of averting this might be for Qawi to resign and the hijab ban lifted. I am told that he presented this idea thus: “These things will help if I can go back to the community and say these things are on the table.”

Never in her entire professional life had Neena Lall experienced anything like the inferno of tension, anger and hatred now being unleashed. So fearful was her senior leadership team of the damage the email might cause that they suggested Qawi should be sacrificed. Shaykh Dudhwala was about to attend another meeting at Imam Wahab’s mosque along with Mend and some 150 parents.

School sources say Lall told Dudhwala that before making any final decisions, she needed to hear directly from parents. Because she had called a parents’ meeting she asked Dudhwala to see if he could buy her more time. He apparently has no recollection of this.

At the mosque the parents were said to be “very, very angry”. By now a petition started by the Islam Channel presenter/activist Hafsah Dabiri had got almost 20,000 signatures. Any hopes Lall may have entertained of a 92-hour breathing space were dashed that evening. At 07:59 the following morning Mend tweeted victory:

Announcement: The Chair of Governors at St Stephen’s Primary School has resigned. This follows meetings between the school and parents acting on Mend’s advice. This is an important step towards resolving concerns about structural #Islamophobia Further updates to come. #HijabBan

Dabiri trilled:

The ban has been lifted and Arif Qawi has resigned!! Guyssssssss! We did it!!! Your support, shares and signatures had a HUGE impact combined with the work of the parents, community leaders and Mend!!! Tell EVERYONE, that today, we protected religious expression!

This was news to Qawi, who had neither resigned nor yet been asked to. But Lall had been boxed into a corner. And so she submitted. A school statement followed the Mend victory tweet: “Having spoken to our school community, we now have a deeper understanding of the matter and have decided to reverse our position with immediate effect.” In fact, Lall had yet to speak to the “school community.”

Not that submission bought Lall much relief. No sooner had the school announced its capitulation than word reached them that Qawi’s offending email to Imam Wahab was going to be released anyway. Which is what happened, despite Shaykh Dudhwala having argued against this. So much for Dudhwala’s hope that capitulation by the school on all fronts might avert this escalation.

Lall now felt she had no choice but to ask Qawi for his resignation — and with immediate effect, before the email was published so as not to be forced into reacting to it. She feared this final humiliation over the email might cost her job — as well it might have. “Limited” and “ineffective . . . emotional care and public support for school staff” had come from Newham Council, says Ofsted.

Qawi immediately acceded to Lall’s request with customary grace: “I wish the school continued success and am truly sorry that my actions have caused any harm to the reputation of the fantastic school.”

“Tell EVERYONE, that today, we protected religious expression!” trumpeted Hafsah Dabiri. “We represent what British values mean . . .”

Do they? They think they do because they helped galvanise the public, got a petition signed by 20,000 people, and acted within the law. But using the trappings of British values to impose a religious diktat on a state secular school concerning 4-7-year-old children while others bombarded the school leadership with hate mail and likened them to Nazis, was distinctly un-British. That’s not tolerance or pluralism. That’s mob rule.

A spoof video even parodied Lall, her staff and Arif Qawi as the twin abominations of the last century — her as a raging psychotic Adolf Hitler in his bunker with her leadership team as his Nazi admirers, and Qawi as Joseph Stalin.
Huge damage has been inflicted on the relationship between the school and the “community” — partly by the “community’s” self-appointed representatives Mend. They may not have sent nasty emails to the school, leaked the Qawi email or been responsible for the offensive video. Rather, what Mend do is help to keep Muslims angry. That seems to be just fine with Mend’s boss Sufyan Ismail, who has boasted that the “wrath” Mend helped generate over the hijab ban “turned it around . . . the sheer pressure on the ground was so significant”. And for what? Now that the hijab ban has been lifted, just one Muslim girl out of some 150 4-7-year olds has put her hijab back on — the same child whose father complained about the ban the previous July.

As Ofsted Chief Inspector Amanda Spielman says: “It is a matter of deep regret that this outstanding school has been subject to a campaign of abuse by some elements within the community.”

Mend thinks Spielman’s words will come back to haunt her because a recording of the meeting Lall held with the parents shows her conceding the hijab ban was “a huge error in judgment” and apologising for not having “communicated with you more”. That simply underscores how devastating a religiously inspired campaign can become. The truth is Lall felt she had to say that. Mend also complains that Ofsted should have consulted the Muslim Council of Britain and its affiliate — the Association of Muslims Schools UK before deciding to inquire into why the hijab is increasingly being worn by small children.

But why should these organisations have been consulted? Both still refuse to accept the findings of two independent inquiries into the 2014 attempt to Islamise the curriculum and the ethos of secular state schools in the Trojan Horse affair in Birmingham. Ofsted put five schools with 4,000 children into special measures following these inquiries. The MCB has demanded multiple concessions for Muslim pupils in state schools. In a 2007 MCB publication, “Meeting the needs of Muslim pupils in state schools”, the word “should” was used over more than 90 times. Its demands included the following:

• permitting girls to wear full-length loose school skirts or loose trousers, long sleeved shirts, and headscarves to cover the hair.
• permitting girls to wear tracksuits and headscarves for sport.
• permitting boys to grow beards.
• providing single-gender swimming classes.
• providing halal food.
• providing time and space for obligatory ablutions and prayer.
• adapting school life to the obligatory fast of Ramadan
• avoiding sex and relationship education (SRE) during Ramadan.
• making SRE consistent with Islamic teaching which considers girlfriend/boyfriend as well as homosexual relationships to be unacceptable.
• marking Eid holidays as authorised absences.
• allowing parental withdrawal of children from dance lessons on grounds of religious conscience.
• accepting the Muslim refusal to shake hands with members of the opposite sex.
• offering Arabic as an option in primary and secondary schools.
• buying relevant and authentic books on Islamic heritage and civilisation for the school library and for class use.
• ensuring that pupils in schools where there are no Muslims nonetheless learn about Islam.
• not encouraging Muslim pupils to produce three-dimensional imagery of humans.
• not serving alcohol at social events and avoiding other activities that might make Muslims feel excluded.

British schools have gone out of their way to accommodate the religious demands of Muslim parents. Trousers and jogging bottoms have replaced skirts and gym shorts; baggy trousers and long shirts in the form of a shalwar kameez now come in school colours, and so on.

The Pakistani-born journalist and commentator Khadija Khan says that appeasing Islamists “is a bottomless pit”, a point the late Professor Zaki Badawi, head of the Muslim College, London, made to me shortly before he died in 2006: “You have to understand, a proselytising religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavours to expand in Britain.”

And it’s true that for Islamists, religious identity trumps all other identities. This presents a significant challenge for any kind of meaningful integration because the non-Muslim majority of Britain is becoming more secular while the Muslim population — especially young Muslims — is becoming much more religious. The 2011 census foretells the religious realignment under way in Britain since 2001: while the proportion of Christians fell from 70 per cent to 59 per cent, and those holding no religion grew from 17 per cent to 26 per cent, those identifying themselves as Muslim leapt by 1.2 million, a 72 per cent increase, far higher than for any other faith group. That divide will be even deeper now — and Islamists know it. As Cage tweeted recently, “ultimately the demographic changes cannot be reversed. This will have a significant impact on govt. policies both foreign and domestic.”

Where communities live separately, with less interaction between people from different backgrounds, mistrust, anxiety and prejudice grow, whereas the opposite is true with meaningful mixing. And it’s here where British values do have an impact, however much Islamists and the pro-Islamist Left, with their shared disdain for the West, try to deride them. Resilience, meaningful social integration and shared common values — respect for the rule of law, democracy, equality and tolerance — are inhibitors of division, hate and extremism.

To what end, then, do some politicians seem to prefer to engage with illiberal Islamist organisations like Mend than with progressive Muslims such as the newly-appointed Commissioner for Counter-Extremism, Sara Khan, who has run a charity that both challenges extremism and promotes gender equality?

When the government announced Khan’s appointment in January, Mend, Cage, MCB and other Islamist organisations launched a blogging tirade against her (Mend four in one week); the sour nihilism of her political detractors was on full display, chief among them Labour MPs Naz Shah and Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, the former Conservative Communities Minister Baroness Warsi, and the Liberal Democrat equalities spokeswoman Baroness Hussein-Ece — all effectively branding Khan a “government stooge”. They variously condemned her appointment as “very ill-advised”, “alarming”, “damaging to relations between Muslims and government”, “McCarthyite”.

Surely what is “ill-advised” is to lend support to organisations like Mend because it provides them with the validation its boss Sufyan Ismail has sought for Mend from politicians and civic society as the authentic representatives of British Muslims and what they broadly define as “normative Islam”.

One of Mend’s “strategic partners”,    an organisation called 5 Pillars, has set out what for them “Normative Islam” actually represents. In so doing they have targeted those they regard as the biggest obstacle to achieving this: not the government but their fellow Muslims whom they disparage as “reformers”, most especially Muslims like Sara Khan. A slick 5 Pillars video opens by saying that in “the last 16 years ‘Muslim Reformers’ have been supported by Western governments”. That would include their own government by the way — the British government.

With a picture of Khan next to the Prime Minister, she and other “reformers” are accused of:

• Delegitimising the concept of a caliphate (over a map shading in southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa).
• Erasing the concept of physical jihad (over pictures of a Saladin-like figure urging his army onwards — and into battle).
• Invalidating the Islamic penal code (like the death penalty for adultery).
• Downplaying the Ummah (the global Muslim community) in favour of national identity (over a Union flag).

What this suggests is that to 5 Pillars the Ummah should be more important to British Muslims than their own nation state.

To pro-Mend clerics like Abu Eesa Niamatullah, a close friend of Sufyan Ismail from their days at Manchester University, liberal-minded Muslims like Khan are “the biggest danger within our community . . . closer to kufr (unbelievers) than Iman” (belief) because they want to “hijack Islam” to “dilute Islamic religious practice” in order to create a “new Western Islam” that will be in line with those “who want Islam to be washed away”.

While mainstream Britain sees Muslims like Sara Khan as “progressive”, Niamatullah sees them as “regressive . . . if this is progression then we need the Stone Age, definitely. The Stone Age is definitely better for our deen [creed] and our dunya [world] . . . we are more opposed to these people than ever.” Niamatullah calls them “brown sahibs . . . the equivalent of what Malcolm X called ‘house negroes’” who served in their master’s  house during slavery.

Mend’s south-west regional organiser, Sahar Al Faifi, a geneticist, tweets: “I decided to be politically correct and instead of calling Sara Khan a coconut I will call her an Oreo (i.e. a dark biscuit with a white filling).” So much for an organisation that so proudly proclaims its anti-hate credentials. Indeed, it is Muslims like Al Faifi and Niamatullah who are the real Islamophobes.

We have reached a crossroads over religious fundamentalism, hardliners, extremism, whichever word you prefer. Mend and some of their supporters in Parliament and on the Left seem to delight in pointing out that because the government has failed to come up with a legal definition for “extremism” it doesn’t really exist and therefore doesn’t need to be countered by promoting something equally vague as “British values”. Those invoking David Cameron’s call for “muscular liberalism” as an antidote to extremism are greeted with eye-rolling despair at the rampant “structural Islamophobia” which they have convinced themselves grips this country.

Typical is Mend’s recent Manchester group co-ordinator, Dr Siema Iqbal. When she is not treating patients or being a “mum” (her phrase) to her two boys, she blogs, tweets and expostulates almost daily. “Currently,” she writes “we have a commission to counter something we haven’t defined and don’t even know needs countering yet. Yes, it really is that bizarre.”

Actually it isn’t. Most people recognise intolerance and fundamentalism when they see it and it’s been on display in the reaction to Amanda Spielman and Neena Lall. Was it acceptable for them to be so viscerally trolled after Mend, the mosques around Manchester, the imam in Newham, Newham councillors, and others raised the temperature? The answer is clearly no. Is it acceptable that the state should always adapt to the demands of a vocal politicised religious lobby, rather than the other way around, with no consideration of the offence that might be caused to others if they’re browbeaten into complying with their demands? Again no.

After many years of hand-wringing by those fearful of causing offence lest they be labelled “Islamophobe”, a “neocon”, a “Zionist”, “house Muslim”, “native informant”, or any other epithet signifying “bad” people, the government seems to have concluded that enough really is enough. Step by step, the counter-extremism strategy is constructing a tangible, values-driven infrastructure: counter-extremism co-ordinators, including Muslims who understand the dangers to the stability and cohesion of this country, are being appointed to local authorities; the Home Office programme called “Building a Stronger Britain Together” now has a network of 124 organisations across the country — again, many run by Muslims — delivering small-scale community projects to build resilience into communities vulnerable to radicalisation from Islamist extremists and the far Right.

This programme is being rolled out quietly, sometimes too quietly for fear of provoking activist sensibilities. But rolling out it is, whether Mend and its “strategic partners” like Cage, the MCB, 5 Pillars and the rest of them like it or not.

Amanda Spielman is right to emphasise that schools shouldn’t assume that the “most conservative voices” of a particular faith group speak for everyone; nor should they be afraid to “call out” practices they believe could negatively affect young people.

 The Chief Inspector of Schools has shown she is unafraid. Neena Lall was knocked down but she has picked herself up. An Ofsted inspection found her leadership of St Stephen’s school is “effective” and that she and her team “continue to run an outstanding school.” Inspectors report that the “bullying and harassment . . . has been co-ordinated by some people outside the school community”. Ofsted has put a muscular arm around Lall with a clear message to any faith group hoping to browbeat a school into submission: “Hands off our headteachers.”

She is not alone. At only  38, Sara Khan is already battled-hardened from years of vicious trolling and has the confidence and conviction to expose the contradictions in anger-stoking, name-calling, Islamophobia-accusing campaigns. Khan has been massively let down by Labour: Diane Abbott criticised her appointment with no explanation beyond parroting the “widespread” (largely Islamist) “perception” that she is not trusted because she supports the government’s Prevent programme. Others will see a feisty, focused, principled woman prepared to confront those determined to force their narrow, intolerant and fundamentalist view on this country.

Other Muslim women have also been speaking out. Indeed, the challenge to religious fundamentalism is being led mainly by Muslim women. More are less concerned now with being trolled as “bad Muslims”, “house servants”, “coconuts” and all the other racist barbs hurled at them by organisations that claim piety and nobility and to be representative of British Islam but are not.

All of these women — Spielman and Khan included — have lost their fear. And this is the game-changer in the ceaseless battle for the soul of British Islam. “You don’t scare us any more,” they are saying. It’s time more politicians and others in public life manned up — and followed their example.

The post The battle for British Muslims’ integration appeared first on Standpoint.

And the solution? “As I said here two weeks ago, there has been far too much tolerance of extremism in our country over many years. And that means extremism of any kind, including Islamophobia.”

On a day when a non-Muslim attempted to mow down Muslims only to then boast about it, it’s understandable that Mrs May would wish to reassure Muslims of her sincerity about protecting them when they so clearly believe that Islamophobia here is rampant — a perception not helped by parts of the press.

But have our institutions really been too tolerant of Islamophobia? No one, surely, could argue this or any other government has been soft about prosecuting people intent on murdering Muslims or blowing up mosques, or abusing them verbally or physically. The Muslim-hating organisation National Action has been banned, and, uniquely in respect of hate crimes, the law has also been changed in favour of the victim’s perception. The police must now record any incident as a hate crime if it is “perceived, by the victim or any other person” to be motivated by racial or religious prejudice. So if a victim believes hatred of Islam rather than anything else was the reason for the abuse, Islamophobia is how the police record it. When it comes to the government’s anti-extremism programme Prevent, the fact that almost a third of referrals now relate to far-Right extremism also suggests there is no institutional tolerance of Islamophobia.

There is, however, plenty of evidence of institutional timidity when it comes to dealing with Islamist extremism, even though its violent manifestation poses a much greater threat to the security and cohesion of this country than far-Right extremism. The reality is that Prevent only came into existence because of the threat posed by Islamist extremism.

Our institutional timidity at being candid about the main cause of violent Islamist extremism begins with academia. At some point in their radicalisation process, the three London Bridge cutthroats experienced empathy fadeout. Dead zones in the anterior insular cortex replaced the normal range of human emotions associated with fellow feeling and compassion. Gone, too, was their fear of pain from the police bullets they knew would be fired into them. They became zombies.

Since the 7/7 bombings, several academics have told us that this zombie psychosis is induced by one or any combination of the following: relative deprivation, alienation, feelings of humiliation, racism, mental illness and especially foreign policy. Glossy academic papers with footnotes and appendices seem to have concluded that Islamist terrorism is the only form of terrorism that has little to do with ideology.

Blaming “radical religious ideology” does “not stand up to scholarly scrutiny” asserts the poster boy for this assessment, Arun Kundnani, a British-born professor of terrorism and media studies in New York. “A growing body of academic work holds this position to be fundamentally flawed.”

No-one claims that ideology alone drives people to violence. But Kundnani seems to want to erase it altogether. He has been described by a government adviser as an “imbecile” who writes “intellectually lazy, retarded, tribal anti-establishment nonsense” and by the Times columnist David Aaronovitch as an “idiot”. Perhaps they have a point. Even Jeremy Corbyn acknowledged during the election campaign there was such a thing as “extremist ideology”.

What of Kundnani’s solution to violent extremism? He thinks non-violent extremists should have more of a platform: “Rather than a broad policy that seeks to criminalise or restrict extremist opinions . . . the best way of preventing terrorist violence is to widen the range of opinions that can be freely expressed, not restrict it.”

One reason for the UK armed forces having only half the number of Muslims as British jihadists who went to fight in Iraq and Syria, or were stopped from going there, is because extremists like Omar Bakri, Anjem Choudhary and some Muslim Brotherhood activists could preach whatever they wanted to here for over a decade.

Today, the “wide range of opinions” that Professor Kundnani wants to be “freely expressed” are espoused by a broad coalition of Salafi-Islamist organisations who do not incite violence. Indeed, some have expressed abhorrence at the recent attacks. They have, however, given a platform to and promoted preachers who are on record as having expressed non-violent but extreme views. Here’s a sample from nine preachers hosted by seven of Britain’s most influential Salafist-Islamist organisations:

On woman (“the nature of the woman is to follow her husband”); gay rights (a “disease”); Jews (“prophet killers”); human rights (“direct opposition to what Allah has revealed”); progressive Muslims (“brown sahibs . . . they’re regressive”); Sharia (“Allah commanded us to make his law superior to any other law”); citizenship (“your primary nation is the nation of Islam”); conspiracy theories (“attacks in the western world? . . . our enemies love it . . . an excuse to attack Islam”); Islamic punishments (“they’re a huge deterrent”); blasphemy (“anyone who insults the Prophet in a way which is extremely derogatory, the penalty is death”); Israel (“I truly respect, those brothers who are resistance fighters making jihad”); helping the police (“a Muslim is a brother to another Muslim . . . he does not hand him over to be imprisoned by anyone”).

The company you keep says a lot about you — and it also says something about the people who follow you. Between them, these seven organisations have Facebook followings of 824,000. One of the preachers — who has made venomous anti-Semitic remarks — has more than one million followers.

None of the above opinions are banned by law. But because it is so blindingly obvious that the language of violent extremists echoes some of these non-violent but extreme and intolerant ideas, for the first time in this country’s recent history, a British government has felt compelled to devise a formal policy to counter them.

How do we know that violent extremists make use of non- violent extreme ideas? How’s this for starters: “This is for Allah,” the London Bridge attackers yelled as they stabbed random victims. The fact that they may only have read an “idiot’s guide to Islam” is supremely irrelevant. As Hannah Stuart, joint head the Security and Extremism Unit at Policy Exchange, has explained, conflating theology with ideology completely misunderstands the issue. Just because young jihadists are ignorant of one “ology” (theology) doesn’t mean they aren’t driven by the other “ology” (ideology) — the simple notion that the West hates Islam and is determined to undermine the global Muslim umma, which is entitled to retaliate. That’s why they see themselves so perversely as “the truest” of Muslims acting on behalf of their co-religionists. What’s that but ideology?

We confronted this ideology in Afghanistan in 2001 with American B-52 bombers and special forces followed by the deaths of a lot of very brave British men and women to prevent al-Qaeda from recovering its foothold there—only for IS to supersede them, to say nothing of the vastly greater and continuing death toll of Afghan security forces and civilians.

But it is an ideology that here at home, by and large, our elected representatives, much of academia, leaders of public institutions, the churches and pockets of the BBC have been slow to square up to in open debate. Why, one might ask, when these non-violent ideas violate our own mores, and their violent manifestation is so pernicious, vicious and backward?

Our reluctance to confront the regressive culture and ideas that underpin violent extremism has been apparent since the anti-Salman Rushdie rallies in 1989. On 28 May that year more than 70 British Muslims were arrested as a 20,000-strong mob descended on Parliament. They waved banners and shouted slogans like “Rushdie must die” with effigies of the writer hanging from a gallows. We looked on in horror as we realised then that some migrants to this country had brought with them a lot more than just their possessions: a total lack of understanding about how dissent was ultimately the only guarantor of religious freedom, including theirs, but also that there were limits.

Or were there? The mob only moved on after the police capitulated by agreeing to release those arrested. A newly-elected Labour MP, Keith Vaz, demanded Rushdie and his publisher, Viking Penguin, withdraw The Satanic Verses from circulation in Britain. Nearly 30 years later, we remain, says the Prime Minister, “far too tolerant” of those versions of Islam which are incompatible with a liberal 21st-century democracy.

Since then, the Muslim population has more than quadrupled, to over 3 million, so it is even more important that we understand this ideology for what it is. The security services are currently wrestling with 500 investigations into 3,000 individuals. A further 20,000 are said to have been “subjects of interest”. “It is time to say enough is enough,” Mrs May said in response to the London Bridge attacks, the third act of mass murder here by Islamist terrorists in as many months. What exactly did she mean? “We’re tired of the hand-wringing,” a prime ministerial aide explained to me, tired of agonising over whether plain speaking about the causes and solutions to Islamist terrorism will cause cultural and religious offence.

After all that has happened, there remains both a naivety and queasiness about speaking frankly in this country. Why, when violent Islamist extremism has so much in common with the knuckle-brained far-right ideology of the traditional shaven-haired sort — intolerance, racism, boot boy violence? Sara Khan, the courageous British Muslim director of the counter-extremism organisation Inspire, explains why. “We have lacked the confidence to challenge” the Salafi-Islamist organisations promoting these extremist ideas, she says, even though we have never lacked the confidence to tackle the traditional far-Right. What accounts for this double standard seems pretty clear: anxiety about being accused of Islamophobia — of being branded a “bad” person even though, if you are gay or Jewish or a woman, fear of much of Islamist ideology is entirely rational. As a result, the Islamic far-Right has thrived.

That’s why Mrs May said that “stamping out” extremism would “require some difficult and often embarrassing conversations”. We need to become “far more robust in identifying it . . . across the public sector and across society,” especially NGOs, churches, sections of the media and politicians.

One of those difficult conversations is reaching agreement on what exactly extremism is. The government defines it as “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. Extremism also includes calls for the death of members of the armed forces.”

Opponents of the government’s counter-extremism strategy seem to relish pointing out that those values are not unique to Britain and also to keep tagging them as “British” is “hierarchal”. Typical is the comment from the Franco-British academic and journalist Myriam François-Cerrah: the term “British values”, she says, smacks of a “very privileged white male in Whitehall dictating to brown people in Birmingham what it means to be British and that is bound up in power”. Jeremy Corbyn has also challenged “the notion that human rights is somehow or other something based on Romano-Christian law based on Europe rather than the rest of the world.”

It’s true, of course, that “British values” as defined are essentially Western and enlightened values, but Western civilisation is itself based on Christianity, which enshrines individualism and freedom. And these values are surely unique to Britain in at least one respect: we have shown ourselves to be far more tolerant of cultural, race and religious difference than many other Western countries who would also lay claim to them.

In her statement trying to reassure Muslims of government protection following the van attack, Mrs May again spoke about values — but this time conspicuously left off the “British” tag.

The alternative to defining our values as especially British is a diffuse mush with nothing particularly special to defend at all, as former prison governor Ian Acheson found last year in his review for the Justice Department of Islamist extremism within the prison service. Like the rest of the public sector, prisons are now under a legal obligation to promote British values. Acheson says that when he raised this with senior prison management, “Some of them looked at me with disdain. ‘Perhaps we’d call them European values,’ said one.”

This kind of institutional timidity also explains why in 2006 a report found that only a third of teachers felt confident teaching in a multi-cultural school. “Am I offending anybody because of my own ignorance?” was the prevailing sentiment of the staff. We have become almost crippled by our lack of confidence in giving a positive account ourselves which is why under David Cameron, the government urged us to start fighting “the battle of ideas”. We have yet to find the courage or the confidence to wage it.

We could start by ending double standards. There was outrage at the government’s decision to seek a pact with the Democratic Unionist Party because of its opposition to gay rights and abortion. A petition against the pact attracted almost half a million signatures in 24 hours. Yet the DUP’s social conservatism is mild compared to that advocated by preachers promoted by many Islamist groups in Britain. Politicians have sometimes shared platforms with Islamist homophobes — like the Conservative peer Baroness Warsi, who appeared with two rampant Islamist homophobes at a 2015 fundraising dinner for an Islamist activist organisation. One speaker had previously referred to homosexuality as a “perversion”; the other had said, “Kill the homosexual . . . if you ridicule, you curse Allah and his Messenger, the punishment for that is death.”

Enough, too, of double standards over calling terrorism for what it is. When jihadists mow down British civilians on London Bridge, and then go on a wild stabbing spree, the BBC reports it as a “terror attack” plain and simple; when a Palestinian mows down Israeli civilians in Jerusalem, it’s described as “what police call a terror attack”.

What about the inflammatory half-truths perpetuated by these Salafi-Islamist organisations about the victimhood of Muslims at the hands of non-Muslims? They also help to radicalise Muslims because they help keep them angry.

For well over a decade now, we have been told that Britain has developed an irrational hatred of Islam to the point of being “institutionalised”. It’s true that after Islamist terror attacks, there are completely unacceptable spikes in anti-Islam related incidents, like the recent oxymoronically named “UK Against Hate” march in Manchester organised by ex EDL leader Tommy Robinson where a pig’s head was provocatively eaten. Some protestors shouted “Our streets” and “You’re not English anymore.”

But it’s also true that Pakistani and Bangladeshi youngsters now have entrance rates to Russell Group universities as high as the white British, despite the former’s (generally) poorer and culturally separate backgrounds. Statistics quoted by some Islamist organisations about the scale of Islamophobia seem alarmist and there is a real danger from playing politics with the fears of ordinary Muslims. Britain is an open society, and if we blindly accept such claims without rigorous scrutiny the bleak vista they promote could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If young Muslims keep being told their own country hates them, they will become even more inward-looking, they won’t apply for jobs and Britain will become even more divided than it already is.

As London Mayor, Boris Johnson was right to round on the Salafi-Islamist lobby group Cage for “crying Islamophobia” instead of directing their “wrath . . . on people who go out to join groups that throw gays off cliffs, that behead people who don’t subscribe to their version of Islam, that glorify in the execution of innocent journalists and aid workers”.

But no. While organisations like Cage have condemned the recent terror attacks, they’ve kept their collective spotlight trained tightly on Islamophobia because it is such powerful ammunition for their priority target: discrediting the government’s counter-radicalisation programme, Prevent, as a state spying operation against Muslims.

Prevent is aimed at stopping those who are vulnerable to radicalisation from being drawn into terrorism. Ever since it was introduced more than a decade ago, a broad swath of Islamist organisations have campaigned to get Prevent and every other single piece of terrorist legislation scrapped. What kind of message does that send?

The public sector is now under a statutory duty to “have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. This has led to some Muslim schoolchildren being referred to special local authority panels for assessment as to whether they are at risk of being radicalised. If so, they are offered counselling with Home Office-appointed mentors under another programme called Channel. Some mentors have themselves been extremists.

The 2015 Act has been a gift to the anti-Prevent alliance. Before it was passed, Prevent was given the standard “racist-Islamophobic” treatment. Now that the public sector has a legal duty to be alert for signs of radicalisation (for which staff get training), it has become a “state snooping campaign” against Muslims. So there is a political purpose to the relentless focus of these Salafi-Islamist organisations on Islamophobia. It gives credence to their main charge against Prevent — that institutionalised Islamophobia has led to a state-sponsored spying programme, inspired by “Zionists” and “neo-cons”.

If that is true, why are almost one third of Prevent referrals to the Channel radicalisation programme being directed at non-Muslims — namely the traditional far Right? There’s no evidence that Prevent has ever been intended as a spying programme against Muslims. Indeed, government guidance states: “The Prevent programme must not involve any covert activity against people or communities.” Prevent is a safeguarding programme, as the Muslim parents of those children who have been talked out of wanting to go to Iraq and Syria would agree.

Inevitably, under Prevent there have been some clumsy referrals, with conservative Islamic practices mistaken for possible signs of radicalisation. But it’s also true that some have turned out not to be quite as clumsy as Prevent’s opponents have willed them to be. And half of all far-Right referrals are also under 18.

Recent comments by Home Secretary Amber Rudd have also been wilfully misconstrued. Responding to criticism on BBC Question Time that cuts to police numbers had led to a reduction in low-level intelligence, she replied: “We get the intelligence much more from the Prevent strategy, which engages with local community groups, not through the police.”

A Cage commentator has presented this as government confirmation of their state spying charge: “The current Home Secretary has now finally admitted Prevent is essentially an intelligence gathering exercise, used to spy on the Muslim community.” What Ms Rudd actually meant was that the intelligence was coming from those civic-minded Muslims who were engaging with Prevent.

So enough of the “state spying” smear, and enough too of the myth that this smear is designed to perpetuate: that terrorist outrages like Manchester and London have nothing to do with Islam. We are forever told there is nothing in Islam to justify this or that atrocity, and it is perfectly true there is nothing within classical Sunni Islamic jurisprudence that endorses such conduct. Sceptics should read A Guide to Refuting Jihadism, written by Rashad Ali and Hannah Stuart, which debunks the claims of modern jihadists and shows that classical Islam’s rules and ethics of warfare broadly mirror the Geneva Convention.

But it is also true that there are many Islams, which is why there manifestly is a problem within Islam which, as Tony Blair has said, is a strain of Islam that is not simply the “province of a few extremists”. It “goes deeper and wider than it is comfortable for us to admit. So by and large we don’t admit it.” But it is time that we admitted how deep and wide is our state of denial — starting with Manchester’s newly- elected Mayor Andy Burnham when he, like so many non-Muslim leaders before him, parroted that the genocidal attack on children at the Ariana Grande concert had “nothing to do with Islam”. If that was true, why do the perpetrators keep coming back to the religious texts? On his WhatsApp profile, one of the London Bridge murderers, Khuram Butt, wrote: “Allah says (Quran 94:6) — Indeed, with hardship, comes ease.” When anti-terror police raided the bedsit Butt and his accomplices had used they found an English-language copy of the Koran opened at a page describing martyrdom.

However hurtful this may be to the majority of Muslims who are just as sickened by Manchester and London as the rest of us, there surely ought to be an end to the repeated denials that such atrocities have anything to do with Islam. They have everything to do with the crisis within Islam, and the more that crisis can be talked about in an open and honest way, the sooner there might be some resolution to it — an outcome not helped by the full-on moral relativism from the likes of “Thought for the Day”’s Dr Giles Fraser. He says he has a problem with people thinking “the Koran is a particularly violent book and that somehow causes some sort of violence” whereas “the Bible itself is a particularly violent book and that doesn’t create the same sort of thing.”

It’s true that the Old Testament has some terrible verses but they aren’t being used today to justify havoc and grief worldwide. There is not a network of private schools and priests, study groups, political activists and global satellite channels inculcating division and hate to the point where cells of warrior Christians are slaughtering innocent people on a near-daily basis.

Viewed through their modern ideological prism, jihadists do justify their appalling violence by reference to the Koran’s warlike verses, despite their reasoning having been challenged by classical Islamic theology and jurisprudence.

That ideological prism — from the 7/7 jihadists, to the slaughterers of Private Lee Rigby, to the Westminster jihadist Khalid Masood and the Manchester bombing — all claim foreign policy as their justification, just as Osama bin-Laden did when he spoke of the “humiliation” suffered by Muslims at the hands of the West since Sykes-Picot, the 1916 Anglo-French agreement that carved up the Ottoman empire.

But things have also moved on. It was the West that came to the rescue of Muslims in eastern Europe after the break-up of Yugoslavia; and it was the West that liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.

Foreign policy is not the root cause of the violence and nihilism now being inflicted on us. If it was, what is the reason for its daily occurrence in Arab and other Muslim countries? Anti-Western sentiment is the root cause, fuelled by lies about how the West hates Muslims and by theological interpretations of Islam that have created a divisive “them and us” worldview. After the van attack on Muslims here, it is easy think this might be true — but the vast majority of British non-Muslims will not fall into the trap set by bigotry begetting bigotry. As for poor theology, that is a challenge which lies squarely with British Muslim community leaders. But non-Muslims also have a massive stake in these leaders fashioning a version of Islam that is compatible with the mainstream majority if we are ever to have a truly shared citizenship and an end to both far Rights — Islamist and traditional.

This may take decades, yet now we seem set for another false start. In its election manifesto, the government sounded as if it was going to put real political heft into calling time on the ingrained timidity that has inhibited this country’s institutions from asserting pride and confidence in, yes, British values. They are indeed superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate.

Instead, the Conservative Party has recklessly and selfishly allowed a poisonous family quarrel over Europe to become a suicide pact — and now risks letting in a Labour leader whose entire political career has been stimulated by disdain for the West, appeasement of extremism, and who would barely understand what fighting for the revival of British values is really all about.  

The post Enough is enough of terror — but also of our self-doubt appeared first on Standpoint.

“There will be a terrorist diaspora sometime in the next two to five years like we have never seen before,” warns the FBI Director James Comey. The recent mass slaughter attacks in France and Belgium may be just the start of violence on European streets lasting years.

By 2015, UK terrorism arrests were up 35 per cent from 2010. The police are removing more than 1,000 pieces of terrorist-related content from the internet every week.

The IS menace has also provoked a growing right-wing backlash. British — or as some MPs now prefer — “universal” values of tolerance and equality are under attack from extremists “operating at a pace and scale not seen before”, says the government.

Its programme for reducing both Islamist and neo-Nazi extremism is called Prevent. Foreigners who promote extremism are stopped from entering Britain, while citizens here assessed as being vulnerable to radicalisation are offered help. Some 15 per cent of Prevent interventions now relate to the far Right but since the threat to national security remains overwhelmingly from Muslim extremists, the focus has been on them.

Since Prevent was launched in 2006, an expanding and influential network of Islamic organisations have campaigned relentlessly to have it scrapped — even though they have said they oppose IS. Leading them is Cage, the jihadist prisoner lobby group (Facebook following: 27,035, despite describing the IS cutthroat Jihadi John as having been a “beautiful young man”). Prevent is “destructive”, says Cage. “It harms communities from top to bottom.”

The version of Islam that dominates this anti-Prevent network can be summarised as Salafi-Islamist. While its activists diverge on the extent to which Islam’s religious texts should be literally interpreted (as Salafists argue), both factions harbour a visceral grievance that the West has declared war on Islam. Many oppose gender and sexual equality and support hudood — capital punishment in Islamic countries for adulterers and apostates (Muslims who leave Islam).

Their primary loyalty is to the Ummah — what they see as the global nation of Islam with its supremacist overtones. They believe that a caliphate (properly constituted as distinct from IS’s so-called caliphate) is superior to the nation state, although there is much debate about their preferred kind of caliphate. Overall, what distinguishes this politicised version of Islam (Islamism) from its more orthodox ancient tradition is that it is an ideology. Judged against the most basic of universal human rights, the Salafi-Islamist worldview is reactionary and highly regressive.

While Cage describes itself as a “human rights NGO . . .  working to empower communities impacted by the War on Terror”, its directors are silent on the right to life of Muslims stoned to death for adultery and apostasy in Islamic states — provided conviction is by “due process”. Nonetheless, Cage’s campaigns strike the highest of moral tones: “All our work is evidence-based — and aims to contribute to intellectual change.”

This is not the case. A recent “evidence-based” Cage publication accused Prevent of having “opened up” a mass spying operation on Muslims by “the entire public sector” of 500,000 public servants. Cage even claimed Muslim pupils were being singled out by teachers using Home Office guidance listing 22 radicalisation risk factors for referral to what are called Channel (de-radicalisation) panels.

The guidance is called, in deadly bureaucratic jargon, ERG22+. According to Prevent officers familiar with how ERG22+ is actually deployed, Cage’s allegation is untrue. William Baldet, Prevent co-ordinator in Leicestershire, says ERG22+ is used only by the Channel panels run by the local authority, on which sit representatives of agencies like social services.

Only then is ERG22+ used to help a Channel panel decide if suspects are a) vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism, and b) what support they could be offered, which they are free to refuse. In practice, very few do.

In other words, ERG22+ is used discreetly, under local authority supervision, with the welfare of the individual at heart. It is not used by half a million public servants as part of a state-sponsored spying operation. Baldet says: “Critics should stick to the facts.”

Cage seems to find that hard. It asserts that Prevent is a “cradle-to-grave police state”. On February 20, 2015, when three teenage girls from Bethnal Green Academy were discovered to have left to join IS, both their parents and the police publicly appealed for them to return before crossing the Turkish border.  “This is not about criminalising people,” said Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command. That same day Cage tweeted: “Incredible. Police telling three girls to come back when they know full well they’ll be locked up.” It was untrue, and the girls did not come back.

The anti-Prevent network of Islamists may feel they are on a sacred mission but to them facts are manifestly not sacred. Last August the Home Affairs Select Committee published a report into countering extremism. The popular Islamist website 5Pillars (so named after the five obligations that Islam commands from a good and observant Muslim) reported that MPs had found as a fact that Prevent “discriminated against Muslims”. Again, untrue. MPs simply quoted one assertion by a member of the Muslim Council of Britain that Prevent had created “discriminatory practices” for pupils. 5Pillars also headlined that the MPs had called Prevent “toxic.” Again, untrue. What MPs actually said was that the Prevent brand had become “toxic” to “some” Muslims, and suggested it be called “Engage” instead.

The number one target for the anti-Prevent Islamists is their fellow Muslims who support Prevent as a way of working for the common good. These Muslims are fully engaged with British society, support gender equality and universal human rights, condemn violence in the name of religion, promote interfaith dialogue and oppose all forms of sectarianism within Islam.

The pro-Prevent organisation that provokes red mist rage from the antis is called Inspire. Sara Khan, 36, is its co-director. Born and brought up in Bradford, she wore the veil in her teens, but removed it because male clerics were using women’s clothing to determine “what women can and cannot do”. This was not a rejection of her faith but of patriarchal “obsession” and “authority”. She remains an observant Muslim. 

Khan’s focus is on women’s rights: when they are advanced, she says, they strike a blow against the extreme ideas that help lead young Muslims to the door of violent extremists. The more the Salafi-Islamist world view is challenged, the greater she believes will be resilience to extreme narratives and the more comfortable Muslims will be with a British Muslim identity.

In September 2014 Khan launched an anti-IS campaign called “Making A Stand” offering help to beleaguered Bangladeshi, Pakistan and Somali mothers in some of Prevent’s 46 priority hard-to-reach areas. Her workshops gave mothers their first chance to share their collective experience of the generational barriers between them and their children: in particular, ideological differences over religion with children seeking a more globalised Islamic identity attracting them to Salafi-Islamist websites, and madrassas teaching a narrow, intolerant understanding of Islam. Ahead of Khan’s visit to Cardiff, leaflets distributed to mosques urged husbands and fathers not to allow women to attend the workshops. The Sun gave the campaign front-page treatment, and Khan wrote an article in which she said: “Islamic State says jihadi brides will be treated as equals. But the reality is they’ve given up the freedoms and women’s rights that Britain offers.”

For a man who says he is “appalled by the criminality of ISIL” the reaction to Khan’s campaign by Dilly Hussain, deputy editor of 5Pillars, was bewildering. Khan’s article was “an apologetic rant filled with liberal rhetoric”, he said.

When another pro-Prevent Muslim organisation, the East London-based Active Change Foundation, led the anti-IS “Not In My Name” campaign, which reached 300 million people, attracted 6.6 million tweets and 885,000 YouTube views, Hussain again vented his spleen. It was a “vicious circus show” smearing the whole of Islam through guilt by association with terrorist attacks.

Prevent is not perfect. How could it be when schools, universities, the NHS, social services and youth offending service have been required by law since 2015 to report expression of opinions that indicate a vulnerability to radicalisation to the Channel de-radicalisation panels? Inevitably, the new law has led to a spike in referrals. Conservative religious practices have occasionally been conflated with extremism and that is clearly distressing for the individuals concerned. The fact that the Channel panels, however, assess that only 20 per cent of referrals merit intervention shows that Prevent’s purpose is safeguarding, not spying. It would surely be perverse to undermine that role.

Despite highlighting cases of anti-Muslim prejudice in delivering Prevent, another Muslim charity “Tell Mama” (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) has been censured by Salafi-Islamists.Why? Because while the charity has been critical of Prevent where the evidence supports this, it considers that the pros outweigh the cons. “Many Prevent officers and practitioners work diligently and sensitively in engaging families and individuals to ensure the safety of communities,” Tell Mama says.

The charity has also put its money where its inclusive mouth is by appointing as patrons the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and Richard Benson, former chief executive of the Jewish Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitism. The appointment of an “LGBT activist” and a “pro-Israeli” Jew, opined Dilly Hussain of 5Pillars — both of them “very unpopular amongst many Muslims” — had “made it difficult for Tell Mama to gain the trust of the people they want to protect”.

The appointments also caused Tell Mama to be written off as “phoney” by the anti-Prevent Islamist organisation Mend (Muslim Engagement and Development). Its chief executive Sufyan Gulam Ismail told a Manchester mosque: “We don’t want . . . a pro-Zionist . . . to be recording Islamophobia” and “making all sorts of comments we might not agree with when it comes to homosexuality”.

Ismail later accepted his words “could have been better” chosen. But his knee-jerk reaction suggests that Mend’s high- minded claim to “enhance the active engagement of British Muslim communities in our national life” exclude those who offend against Mend’s own set of “Islamic values”.

Ismail’s rancour is on a hair-trigger. He says Britain has a “300-year-old Israeli lobby”, when Israel has existed for 68 years. After arson destroyed a north London Somali mosque in 2013, Ismail said: “Did you hear one politician condemn it? Did you even hear one politician condemn it?” Actually, yes — several. Visiting the smouldering ruins of the building, Home Office minister James Brokenshire said the attack was “appalling” and the government would stand “against any forms of extremism or any forms of aggression or violence”. Then London mayor Boris Johnson said he was “shocked”, local MP Theresa Villiers said, “This kind of hate crime is despicable,” the Communities Minister Eric Pickles said he was “deeply concerned” about this “disgraceful crime” and local Muslims “have all my sympathies”. In 2014, Finchley United Synagogue hosted the Somalis for an Eid celebration because they were still without a mosque. In 2015 Finchley Reform Synagogue did the same thing, with Sadiq Khan, now mayor of London, and Golders Green MP Mike Freer present.

For their willingness to work with Prevent, Muslim civil society organisations like Inspire have been branded “government stooges”. This is also untrue. Several, including Sara Khan, have been highly critical of the government’s Extremism Bill, describing it as “excessive, draconian, and counter-productive, a violation of civil liberties”. Which it is. Or was. Some of the bill’s most illiberal provisions appear to have been shelved. Most objectionable to Khan was its provision for a kind of ideological Asbo called an Extremist Disruption Order to be served on those deemed to be “extremist” but who had not broken the law. Those served with an EDO were to submit any speech or article for advance vetting by the police. Creating a thought police to protect British values?  There could scarcely be anything less British.

However, to 5Pillars, Sara Khan is a “Muslim apologist . . . a government-friendly desperado” who “parrot(s) whatever the establishment wants them to”. 

According to another popular Salafi-Islamist blogger “Coolness of Hind”, Muslims like Sara Khan are the Islamic equivalent of the Black Power leader Malcom X’s “house Negro” who “loved his master more than the master loved himself” by enforcing his writ against his slaves in the fields. So Khan and her Muslim colleagues are maligned as “house Muslims” and “native informers” colluding with Western Islamophobia — even though they are practising Muslims.

For make no mistake, the Salafi-Islamist anti-Prevent campaign is a major staging post in their demand for recognition as the dominant voice among British Muslims, and in their claims that their politicised version of Islam is “normative” or “orthodox” Islam, and that Muslims like Khan are not really Muslims at all. Hence, their description of her as a “Muslim” in quotation marks, and Coolness of Hind’s dismissal of her faith as “some strange concoction of her version of ‘Islam’ and feminism” and his allegation that she had descended from being a “reasonably grounded Muslim [presumably because Khan once worse a veil] to frankly a confused stooge . . . who has completely lost her way”.

This trolling of Muslims who have “sold out” their faith (deen) is a non-violent form of takfir — the war cry of groups like al-Qaeda and IS to murder Muslims they consider have abandoned a purist version of the Islamic faith. Another female Muslim campaigner for Muslim women’s rights was trolled by 5Pillars’ deputy editor Dilly Hussain as “a stupid liberal cow” with “verbal diarrhoea” because she said on TV that the notion of a caliphate was “totalitarian”. A photograph of her having a drink with friends was “Muslim slutshaming”, she was a “pisshead . . . fat cow . . . a liberal bullshitter” whose “drunken liberal garbage doesn’t count”. Hussain has since told me his Muslim “etiquette was out of order” but his swaggering diatribes reflect a reality: in the battle for British Islam, the Salafi-Islamists are on a roll. A new book by Sara Khan (The Battle for British Islam: Reclaiming Muslim Identity from Extremism, co-authored with Tony McMahon, Saqi Books, £14.99) sets out in forensic detail just how much this puritanical and politicised faith is ascendant in Britain thanks to its 24-hour-a-day activism and divisive tactics.

McMahon works for Breakthrough Media, a strategic communications company contracted by the Home Office to help civil society groups develop narratives to counter extremism — grist to the mill of Khan’s detractors that she’s a “government stooge”, despite her book being open about McMahon’s job. The book was also Khan’s idea, so frustrated had she become with the Home Office leaving organisations like Inspire “to be ripped apart by the wolves by their deathly silence in challenging the myths perpetuated by the anti-Prevent lobby.”

5Pillars has nearly 179,000 Facebook followers compared to Inspire’s 6,470. “Good luck!” mocks the triumphalist editor of 5Pillars, Roshan Muhammed Salih, in response to Khan’s efforts to marshal a rival network of Muslim activists to counter their illiberal anti-Western outlook. Yet even 5Pillars’ following is but a fraction of the fans following the doyen preacher and chairman of another leading anti-Prevent organisation, the London based Islamic Education and Research Academy (iERA).

The Ampleforth-educated convert Abdur Raheem Green boasts 878,211 “likes” on his Facebook. Should we assume that many “like “Green’s response to a Jew who interrupted one of his Speaker’s Corner rants: “Why don’t you take the Yahoudi [Jew] over there, far away, so his stench doesn’t disturb us, OK?” Or Green’s strictures against Muslims allying with non-Muslims who “will not fail to corrupt you”? Or what Green says about a Muslim state where Jews and Christians would be taxed in order to practise their faiths? Do they also “like” Green’s rationale for the “wisdom” of adulterers needing to suffer a “slow and painful” death by stoning because “the death of two criminals can prevent the death and agony of many innocents”?

Another increasingly influential Salafi-Islamist group is Islam21C, which claims to have been “setting the narrative since 2007”. Over the past decade Islam21C has built up a Facebook following of 225,461 which must have something to do with Britain’s foremost Salafist preacher, Haitham Haddad, being its star turn. His “ultimate aim” is not to build a pluralist society but “to see the word of Allah dominant on the whole globe because justice will never be achieved unless the word of Allah is dominant” with an Islamic republic of Britain as a stepping stone. Haddad urges Muslims to use our “filthy” democratic process to work towards this.

Islam21C’s editor Dr Salman Butt poses a rhetorical question: “So what now? Do we continue for the next ten years keeping to the current scope and capacity? Or do we aim bigger braver higher spanning across Europe and the entire English-speaking world to bring orthodox Islam truly into the mainstream?” Guess what his preference is.

Although Prevent has saved many vulnerable young Muslims and nascent neo-Nazis from being sucked into terrorism, the mainstreaming of the Salafi-Islamist narrative that the West hates Islam suggests Prevent will be unable to marginalise it. It is this mainstreaming that the government believe offers a staircase to violent radicalisation.

That is why Prevent is not simply aimed at IS but more widely at the ideology that underpins all violent jihadi groups — the entire Islamist spectrum from IS and al-Qaeda and its offshoots at one end, through to the Taliban, with Hamas at the other end.

While most Salafi-Islamist organisations — including Cage — have made clear their opposition to IS, some of their activists do sympathise with other jihadi groups. Sympathy for motives, of course, is not the same as sympathy for direct actions. But that sympathy comes through in the visceral tone of their anti-Westernism which the government seeks to counter because it believes this offers a route to radicalisation.

That’s why the Islamists never stop insisting that radicalisation has got almost everything to do with Islamophobia, foreign policy and alienation — everything, that is, except their ideology.

So when Omar Hussain, a former supermarket security guard from High Wycombe who now calls himself Abu Saeed Al-Britani, urged fellow British Muslims to “cause terror . . . right in the centre of all that heresy”, his loathing of the West is merely “incidental” to him having joined IS. But if that loathing isn’t ideological, why did he also say: “Why are you still in dar al-kufr? [land of the unbeliever]. Why are you still in the West? What does that filthy despicable country have to offer you? Nothing — here, Allah is offering you Paradise.”

But this doesn’t stop the anti-Prevent mantra that Prevent is based on a government “conveyor belt” theory, flawed because it assumes that someone who develops extreme ideas will graduate to terrorism. Repeated ministerial assurances that “we are clear there is no single path to radicalisation” have not killed off this canard even though the evidence clearly suggests that the ideology is one of those paths.

The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, David Anderson QC, says that radicalisation is a two-stage process: first comes a grievance, say, racism or foreign policy. Of course the world is full of people with grievances. But they don’t become terrorists unless an ideology “battens onto the grievance” to “provide a language that makes sense of the grievance and that makes sense of the person’s life”.

Yet the notion that ideology is just incidental to radicalisation and that Prevent is not addressing its root causes has spread from the Salafi-Islamists to the political mainstream.

The MP for Bolton South East, Yasmin Qureshi, says she wants Prevent replaced with a “community-led programme that builds resilience for tackling social problems”. No mention of tackling ideology.

Like everyone in the anti-Prevent lobby, Qureshi complains that the government should “engage with community actors and organisations that have grassroots credibility”.

To the MP for Bradford West Naz Shah, Inspire — one of the few organisations that has engaged with local Muslim organisations and countless of women in hard-to-reach Muslim communities — is “one of the two most loathed organisations amongst Muslim communities”. It showed in Shah’s questioning of Sara Khan when she gave evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee on countering extremism.

What exactly has Inspire’s impact been, asked Shah? Significantly more, it seems, than her constituents from the Bradford Council of Mosques, who Shah invited to give evidence — an invitation that backfired.

World-renowned as “community leaders”, the Bradford Council of Mosques explained that if the government wants to defuse suspicion about its counter-extremism strategy, it should “engage” with them. “Engage” about what, exactly? It soon became clear the Council knew next to nothing about extremism within its vast network of 80 mosques, faith schools and other institutions. To the obvious astonishment of MPs, the Council’s senior imam of 19 years said that despite his “extensive contacts”, never once had he encountered views among Bradford’s 129,000 Muslims that were hostile to Britain, or of anyone wanting to be an activist for a proscribed organisation. Not even a whisper from the relatives of the 14 Bradford children who went to Syria in 2015 — and who constitute 90 per cent of the so-called “caliphate cubs”. By contrast, Sara Khan says she is overwhelmed with requests from schools to train teachers how to spot vulnerability to radicalisation, and Muslim parrents concerned about the radicalisation of their children.

The East London Mosque — which also sees itself as “community leader” for a significant section of the capital’s 1.3 million Muslims — does not seem to have its finger on the pulse either. “We are a bit surprised that the government has not engaged an institution like ours,” lamented the ELM’s chairman. It would have “made a very valuable contribution”. Really? Like its Bradford counterparts, the ELM told MPs they had no knowledge of radicalisation. Nor could it even clarify the ideology of its imams, or so it said.

The other organisation “most loathed” amongst Muslim communities, according to Naz Shah, is the counter- extremist think tank the Quilliam Foundation. Again, why? Its senior research director is Dr Usama Hasan, a physicist, theological scholar, fluent in English, Urdu and Arabic (he memorised the entire Koran by the age of 11) and a once-radical Salafist. However, after the 7/7 bombings he discarded Salafism to campaign against extremism and joined Quilliam, which also supports Prevent. That has earned Hasan the contempt of the forever fulminating blogger Coolness of Hind, who dismisses his scholarly fellow Muslim as a “devolved reformist”. I take that to mean it’s not Hasan’s progressive version of Islam that makes him a “reformer”; rather it is Salafism that qualifies as “reformed” Islam because its literalist reading of religious texts has become so “mainstream”, as indeed it has. It is the traitorous Hasan who has “devolved” from this — i.e. he has abandoned the true faith.

Even elements of the secular “progressive” hard Left have sided with reactionary Salafi-Islamists in their quest for control of Islam in Britain.

For a glimpse into this Kafkaesque world, we need to head to Bath University where professor of sociology David Miller seems to believe that the real reactionaries are not the Salafi-Islamists but their Muslim opponents like Sara Khan and Usama Hasan, who are, of course, the real progressives.

Miller, a staunch defender of Cage, has even wagged an angry finger at a former jihadists turned progressive on what does, and does not, constitute Islamophobia.

Adam Deen, once a member of Al Muhajiroun, now works for Quilliam. Last April he delivered a lecture at Bath on the difference between Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry. Like Sara Khan, in support of Prevent Deen trains teachers how to avoid discriminating against Muslim children through misreading conservative Islamic practices as signs of extremism.

Deen sought to explain how the Left has fallen into a trap laid by the Islamists over “Islamophobia”. While violent attacks on individual Muslims were clear evidence of anti-Muslim bigotry, Islamophobia had been steadily broadened to cover any criticism of religious theology, including and especially Islamist theology. Since Islamism is an ideology, it should be open to debate with the same latitude as any political debate.

Witnesses say some lecturers called Deen “racist”. Deen says Professor Miller heckled him “incessantly”, shouting, “Why do you support the racist Prevent strategy . . . you’re funded by the Islamophobic industry.”

In what must rank as one of the world’s weirdest alliances, Islamism’s reactionary Right and the secular “progressive” hard Left have conjured the oppressed into the “oppressor” and the oppressor into the “oppressed”. Supported by non-Muslim feminists and Corbynite activists from the National Union of Students, some campus Islamic Societies (ISocs) have tried to ban speakers like the gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell and Usama Hasan. Why? Because they are now seen as fuelling Islamophobia — as is Sara Khan. She says: “A white middle-class feminist once stood up and called me an ‘Islamophobe’ for daring to condemn Muslim extremist preachers who don’t give a shit about women’s rights. Where’s the feminist sisterhood in that? Down the pan.”

Last month in Glasgow, academics from Edinburgh and Newcastle universities were due to share a platform with Cage at a “landmark summit” organised by a Muslim women’s centre “to examine the scale of prejudice” faced by Scottish Muslims.  Given Cage’s equivocation on the stoning to death of adulterous women in Islamic countries, what contribution it can credibly make to women’s rights is unclear. 

What explains the mainstreaming of reactionary Islamists by supposedly enlightened secular British academics? To spare the reader the pain of unpacking Professor Miller’s rationale, in a sentence it is this: progressive non-Islamist Muslim activists like Sara Khan, Adam Deen and Usama Hasan are collaborating with one of the world’s most repressive states, whose counter-terrorism strategy is — in his words — “at the forefront of ensuring that Muslims are collectively pushed to the edge of public life having been dragged to the Right” by “elements of neo-conservative and Zionist movements”. Get it?

MPs have now decided that the Prevent “brand” has become “toxic”. The toxins were infused back in 2009 after Prevent, still in its infancy, was called the “biggest spying operation in Britain in modern times” by Shami Chakrabarti, today the Corbyn-ennobled Shadow Attorney General. It was an “affront to civil liberties”, she said.

Sustained infusions of toxins provided by the Salafi-Islamists have now been reinforced by the senior Labour politician Andy Burnham. The once aspirant Prime Minister is campaigning to be Mayor of Greater Manchester.

Appearing recently alongside the anti-Prevent organisation Mend, Burnham said: “The Prevent duty to report extremist behaviour is today’s equivalent of internment in Northern Ireland.” Eh? The 11 per cent of Greater Manchester’s electorate that is Muslim presumably now has visions of armoured cars, tanks and guns coming for them, just as they came for 2,000 Irish men and women detained without trial behind barbed wire between 1971 and 1975.

So “toxic” have anti-Prevent activists succeeded in making the brand that the programme needs an independent review, says the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation David Anderson. He is right.

But we should be clear about one thing. Anderson’s recommendation is not because he thinks Prevent is either a spying operation or an affront to civil liberties. He has emphasised he does not. He also says he has “no reason to believe Prevent is not well-motivated” and is “sure” that fears that Islam is being targeted “are exaggerated”. 

Rather, there is now a major crisis of perception, not substance, of a government strategy aimed at building resilience against an alien ideology that is steadily eroding the cohesive fabric of this country and its security.

Ministers and leaders of Britain’s many different Muslim communities — whoever they really are — need to address this urgently instead of leaving it to the small band of front-line Muslim activists like Sara Khan who have done more than anyone to expose the shallow hysteria of Prevent’s detractors — and who get abused and threatened for doing so.

Since going to press, the Guardian has reported that the MCB plans to establish an alternative to the government’s Prevent programme.

The following day, the MCB’s assistant Secretary General elaborated in the Guardian, saying Prevent was failing because it is “widely perceived to be a toxic brand.”

This in turn was followed by criticism of the MCB by Cage and other Salafi-Islamists demanding an end to any kind of Prevent programme.

Now the MCB’s Secretary General, Harun Khan, has denied it plans to “create an alternative to Prevent or rebrand it” — despite his assistant not denying this in his follow up Guardian article.

The MCB has not, however, resiled from its plan to offer a “grass roots led response to the challenge of terrorism” which it acknowledges is “real.”

What this “grass roots response” might amount to in practice is unclear.

The Guardian was told that panels of “community leaders” and other supporters will be involved.

If so that would amount to an alternative to Prevent with Muslims considered by the MCB scheme to be at risk of radicalisation referred to their panels, rather than the official Channel Panels operated under Prevent.

Criteria for referral to Channel Panels is a calibrated process in which an individual is assessed for a) engagement with a group, cause or ideology; b) intention to cause harm; and c) ability to cause harm. Each of these criteria is assessed by reference to 22 factors. Support is offered to the individual tailored to the outcome of this assessment.

What would be the MCB’s criteria for referral to its panels?

Presumably, very different from the government’s criteria, since the MCB doesn’t agree with the government’s definition of extremism in the first place.

In 2014, the MCB said the government had conflated extremism with “conservative Muslim practices” after an inquiry had found evidence of bigotry amongst Muslim staff in some Birmingham schools towards gays, other faiths, gender, and hostility to the armed forces.

The MCB says Prevent is now “seen” by “Muslim communities” as a “top down government-led effort to create a more palatable version of Islam.”

The post Are We Losing The War On Home-Grown Terror? appeared first on Standpoint.

A classified government review by two of Britain’s leading civil servants, expert in the Arab world and Islamist ideology, has concluded that organisations like the one Altikriti heads are, in effect, fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood — a charge they categorically deny.

The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen, as it is known in Arabic, was established in 1928 in Egypt and its goal was — and remains — the step-by-step Islamisation of Muslim communities with the ultimate aim of creating a global Caliphate ruled by holy law. “Allah is our objective” is the Brotherhood’s motto, “The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

With Altikriti on the platform was Omer El-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, and Mohammed Kozbar, chairman of the Finsbury Park Mosque, North London, where the press conference was held. “We are not enemies of the state,” said the gently-spoken Hamdoon. All three say they “totally reject the allegation” that they are “in any way linked to the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Altikriti, in particular, has emphasised that he has “absolutely no links” and on its face his denial would seem to be consistent with the values of “tolerance” and “positive co-existence” which he says he is devoted to promoting. It’s certainly a vision a world away from the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, who sought the moral purification of Muslims, because he regarded them as having been infected by Western decadence. That and his belief that Jews were a major source of the infection help explain why he was an admirer of Hitler and why he translated Mein Kampf into Arabic, calling it My Jihad.

Al-Banna’s legacy has bequeathed a virulent strain of anti-Semitism, homophobia, and disdain for the West and its pluralist values within the Brotherhood that survives to the present day. But no hint of that is to be found in the estimable “Vision” and “Values” section of Altikriti’s think-tank, the Cordoba Foundation, which he established so that Muslims and non-Muslims can “strive” to “understand each other.”

The Cordoba Foundation says it promotes “intercultural dialogue and positive coexistence among civilisations”; it puts a premium on “compassion, peace, justice” and is a “strong voice of tolerance and reason”. It asserts that its “independent” research is underpinned by “sound” academic authorities. What could be more in tune with those British values which the Prime Minister has done so much to promote over the last year as part of his counter-extremism strategy?

Nothing, according to Mohammed Kozbar, sitting alongside Altikriti. With the help of the Metropolitan Police, the Finsbury Park mosque was “liberated” in 2005 by Kozbar and his fellow trustees from the hook-handed demagogue Abu Hamza, now serving life in an American jail. Today, says Kozbar, the mosque serves as a “role model to other mosques and community centres”. In fact, he says, his mosque, together with the Muslim Association of Britain and “similar Muslim organisations”, could “teach” David Cameron “a thing or two about British values”.

Really? It is true the Finsbury Park mosque does good by offering hot meals to the homeless. But since its “liberation” it might also benefit from a few lessons in British values. It has hosted speakers who are on the record as having said they were inspired by the books of Hassan al-Banna and by the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who in 2009 thanked Hitler for having “managed to put Jews in their place”. Another speaker hosted by the mosque has described Jews as having “no conscience” and “having all the bad qualities: lies, jealousy, treachery, cowardice, aggression”; another has argued that apostates from Islam must be killed; and yet another has said, “We don’t need to go to the Christians, or the Jews, debating with them about the filth which they believe.”

You only have to imagine what — rightly — would be the reaction had Cameron ever shared a platform with people who spoke of Muslims in such a venomous way. 

The mosque’s trustees are also happy to be photographed with Hamas leaders in Gaza. Indeed, one of the trustees is himself a fugitive Hamas commander. Like some other Muslim Brothers, he appears to use London as a base from which to travel to the Middle East to promote the movement — even though Hamas’s military wing has been designated a terrorist organisation here and elsewhere because it has deliberately targeted unarmed civilians. Hamas is, of course, the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood.

The government review of the Muslim Brotherhood was conducted by Sir John Jenkins, until recently ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer and Director General of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism in the Home Office. He now chairs the Joint Intelligence Committee. Jenkins examined the development, ideology and structures of the Muslim Brotherhood around the world, from when it was established to the present day. Farr investigated the Brotherhood’s network in the UK.

The Brotherhood is now banned in Egypt, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and in commissioning his review, Cameron has been accused by Altikriti, Kozbar and el-Hamdoon of bowing to those states under threat of losing defence contracts. In truth, the Prime Minister had become increasingly concerned that the Brotherhood’s network here, whilst not engaging in violent extremism, was helping to create the conditions that allowed it to flourish.

Altikriti and his colleagues say the opposite is true and that Jenkins and Farr’s work is “filled with mistakes”. Is it? What about their categorical denial that they are not linked “in any way” to the Brotherhood?

The published summary of the classified review finds that much about the Brotherhood’s UK network of associates and affiliates “remains secretive, including membership, fundraising and educational programmes”. Perhaps that is why Jenkins and Farr are careful to refer to “organisations associated (my emphasis) with the Muslim Brotherhood”.

Judged by this criteria the associations are numerous. The Egyptian Brotherhood has morphed into a global movement of like-minded organisations, often interconnected. Hence Mohammed Kozbar’s Finsbury Park Mosque is identified by a Muslim directory as being “Salafai Ikhwan” (Brotherhood) and he is also a vice-president of the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). Altikriti was MAB president (2003-04), and he and Mohammed Kozbar were directors (2000-2007).

MAB was established in 1997, its founding president having previously been the Brotherhood’s official spokesman in the West. In September 2002, MAB published a paper called “Inspire” which explained how MAB had indeed been Brotherhood-inspired. Virtually all of the modern influences quoted were Muslim Brotherhood leaders and ideologues. In 2002, MAB paid its condolences on the death of the “General Guide to Muslim Brotherhood”, Mustafa Mashoor, and did so again in 2004 on the death of his successor, Mamun al-Hudaybi.

An archived link from MAB’s 2004 website identified some of the “links” that Altikriti today insists do not exist. MAB said then that “amongst its members are those who back in their original countries were members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

In 2005, Altikriti himself told me: “My family is Muslim Brotherhood.” His family are from Iraq and his father, a consultant radiologist, was head of the Muslim Brotherhood there. “When I was in the Arab Emirates, I was extremely closely linked with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he explained. “I used to go to some of their (study) circles.” At a conference in Doha in 2010, Altikriti was listed as representing the Islamic party in Iraq which he himself has described as a Muslim Brotherhood “offshoot”.

I count at least 30 Islamic organisations in Britain that are closely associated with the Brotherhood. Broadly, they seek to popularise a more “ideologised” version of Islam (as the theologian Malise Ruthven puts it) by monopolising political representation of Muslims in Britain. They want the government to adopt a more Islamist-friendly foreign policy, and of course to expand politicised sacred space. Even though Brotherhood-associated organisations actually control only a handful of mosques, their political activism has exerted an influence over Muslims disproportionate to their size.

Here, for example, is “Jemal”, MAB’s delegate to a Stop the War Coalition conference, who told the British Communist Party journal Weekly Worker in 2003 that many Muslim organisations here had been “set up under the influence of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood . . . we have gone from strength to strength.” A decade later, Altikriti was asked in an interview published by his own Cordoba Foundation to identify the “most important Muslim Brotherhood institutions that had an influence on the Muslim community in Britain”.

Altikriti responded by naming ten organisations, including six mentioned in the government review — another “mistake” by Messrs. Jenkins and Farr: UK Islamic Mission (UKIM); Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS); Islamic Society of Britain (ISB); Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE); Muslim Association of Britain (MAB); and Muslim Council of Britain (MCB). As the review says, the ISB has been inching away from its Brotherhood birthright and seems to be focused on promoting an identity that’s closer to the mainstream. Its activist erstwhile brothers meanwhile claim it is they who represent “normative” Islam. If they are right, we’re in trouble.

Take UKIM which runs some 50 mosques. Jenkins and Farr say UKIM “still explicitly argues that it is not possible for an observant Muslim to live under a non-Islamic system of government whilst also anticipating the forthcoming ‘victory’ of Islam over Communism, capitalist democracy and secular materialism”. UKIM was established by supporters of the Brotherhood’s south-east Asia counterpart, the Pakistani Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, whose members sheltered some notable al-Qaeda terrorists, including the 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. UKIM insists it has “strongly condemned all forms of extremism” but it is clear, if only in terms of UKIM’s worldview, that its definition of “extreme” cannot be reconciled with mainstream Britain’s.

What about the influence of the Islamic Forum for Europe (IFE)? It dominates the East London Mosque in Tower Hamlets. Like the Finsbury Park Mosque, its volunteers do good community work offering advice on marriages, families, women’s services, pro-bono legal support, and ex-offender support, though why such services for Muslims have to be provided by Muslims is unclear if, as the mosque says, promoting community cohesion is its “mission”. Under the IFE’s influence, the mosque has also transformed large parts of the East End into communities that are so conservative in lifestyle and attire that they have effectively segregated themselves from any meaningful social interaction with the mainstream. IFE members have privately advocated sharia law and it was also the IFE which propelled Britain’s first directly-elected Asian mayor, Lutfur Rahman, into power in Tower Hamlets, only for one court to find that he was corrupt, a liar, a politician who played the race and religious card, and an election cheat and now for another court to find he has been a long-standing tax cheat.  Yet Altikriti is on record as having said that since its arrival in the UK the Brotherhood has cultivated a “comparatively progressive narrative” here, and is “amongst the most progressive . . . religious- based movements in general”.

Again, the government review finds otherwise, concluding that MAB — and other Brotherhood associated organisations — have yet to “clearly and publicly promote a vision of Muslims living in this country as integrated British citizens”.

What is stopping this vision from materialising? The review found the Brotherhood was more focused on trying to Islamise individuals and the Muslim community than the state. Yet that was also  Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna’s strategy as he sought to change Islam, the faith, into a political ideology by Islamising individuals as a first step towards creating Islamised communities with the ultimate political goal of building a caliphate with laws, customs and lifestyles organised entirely around Islam.

However fantastical this might seem, many observant Muslims dream that one day, albeit in the far-distant future, not just Britain, but the entire world will became a caliphate. Altikriti is no exception, as he explained to me in 2005:

JW: You have this firm conviction that one day there . . . will be an Islamic state here in Britain?
AA: The Prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad is quite clear of that: and that is that the world will embrace Islam . . .
JW: How will this happen?
AA: I have no idea.
JW: I don’t mean this pejoratively but is this something you are working for?
AA: No, I would be absolutely lying if I said, “Yes, in my daily activities and when I work for MAB [Muslim Association of Britain] . . . I had in mind that I’m trying to bring forth the conversion of Europe to Islam,” I would be lying if I said so. But at the same time I would also lying if I said I’m not convinced in my heart of hearts that it will happen . . . I know for a fact that this will happen in spite of me whether I work for it or not.

So if Altikriti is not working towards this global transformation, what exactly is he doing? “The only obligation that I have is what I call Da’wah,” he explained, which is the Arabic term for proselytising, or inviting people to Islam. And, according to the scholar often referred to as the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, Da’wah is what will lead to  Islam coming “back to Europe for the third time, after it was expelled from it twice . . . Conquest through Da’wah that is what we hope for. We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’wah.” It’s a point the Sheikh has made many times.

One thing seems clear: whether the Brotherhood is actively seeking to lay the groundwork for a caliphate, the amount of politicised sacred space has expanded rapidly here in Britain as in much of the world since the Egyptian Brotherhood’s influence has gone global. It is why this “ideologised” version of Islam is someties referred to as history’s latest big idea since the fall of Communism and fascism. So where does the Brotherhood stand on violence?

The Egyptian Brotherhood told Sir John Jenkins it had “consistently adhered to peaceful means of opposition, renouncing all forms of violence throughout its existence.” Again, he finds otherwise. While engaging politically where possible, Sir John says the Brotherhood has “also selectively used violence and sometimes terror in pursuit of their institutional goals”.  Brotherhood-linked media platforms “seem to have deliberately incited violence” after the ousting in 2013 by a military coup of the Brotherhood’s first Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi because he failed to deliver his commitment to democracy, notwithstanding Altikriti’s claim that the Brotherhood is the world’s “most important Islamic democratic force”. The review also found that the Brotherhood has “deliberately, wittingly and openly incubated and sustained” Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

Altikriti, his two colleagues on the press platform and other Brotherhood-associated organisations have roundly condemned terrorist attacks on the UK and terrorism by al-Qaeda and so called Islamic State abroad.

But some of Altikriti’s associates here have also openly applauded attacks by Hamas against unarmed Israeli civilians, including suicide bombings. Nor has Altikriti publicly disowned Hamas, which he does not regard as a terrorist organisation anyway, although he has said he does not consider Israeli civilians to be legitimate targets.

However, when interviewed by the BBC in 2014, Altikriti denied that the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi supported suicide bombing, insisting he knew of no evidence that Qaradawi did, even though the cleric has been very widely publicised as saying he considers them to be “heroic acts. We should hail those who carry out these acts and bless them and call on God to take them to live in Paradise.” Altikriti’s claim to have been ignorant of Qaradawi’s blessing is especially bewildering because it was his organisation, MAB, in 2004 — the year he was also MAB president — that invited Qaradawi to London amid a storm of protest in the newspapers and on the BBC about this very issue. Moreover, Altikriti was photographed sitting next to Qaradawi at a reception at City Hall, London, hosted by the then mayor, Ken Livingstone. Usama Hasan, now senior researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, says he was present at the reception and heard Qaradawi asked about women and children as targets. According to Hasan, Qaradawi replied in Arabic that there was no such thing as civilian targets in Israel because “Israeli women are not like our women. They are living in a militarised society.” Altikriti is fluent in Arabic.

What about Altikriti’s approach to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? He is an Iraqi-born British citizen, having been given sanctuary here when he was just two, after his father fled from Ba’athist persecution in Iraq.

Some 630 of Altikriti’s fellow citizens — British soldiers — have fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002. Like many Muslims and non-Muslims he was opposed to both wars. He said he preferred political rather than violent “resistance” because he didn’t want to see “any spillage of blood — coalition forces or the Iraqis”. Yet he also affirmed the right of Iraqis to use “any means and methods” to expel the “occupation”. Those, like him, who were opposed to the invasion had “made a decision to fight for what is true and pure”.(That word “pure” again.) Is it really so difficult for Altikriti and the thousands of other Brotherhood followers in this country to understand that it is one thing to see the invasion through the eyes of Iraqis resisting it, but quite another to publicly support them when the lives of your fellow citizens are at stake — especially when those fellow citizens belong to a country that protected your family from Iraqi oppression in the first place?

To convince sceptics that the Brotherhood alligned movement here is “working tirelessly for the good of British society on several fronts” Anas Altikriti and Kozbar will need to reconcile their admirable rhetoric — how they strive for positive coexistence, tolerance, peace, compassion and justice, etc — with the words and actions of the organisation they led between 2000 and 2007: the Muslim Association of Britain. While condemning al-Qaeda attacks like 9/11 and 7/7, some of MAB’s actions and rhetoric directed at the Israel-Palestine conflict were particularly inflammatory and contributed to keeping young British Muslims angry.

On April 13, 2002, MAB organised a pro-Palestinian rally in London. The MAB email advertising this rally was headlined “Muslim Brotherhood launch biggest Palestine rally in the UK”, clearly indicating the MAB/Muslim Brotherhood connection that Altikriti has denied. At the rally itself, demonstrators dressed as suicide bombers and carried placards, downloaded from the MAB website, equating Israel with Nazi Germany.

In 2003, a MAB spokesman, Azzam Tamimi (whom Altikriti told me was almost certainly a Muslim Brother), wrote an article titled “Anti-Semitism or Just Jews Behaving Badly?” So carried away was Tamimi by his accusations of racism against Israelis, that his own language descended into racism, going well beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and its policies.

Israeli Jews were described as “invaders” that came from afar “out of greed . . . justifying their aggression by . . . claiming themselves to be the chosen people of God who are given a divine licence to dehumanise, kill and rob and [sic] entire nation of a decent living”.

The article concluded: “Few humans may accept the racist claim of other humans of being God’s chosen ones who may kill others because they are less divine . . . Until when will the world be able to put up with their arrogance and aggression? If they want to be as human as anybody else, Jews must wake up before it is too late.”

No doubt Tamimi would say that his hostility to Israelis was not because they are Jews. The same defence was made by the Brotherhood’s ex-President of Egypt Mohamed Morsi in 2013 to six American senators who questioned him about a ranting speech in which he urged Egyptians to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. In a later interview Morsi described Zionists as “these bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs”. While confining his comments to “Zionists” and never explicitly mentioning Jews, his tirade nonetheless invoked an anti-Semitic theme common in the Middle East about malevolent Jews exercising demonic power: “They have been fanning the flames of civil strife wherever they were throughout their history. They are hostile by nature.”

As the government review found, senior members of the Brotherhood “routinely use virulent, anti-Semitic language”, which is a core motivator of violent extremism. And the truth is their language goes well beyond Israel. The view that Jews are intrinsically evil was developed in prose reminiscent of the Nazis by a Muslim Brother revered on MAB’s website as the “doyen” of the Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb. Echoing al-Banna, Qutb extolled the Islamic virtue of extreme purity defiled by Jewish “filth” just a few years after the Holocaust. In an essay entitled “Our Struggle With the Jews” he wrote:

Free the sensual desires from their restraints and they destroy the moral foundation on which the pure Creed rests, in order that the Creed should fall into the filth which they spread so widely on the earth. They mutilate the whole of history and falsify it. . . . From such creatures who kill, massacre and defame prophets one can only expect the spilling of human blood and dirty means which would further their machinations and evil.

MAB’s attempt to mitigate Qutb’s diatribe because he wrote it during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence with the Arabs doesn’t wash. He said Islam’s struggle with Jews had raged for 1400 years and described them as “ungrateful” by nature, “narrowly selfish” and “fanatical”. Their disposition prevented them from feeling “the larger human connection which binds humanity together”.

This is just a flavour of Qutb’s mendacity. Yet it was under Altikriti’s presidency of MAB with Kozbar serving as MAB director that Qutb was lionised on MAB’s website as the “doyen” of the Muslim Brotherhood. I don’t suggest Qutb reflects either man’s views of Jews for I know of no Qutb-like reference by them to Jews. But when a journalist challenged MAB in 2004 about its reverence for Qutb, the best MAB could do was to suggest that his “Zionist ex Mossad friends” had misled him.

In the 2013 interview Altikriti granted to his own Cordoba Foundation, he was asked if he thought “the Muslim Brotherhood, since its arrival in the UK . . . had an intellectual effect on the Muslim community in Britain?” He replied: “Undoubtedly so.” He is right — but not in the virtuous way he intended. Brotherhood ideology has also been the intellectual inspiration behind those violent Islamist groups that have appealed to thousands of British Muslims. No one more so than Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb drew on the thoughts of another MAB website poster boy, the Indian Islamist theologian Abul Ala’a Mawdudi, who founded Jamaat-e-Islami, to promote the doctrine of takfirism. This is the practice used by extremists to stigmatise other Muslims as “impure” infidels or apostates, and of Muslim states as “unislamic.” Takfir is the war cry of groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State to murder other Muslims in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the most bestial ways imaginable in pursuit of the perfect Islamic society. Like these groups, Qutb was viscerally anti-Western, with a psychotic loathing of its “decadent” and materialistic ways (triggered by sights like Americans dancing cheek-to-cheek and their neatly mown lawns),

Qutb is now widely recognised as the father of modern jihadism because he decided it was going to take more than just Da’wah (preaching) to establish the kingdom of God on earth.  He argued that a revolutionary vanguard should establish an Islamic state and then impose Islamisation, first on Arabs, then the rest. Ring any bells? It’s why Islamic State today quotes Sayyid Qutb so heavily in its public discourse.

When I listen to the current MAB president Omer El-Hamdoon — who is also an imam — castigating with such passion and conviction the “ignorance” and “arrogance” and “warped mentality” of the “savages” of Islamic State, I wonder if he links it back to the Brotherhood’s ideologue whom his organisation so publicly admired just a few years ago. It’s a fair question because, beyond MAB’s muted qualifier that some scholars disagreed with Qutb “on a number of issues”, British-based Brotherhood organisations and associates have not openly or consistently refuted the poison he wrote. But then according to Altikriti, there is no need. “If anything,” he says “the Muslim Brotherhood and their ideas has (sic) constantly, constantly, without fail, been the very antithesis of the ideology of the likes of al-Qaeda.”

Yet Qutb was held up by MAB as a supremely moral being for having “opened his eyes to the malaise of the Western culture and non-Islamic ideologies”. He made a “clear distinction between pure faith and association of partners (shirk)” which bluntly means venerating anything other than God.

At its most extreme, this obsession with purifying the Islamic faith is what also drives Islamic State to kill everything it deems to be impure and is why the mere mention of purity by Islamists sends a Nuremberg-like shudder down my spine, though not, apparently, the spines of many on the Left nor even some conservatives. The commentator Peter Oborne considers the Brotherhood to be “a great political movement — not just in Egypt”.  He says he has “seen no evidence of any kind of Muslim Brotherhood terrorism . . . I’ve looked into it.” But then so have two of Britain’s most senior and expert civil servants with access to Muslim Brother leaders, British embassies around the world, and intelligence from MI5 and MI6 that presumably Oborne did not have. Given violent jihadism’s inheritance from Brotherhood ideology, there is nothing “phobic” about this apprehension. It is rational.

Anas Altikriti and his Cordoba Foundation can talk all the grandiloquent talk they like about “believing” in a “world full of hope” where “opposing ideas are working together, enriching our understanding of each other; strengthening our humanity without seeing its end in a grand clash”.

But until they can reconcile the resounding clash between their enlightened rhetoric and their blind eye to the Brotherhood’s regressive ways, sceptics will continue to question whether the change is real or tactical. Clearly Jenkins and Farr have yet to be convinced. Brotherhood literature here, they say, still casts “Western society” as “inherently hostile to Muslim faith and interests and that Muslims must respond by maintaining their distance and autonomy”.

British society is not inherently “hostile” to Muslims nor ever has been. More than three million Muslims have made their home here and their numbers are growing rapidly. British Muslims are a fact of life. Non-Muslims are crying out for their fellow Muslim citizens to close that distance by articulating a set of values around which a meaningful common life can be built. Until then, the Brotherhood’s British network that claims to speak for “normative” Islam will continue, as the review says, to be regarded as operating “contrary to our national interests and our national security.”

The post Double Games Of The UK Muslim Brotherhood appeared first on Standpoint.

The Paris attacks mark the latest in a series of increasingly successful strikes by French jihadists since 2012. Less sensitive to Muslim sentiment than Britain, the French have sought to counter jihadi terrorism with more draconian legislation than us, while expecting the country’s almost 5 million Muslims to assert the robustly secular values of la République française.

The Cameron government, by contrast, has taken a more interventionist approach when it comes to Britain’s “precious” progressive values. Permanent agitation by Islamists to inject ever more of their version of Islam into public life, overpowering more mainstream Muslim voices, means tolerance, freedom of speech, free religion, free thinking, democracy, and gender and sexual equality can no longer be taken for granted.

Even as the IS slaughterers in France were strapping on their suicide belts, that same night on this side of the Channel British values were being dismissed as “junk” at a debate about Islam at the Corn Exchange in Bedford. “Every single one of these speakers is a caliphate-advocating Islamist,” commented Maajid Nawaz, the co-founder and chairman of the counter-terrorism think-tank Quilliam.

Since the Charlie Hebdo attack that led to the murder of 17 French citizens (four of them Jews) last January, the French have followed a counter-terrorism policy that has moved towards the British approach. Like its British counterpart, the French ministry of education now actively promotes the values that underpin French society, in its case the French Enlightenment that laid the foundation of the Republic.

Not before time. Iannis Roder, who teaches history at a school in one of Paris’s deprived banlieues (suburbs), said those killed in January “didn’t mean much” to most of his Muslim pupils. So convinced were they that their co-religionists could not possibly have slaughtered their fellow citizens, they thought the shootings were staged, much as some Muslims were convinced Jews were behind 9/11.

Swallowing fantastical conspiracy theories — especially about Jews — is an early sign of vulnerability to radicalisation, and is symptomatic of the marked grievance narrative that says the West is persecuting Muslims. At its most extreme it ends with the Paris massacres. No slaughter quite satisfies the jihadists’ appetite unless Jews are included in their crosshairs, and so it may have proved with the Paris attack. The Bataclan theatre, which the jihadists turned into a charnel house with 89 dead, had previously been a target. Why? Because it was until recently Jewish-owned.

The grievance narrative that Muslims are the eternal victims of Jews and the West is known to set David Cameron’s eyes rolling and is one of several extreme but non-violent drivers that can lead to radicalisation. Others include disdain for parliamentary democracy, sectarianism, and regressive attitudes to equality. The entire extremist narrative is now the target of the government’s counter-extremism strategy published this autumn, a narrative which Mr Cameron has exhorted the nation to fight “every day at the kitchen table, on the university campus, online and on the airwaves”. So how exactly are we doing on this side of the Channel?

At the heart of the strategy is financial support for what Number 10 describes as “mainstream” Muslim voices to “strengthen community resilience and promote a coalition to speak out, challenge and ultimately defeat extremism”.

One organisation singled out for praise is an east London youth centre called the Active Change Foundation (ACF). It is one of several “grassroots” organisations which will benefit from a £5 million grant “to challenge all forms of extremist     ideology”.

Number 10 says the money will help fund ACF’s Young Leaders Programme, which trains teenagers in how to mentor youngsters to help prevent street, drug and gang crime, as well as domestic violence and bullying, and also gives them “the tools to assist them in preventing radicalisation and violent extremism”.

ACF is run by an alleged former jihadist, Hanif Qadir, who has certainly been unequivocal in his denunciation of Islamic State. “Any Muslim with an ounce of faith . . . will condemn them,” he says. Indeed his organisation’s powerful “Not In My Name” campaign accusing IS of “hiding behind a false Islam” was singled out by President Obama in his speech to the UN General Assembly in September 2014.

But a search through Mr Qadir’s tweets also reveal intemperate comments that feed into the grievance narrative. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, for example, he told his followers: “BBC interview re 9/11 & the current situation 10yrs on! Same old questions & nothin abt the millions killed since George Bush war on terror!” So George Bush is responsible for “millions” killed since 9/11?

Then this: “Lots of youth askin abt who’s rememberin the hundreds of thousands innocent women & children killed by Western forces since 9/11? Any takers.” Hundreds of thousands of women and children? Have we really been worse than Bashar al-Assad?

Casualty figures are notoriously difficult to assess and highly disputed. Only estimates are available for the numbers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and range wildly from the low to high hundred thousands. One thing, though, is clear: the overwhelming majority were Muslims killed by Muslims — not Western forces. You may say Mr Qadir’s statistical conflation doesn’t matter much if his overall message is one that rejects violent ideology, which it does. But as the Prime Minister has said, extremism can grow out of a “warped world view.”

Hanif Qadir is also a Home Office approved mentor for the government’s deradicalisation programme, Channel, which operates in what is described eerily as the “pre-criminal space.”

Channel is the least known and, in some ways, the most sensitive part of the government’s Prevent programme so called because it’s about stopping people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism before they have done anything wrong.

Schools, universities, the NHS, local authorities, charities, faith institutions, prisons and the probation service now have a statutory responsibility to prevent people being drawn into terrorism when carrying out their day-to-day functions.

If someone is exhibiting a belief in extremist ideas, they may be referred to what’s called a Channel Panel, whose membership will be drawn from local agencies relevant to the individual’s case, like social services, youth offending services and so on. The panel decides if that individual would benefit from referral to a specialist mentor like Mr Qadir to change their ideas before they become involved in terrorism. A first stage in the development of extremist ideas can be, as Mr Cameron has said, a belief in conspiracy theories about Jews exercising malevolent power.

So what about this tweet from Mr Qadir when Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, its 50-day military assault on Gaza to stop rocket fire into Israel in the summer of 2014? “A whole nation is being radicalised to exterminate the Palestinians. Where are the interventionists? Who is going to prevent this Terrorism?” “Exterminate”? There could be no more serious, nor tendentious, charge against Jews.

The UN estimates roughly three civilians for every combatant were killed in Protective Edge; the Israelis say it was half that rate. But even if the UN are correct, that was still no higher than the NATO ratio in Afghanistan — a brutal reality about asymmetric urban war, especially since Hamas deliberately moves its fighters into civilian areas knowing that would constrain the IDF. “For the Palestinian people, death has become an industry, at which women excel, and so do all the people living on this land” said Hamas MP Faithi Hammad in 2008. “The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields . . . It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life’.”

The charge of “exterminate” is the kind of wild and disproportionate canard now routinely directed at Israel. As Baroness Ruth Deech says, a cult of “fashionable disgust” has taken hold. Yet it surely feeds the grievance culture whilst simultaneously inflaming hatred (as distinct from legitimate criticism) against Israel.

This mind-set dismisses as mere “detail” Israel’s long history of treating Palestinians in Israeli hospitals as a matter of basic humanity. In 2010 some 180,000 Palestinians are reported to have been treated in Israel. Two weeks into Protective Edge the Israeli army set up a field hospital near the border with Gaza to treat the injured and wounded caught in the crossfire and sent in medical supplies during a brief ceasefire.

Even Israel’s sworn enemies are treated. The daughter, granddaughter and brother-in-law of Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyah and relatives of other Hamas officials are all reported to have been treated at Israeli hospitals. So were the wife and brother-in-law of Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority. That doesn’t sound like the conduct of a government intent on “exterminating the Palestinians”. Nor does the $10 million which the Israeli foreign ministry says has been spent to expand the border crossings into Gaza since 2014 to allow in 1,000 aid trucks per day.

If anyone is bent on extermination, it is Hamas, and the infamous Article Seven of its 1988 Covenant quoting the Prophetic injunction to kill Jews, which Hamas apologists keep saying is outdated but which Hamas itself has yet to rescind.

At the height of Protective Edge, Mr Qadir also tweeted a picture showing Israelis supposedly playing badminton inside the Al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, located on the eastern edge of the Old City of Jerusalem. He wrote: “So this isn’t anything to do with religion or deliberate acts to undermine islam & Muslims. Who are the extremists???”

The picture was captioned: “One of the most disturbing images of today. This is inside Masjid Al Aqsa!! Palestinians were not allowed to pray inside but these people are allowed to play!”

Attached to it were pictures of what look like smouldering Korans and a woman defiling a Koran by standing on it with her bare feet and painted toenails.

The picture of badminton being played “inside Masjid Al Aqsa” is false and appears to have come from Turkish media reports in July 2013 showing badminton (and karate and soccer) being played — not in Jerusalem — but in the Milas Mosque in the Mugla province of Turkey. A simple Google search would have alerted Mr Qadir to his error. But more than that it displays a predisposition to believe the inflammatory propaganda promoted by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority that Israel intends to change the status quo of the site on which Al-Aqsa is built. The site is administered by the Jordanian (religious) Waqf authority, as it was before Israel captured east Jerusalem during the Six Day War in 1967. Israel has repeatedly insisted that will continue.

It is, of course, true that to Jews, the site is just as precious as it is to Muslims — if not more so. While Al-Aqsa is Islam’s third holiest site (after Mecca and Medina), it stands on Judaism’s holiest site because it was built in the seventh century (when Muslims conquered the city) over the sites of the first and second Jewish Temples, the latter destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The site also houses an Islamic shrine, the Dome of the Rock. So while Muslims call the site the “Noble Sanctuary” (“Al-Haram-al-Sharif”) Jews call it the “Temple Mount.”

In recognition of how important the site is to both Muslims and Jews, Israelis often refer to it as Al-Haram-al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Precisely because the 37-acre site is such a powder keg, Israel prohibits Jews from praying there. Non-Muslims are allowed to visit the site, accompanied by police, but only Muslims are allowed to pray and those from other faiths who try are escorted away. Visiting times are co-ordinated with the controlling body, the Waqf, so as not to clash with Muslim prayer times.

However, some rabbis and right-wing government ministers have demanded equal access to the site to pray there, and last year two Israeli MPs proposed a bill supporting this, although one of them withdrew and it got nowhere. There has also been an increase in Israeli visitors and politicians, with one minister having called for a third Temple to be built. Mainstream Jewish law prohibits this. Nonetheless, such ideas are no longer as fringe as they once were.

Equally provocative has been a demand by the Muslim Council of Clerics in Jerusalem to ban all Jewish presence from the site. Dozens of women are reported to have been hired to harass Jewish visitors and the police officers escorting them. They have been filmed shouting and trying to assault Jews and policemen. Palestinians are also reported to have smuggled stones, firebombs and pipe bombs into Al-Aqsa mosque.

On September 15, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu reaffirmed there would be no change to the status of the site. The following day the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas simply ignored this. In a televised address to Palestinians, he said: “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah, Allah willing. Every Martyr (Shahid) will reach Paradise, and everyone wounded will be rewarded by Allah.”

Abbas concluded: “Al-Aqsa is ours and so is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre . . . They [the Israelis] have no right to desecrate them with their filthy feet.” In Gaza, the head of koranic studies at the Islamic University of Gaza Dr Subhi Al-Yaziji declared: “The Jews of Palestine are fair game today — even the women.” These sentiments rated barely a mention in the British press, even though such racism is routine from senior Palestinian Authority members. By contrast, had Netanyahu said “We don’t want any filthy Arab feet on Jewish land” there would — rightly — have been a global outcry.

Two weeks later came the start of the “knife intifada” — the wave of cold-blooded stabbings, car-rammings and shootings of mostly unarmed civilians, including women, by mostly young Palestinian men, and many of them close to Al-Haram-al-Sharif/Temple Mount. The attacks mirror the Jerusalem knife attacks on Jews by Arabs in 1920, also influenced by “statements of hatred and incitement against the Jews”, according to Israel’s official memorial to murdered Jews.

To the PA Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh, the morning after two Israeli civilians were stabbed to death in October was “fragranced by the blood of the Martyrs”, according to her Facebook page. Another PA leader implied he considered the stabbings to be legitimate self-defence. Abbas has refrained from condemning them outright.

Twice more did Netanyahu repeat that the status quo of the Al-Haram-al-Sharif/Temple Mount would not change. He also reprimanded any minister who said it should change and he banned politicians from visiting the site. He has also agreed to a Jordanian proposal to install 24-hour cameras to prove to Palestinians that the government has no intention of changing the status quo.

Whatever else may be said about Netanyahu he is not stupid. Like all his predecessors, he understands that to change the status of Haram-al-Sharif/Temple Mount would be seen as an act of incendiary provocation on a regional, if not global, scale. As the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of MI5, has said, it would have “implications for the Palestinians and for Muslims everywhere in the world”. That is why Shin Bet actively monitors Jewish extremists who want to blow up Al-Aqsa, and why the Netanyahu government has sought to restore calm.

So why, in the midst of this religiously inflamed bloodshed, and despite Netanyahu’s unequivocal assurances, did Mr Qadir add to the anger of British Muslims here by tweeting a picture of an Orthodox rabbi with the caption: “This is Sick:- Killing Palestinian resistance a ‘religious duty.’”?

His tweet highlighted a report of the Chief Rabbi of the ancient Israeli town of Safed, Benzion Mutzafi, who said no mercy should be shown to Palestinian stabbers once cornered. The rabbi said it was a “religious duty” that they should be killed. Another right-wing rabbi said, “Hold his head down to the ground and hit him until his last breath.” Other rabbis, however, have emphasised that mercy should be shown. One thing, however, is surely clear: anyone who suddenly plunges a knife into the person next to them is a murderer. What was “sick” was to suggest that stabbers should be seen as “resistance fighters”.

Mr Qadir also provided the link to the original “resistance fighter” story, run in a UK journal called the Middle East Monitor (MEMO). MEMO is a pro-Muslim Brotherhood publication which claims to be “honest in everything we write and publish”. It has certainly been upfront in its support for the “knife intifada”. A MEMO article hailed the stabbers as the “the pride and dignity of the Muslim nation”. The author hoped the stabbings would turn into a “third Intifada . . . may God bless the people of the third intifada. Go on with your intifada, our hearts are with you.”

David Cameron has said that it is just this sort of mindset that forms part of a broader extremist spectrum offering Muslims a warped worldview which can take some to the front door of violent extremists.

In contrast to his tweets on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mr Qadir’s denunciations of the cold-blooded barbarity of IS come over as heartfelt and passionate. The fact that he receives government funds and is also a Home Office-approved mentor for the Channel deradicalisation programme will also come at a cost to his standing in some sections of the Muslim community, for both signal that he buys into the government’s Prevent agenda. So what explains his aberrant behaviour when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict? I emailed and telephoned him to try to find out but was told he could not comment.

Hanif Qadir is not the only Muslim to stick his neck above the parapet actively promoting Prevent, while at the same time making incendiary remarks with no factual foundation about this highly contentious conflict that helps keep young Muslims angry.

Take Waqar Ahmed, manager of the Prevent programme in Birmingham since 2011 — a tough patch, to be sure. Reading Mr Ahmed’s Facebook pages, his commitment, like Mr Qadir’s, to trying to prevent young Muslims from going to Syria and Iraq burns through. Nor does he flinch from taking on the Prevent naysayers, like the 280 academics and Islamists who last summer signed a letter to the Independent saying that Prevent would have a “chilling effect on open debate, free speech and political dissent”.

“I feel I have to respond,” wrote Mr Ahmed on Facebook, “because no one is going to do it on my behalf, the people we work with will be too frightened to speak out of fear of becoming community outcasts.”

The letter complained that Prevent “remains fixated on ideology as the primary driver of terrorism” when really the government should be focusing on factors like “social exclusion” because they “play a more central role in driving political violence than ideology”.

It was yet another attempt to persuade the public that government counter-extremism policy is based on the flawed notion that there’s an inevitable progression from non-violent but extreme ideas to violence. But the letter shoots at a straw man. Ministers accept that social factors may well make some people more vulnerable to ideology. Equally, ideology also helps turn “simmering prejudice into murderous intent”, as Mr Cameron has put it. The one constant with terrorism is that it always draws on ideology. The bien pensants seek to factor that out.

Mr Ahmed has the intellectual rigour to see this, and the courage to say so. “I agree ideology is not the only cause and may not be the driving factor,” he writes. “But I don’t see young impressionable Muslims citing they don’t have a job and that is their reason — no, they are going in drives (sic) to join a ‘so called’ religious state that gives them a vehicle and a justification to carry out mass rape and killings including low and behold, FELLOW MUSLIMS! . . . ideology gives them the justification. Unless you remove that you will always give people an avenue.” He pointedly asks if any of the letter’s signatories — who include the organisation Cage, which blamed MI5 for radicalising the British cutthroat Jihadi John — “are doing and Preventing on the ground? . . . Hmmm I wonder.”

But then comes the screeching handbrake turn on Israel-Palestine. In a separate posting Mr Ahmed accuses Netanyahu of “leading his supporters into becoming another Daesh-style state; led and influenced by bigotry and religious illiteracy”. A “Daesh-style state”? Is this the same Waqar Ahmed who takes on the Prevent detractors? Does Israel carry out public beheadings or throw gays off high-rise blocks in Tel Aviv, abandoning its status as the gay capital of the Mediterranean (then stone them if they survive)? Does its edgy film industry, often challenging to the status quo, subvert its talents to choreograph executions by burning Palestinians alive or drowning them in cages, all immortalised with a director’s gimlet eye? The analogy with Daesh is unspeakable.

I have also been told of another Prevent official who showed slides in a training session that appeared to draw an analogy between a Daesh patrol and an Israeli tank.

Shouldn’t someone have a word with this official and Mr Ahmed? Abuses against Palestinians by the IDF and religious extremists there certainly are in Israel. There are also sizeable inequities between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs although these are narrowing. The newspaper Haaretz — no friend of the Netanyahu government — reports that relations between the two have improved significantly over the last 15 years. And the stabbings have highlighted a big difference between how Israeli Arabs and the 320,000 Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem see Israeli Jews. Unlike their East Jerusalem compatriots, who have not opted for Israeli citizenship, Israeli Arabs have condemned attacks on innocent bystanders.

But IDF abuses (there is no occupying army in the world, including the British, that has not been guilty of them) and extremism in some sections of Israeli society are not representative of the country’s civic society as a whole. In truth, Israel remains the only Middle Eastern country that enshrines values closest to those as defined by the British government’s Prevent strategy: democracy, free speech, a muscular press, an independent judiciary, and pluralism.

I suspect that Messrs Qadir and Ahmed do not agree with the picture I paint of Israel. They are entitled to their view — and to express it publicly in the inflammatory terms that they have, if they must, were it not for the fact that not only are they funded by a government counter-terrorism programme but that what both have written would also be considered by the government as promoting a warped worldview.

That is not, of course, to say that either man intended to incite violence — far from it. But their views aren’t likely to discourage any angry young Muslim already simmering with prejudice either.

But then again, as I discovered while making a programme for BBC Radio 4 on the Channel deradicalisation programme, even some of the senior officials at the heart of Prevent don’t seem to agree with how the government defines extremism.

Mashuq Ally chairs the Channel Panel in Birmingham that decides if someone needs to be referred to a mentor like Mr Qadir. Mr Ally is responsible for overseeing all Channel cases in the Birmingham area. Once a lecturer in Islamic studies, he is now an assistant director of Birmingham City Council and is in charge of equality and community cohesion.

Last year a government inquiry found evidence of what it defines as non-violent extremism in up to 16 state schools in Birmingham. In total about 5,000 pupils were in schools affected by the Trojan Horse affair.

The inquiry was led by Peter Clarke a former head of counter-terrorism assisted by a team of senior civil servants and experts. Clarke reported that the Islamist “ideology” his inquiry found was “an intolerant and politicised form of extreme social conservatism that claims to represent, and ultimately seeks to control, all Muslims”.

Its manifestations in these Birmingham schools included: “anti-Western rhetoric, particularly anti-US and anti-Jewish; segregationism: dividing the world into ‘us and them’, with ‘them’ to include all non-Muslims and any other Muslims who disagree; perception of a worldwide conspiracy against Muslims; attempts to impose its views and practices upon others; intolerance of difference, whether the secular, other religions or other Muslims” and disdain among teachers for the armed forces.

Both the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, Theresa May, have described what Clarke found as examples of (non-violent) extremism. Indeed, the government’s recently published counter-extremism strategy said that Clarke had “described extremists gaining positions on governing bodies and joining the staff . . . extremist speakers making presentations to pupils and bullying and intimidation of staff who refused to support extremist views”.

However, when I asked Mr Ally if he regarded what Clarke had found as evidence of extremism he replied: “No I don’t, because I think that Trojan Horse was about essentially conservative Muslims using state schools or local government schools to promote their particular version of Islam, which wasn’t extremist, and also that was related to poor governance and management of those schools.”

Although Mr Ally said that this “conservative interpretation of Islam” was not one he would subscribe to, he nonetheless questioned whether Clarke had actually found any examples of anti-Semitism.

Clarke manifestly did — citing a teacher leading prayers giving a sermon during which he said that Christians and Jews were ignorant; a three-year-old in nursery saying his family was poor because “all the Jews and Zionists have all the money”; a ten-year-old aghast when his friend drew some stars by overlapping two triangles saying, “You can’t draw that! It’s haram [sinful] because it’s Israel.”

An ex-teacher has subsequently told a disciplinary hearing into the conduct of some of the teachers identified by Clarke that she “heard both pupils and staff use anti-Semitic language. Pupils would say to staff or other pupils ‘you Jew boy’, which was considered a derogatory term . . . racist and homophobic comments were an ongoing problem” at the school and there was “an increase in anti-Semitic graffiti in pupils’ books . . . Our pupils were being fed entirely inappropriate and biased information, which was in particular anti-Semitic.”

Clarke’s inquiry into Trojan Horse also heard evidence that Birmingham Council’s response to allegations that extremists were trying to take over schools was not to intervene for fear of damaging community cohesion. And who was the council official in charge of community cohesion? It was Mashuq Ally — who doesn’t accept that what Clarke found was evidence of extremism but who also chairs the Channel Panel that decides if someone needs to be disabused of extremist ideas.

I don’t doubt for a minute that Messrs Ally, Qadir and Ahmed would draw the line at comments like “Jew boy” or would not recognise anti-Semitic graffiti for what it was. I just wonder if they have ever considered that this stems from the cacophony of disgust now directed at Israel that owes more to fashion than facts. There may be much that is wrong with Israel — it would be a miracle if there was not, given the vicissitudes of a rapidly changing demography and the complete breakdown of trust in the Palestinian leadership. But there is much that is good and right as well — and too rarely mentioned.

For years we were assured that a new dawn would break over the Middle East if only Israel-Palestine could be resolved. Yet the satanic thunderclouds that now darken the region have rolled in all on their own.

Racism towards Jewish people has never quite had the stigma attached to other ethnic groups, a double standard that has grown as criticism of Israel has morphed into demonisation. Only when all practitioners of Prevent understand that, will they also understand that addressing it is part and parcel of what the Prime Minister says has become the defining battle of this century.
 

The post ‘Anti-Extremists’ Who Equate Israel With IS appeared first on Standpoint.

The next day Adams bounced into Charles’s private space as he sipped a cup of tea. Photographs captured this counterfeit moment of mutual respect as the heir to the throne and the diehard republican exchanged what the BBC described as a “firm and lingering” handshake. Charles smiled the dutiful smile of a Royal, betraying none of the contempt I imagine he feels for the man said by the Special Brance to have been the IRA’s Adjutant General in 1979 when they blew his “infinitely special” 79-year-old great-uncle Lord Mountbatten to pieces, along with an 83-year-old woman and two teenage boys.

There do indeed remain many unresolved injustices in Northern Ireland. But having lost the bloody and irregular war, Adams — who helped to start it — has been determined to focus attention on just one set of injustices: killings by the security forces. There were 1,785 fewer of those than there were killings by republicans. Undaunted, Adams has sought to establish a moral equivalence between the British state and the IRA, who killed vastly more innocents trying to drive the British out of Northern Ireland against the wishes of the majority in Northern Ireland.

Hence the self-righteousness with which McGuinness described the post-handshake private meeting he and Adams had with Charles: “We didn’t ask anybody in that room to apologise for anything.”

It is remarkable how Adams especially and Sinn Féin have managed to rewrite history considering that the IRA, in effect, surrendered, having reconciled themselves to the fact that their organisation had been so successfully penetrated by army police and MI5 agents it was holed like a Swiss cheese. Yet Adams and Sinn Féin have managed to turn the tables by portraying the security forces as terrorists while sanitising what the real terrorists actually did.

They have done this by relentlessly drawing attention to security force collusion with loyalist murder gangs against the IRA — a narrative that now occupies much of the work of some NGOs and lawyers.

No state can fight terrorism without some compromise over peacetime legal and moral standards. The problem for the British state is that Adams does have a bone to gnaw on. For many years now one stone after another in the undercover “dirty war” has been lifted — mostly by journalists (myself included) and NGOs — and what we have found underneath is not pretty. Recently declassified papers discovered by researchers from the Pat Finucane Centre in Derry show there did indeed exist an unhealthy alliance between the state and loyalists in the early years of the conflict. The bloodiest year was 1972, when almost 500 died; there was a bombing or a shooting every 40 minutes. At up to 50,000 strong, the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation was the Ulster Defence Association. By the summer of 1972, with their masks, dark glasses and khaki fatigues, the UDA were strutting around Belfast, some members brandishing offensive weapons. Their message to the army was: “You deal with the IRA or we will.”

The declassified documents show that the General Officer Commanding, Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, enlisted the UDA as a sort of fifth column. He let them act as auxiliaries to patrols by the Royal Ulster Constabulary in loyalist areas to free up soldiers to take on the IRA in republican strongholds. “It may even be necessary to turn a blind eye to UDA arms when confined to their own area,” Tuzo wrote to the Northern Ireland Secretary, Willie Whitelaw. “Vigilantes, whether UDA or not, should be discreetly encouraged in Protestant areas to reduce the load on the security forces.”

Sinn Féin have successfully presented this alliance as the natural evolution of British counter-insurgency operations in end-of-empire conflicts like Kenya where the British brutally colluded with tribes hostile to the Mau Mau movement.

It is obviously true that in the IRA, the British army and the UDA shared a common enemy. Senior army officers in Northern Ireland believed that working with the UDA was an alliance born of necessity. They did not consider 30,000 troops sufficient to be able to fight a war on two fronts, against not just the IRA but also the loyalists. So the army cosied up to the loyalists even though they had begun to kill Catholics randomly, sometimes in the most sadistic ways imaginable. That did not deter Whitelaw either. The day after two Catholic workers at the Rolls-Royce plant in east Belfast were murdered, he met UDA leaders to seek their help.

The army also tolerated UDA barricades. Thus emboldened by the slack cut them, the UDA stopped some Catholics and took them away for “interrogation” before murdering them in cold blood.

In the hope that loyalist frustration could be channelled into a “constructive and disciplined direction”, the British had established a part-time security force, the Ulster Defence Regiment. UDA members were allowed to join the UDR.  “I am sure that this moderate line towards UDA supporters is the right one in view of the role of the UDA as a safety valve,” Army HQ in Northern Ireland told the Ministry of Defence in London.

Before long, weapons from UDR bases were finding their way into the hands of the UDA and other loyalist paramilitaries like the Ulster Volunteer Force. By early 1973, some 222 guns had gone “missing” from the homes of UDR soldiers, had been “stolen” from UDR armouries or were “lost in transit”. In some areas 15 per cent of UDR soldiers were members of loyalist paramilitaries. By then, there had been some 140 sectarian murders, mostly carried out by the UDA.

Early evidence of this security force-loyalist collusion was gathered by Sean Donlan, a senior Irish diplomat on his trips to the north. Little escaped the notice of Protestant and Catholic neighbours in rural Northern Ireland. Trusted Catholic confidents told Donlan of Protestants who had joined the UDR and were lending their weapons to  paramilitaries. Donlan reported this to MI6 officers based at a British government house outside Holywood in County Down. Even though Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, in those days MI6, the foreign intelligence-gathering service, not MI5, was the lead agency there. Donlan says MI6’s response was, “So be it”. He warned them, “If you don’t deal with this, this little seed will grow.”

And so it did. Between 1973 and 1978, some two dozen serving and former police officers and soldiers actively colluded with the UVF in an area of Armagh and Tyrone that became known as “the murder triangle”. Some operated from a farm at Glenanne, County Armagh, then owned by a part-time policeman. “As well as being a weapons storage base there was other anecdotal intelligence and evidence that showed that his farm was used as a planning centre for several of these attacks,” says Dave Cox, a former Metropolitan Police Commander who headed the recently disbanded  Historical Enquiries Team in Belfast which reviewed the files on some 50 murders of Catholics carried out by members of the so called “Glenanne gang”.

Cox strongly suspects elements of this gang were responsible for the bloodiest day of the conflict — May 17, 1974, when car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan killed 33 people. Even though UVF members were almost certainly involved, the British government continued with its plans to de-proscribe the organisation a week later.

At night, part-time soldiers posed as real soldiers at bogus checkpoints in the countryside. Five Catholics were shot dead this way. Mass casualty attacks on Catholic bars were also favoured, executed with such insouciance that the perpetrators seemed to have assumed they would never be caught. Some belonged to an elite RUC unit, call sign “Orange”, named after the Orange Order who sometimes staged provocative marches through Catholic areas wearing orange sashes and banging lambeg drums.

Serving police officers who attacked the Rock Bar in Granemore in June 1976 using guns and a bomb packed with nails and pieces of metal actually escaped in a police car. Lying on the ground, having been machine-gunned in the stomach,  one survivor noticed his would-be killer was wearing police boots. Another gang member returned to the scene an hour later in uniform to take statements from survivors.

“Our role was to carry out attacks against the nationalist and republican community,” former police sergeant John Weir told the Irish state broadcaster RTE recently. “If ordinary Catholics were shot nobody was too worried about it.” Most of the Glenanne gang’s victims were “ordinary” Catholics.

Evidence uncovered by Cox and his team of ex-mainland detectives suggests that some in Special Branch were on to Weir and his murderous colleagues  by the autumn of 1976, if not before. If so, those Branch officers never shared this intelligence with the CID officers investigating the bombings, a pattern that marked SB-CID relations for the entire conflict. “In many, many cases we found examples that intelligence had not been passed on to the investigators and no satisfactory explanation for it in the papers at all,” says Cox. The clear implication is that Branch agents, even those involved in murder, were being protected, prioritising intelligence-gathering over justice.

Weir and some of his fellow perpetrators were only brought to justice when one of them ended up in a psychiatric ward and started talking, although “justice” dignifies the sentences handed down by the Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland Robert Lowry on those officers involved in the Rock Bar attack. They received one- or two-year suspended sentences because Lowry did not regard them as terrorists. “I must remember that whatever sentence is just, it would follow that it would be imposed on a different and lower scale from that appropriate to terrorists,” he said. The police officers’ conduct, Lord Lowry insisted, had sprung “from a feeling of frustration . . . that what I might call ordinary methods had proved relatively ineffective in dealing with terrorists”.

It was, of course, true that the IRA were wreaking death and destruction on a much greater scale than loyalists. The mind boggles, however, at how the Lord Chief Justice reached a verdict that excused taking it out on uninvolved Catholics.

The unpalatable truth is that as the conflict extended into the 1980s and 1990s collusion between loyalists and the security forces continued at a greater level than successive British governments have been prepared to admit. “I didn’t think it was anything like on the scale which we now know it was,” the former Northern Ireland security minister Michael Mates recently told me.

We now know that in 1985 MI5 assessed that 85 per cent of the UDA’s targeting material came from security force records. A “very senior RUC officer” was also suspected by MI5 of “assisting loyalist paramilitaries to procure arms”. The UDA’s five Belfast “Brigade” areas were in contact with some 100 police officers.

Army records also show that in 1987 the agent-running arm of military intelligence called the “Force Research Unit” (FRU) recruited a member of the UDA to help ensure “the proper targeting of Provisional IRA members . . . prior to any shooting”. The agent, Brian Nelson, was paid nearly £50,000 by the FRU, which arranged for him to be set up as a mini-cab driver. This gave him cover to enter hard-line republican areas to help identify IRA targets. The FRU operated “almost as if it was a maverick unit”, says Sir Hugh Orde, the former Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Eventually, the FRU reported that thanks to Nelson, UDA targeting had become “more professional”. Rarely was that so: more uninvolved Catholics were killed than IRA members, despite Nelson claiming to only want “to attack legitimate targets.”

Nelson was also involved in targeting the Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane, who represented several high-profile IRA clients. Finucane had bullet after bullet fired into his head and neck at a distance of 18 inches after two masked gunmen burst into the kitchen as the Finucane family sat down to supper in February 1989. “It’s not a place I care to go,” says Finucane’s eldest son Michael, who witnessed the murder together with his mother, younger brother and sister. At least one Special Branch officer appears to have known Finucane was being targeted, as did MI5, who had effectively helped to set him up as a target by using one of their agents in the UDA to profile him as an “IRA solicitor” in a loyalist magazine.

Between them, the FRU, MI5 and the Special Branch ran scores of agents. Most, though, were run by the Branch, which has most questions to answer in Northern Ireland’s “dirty    war”.

Many lives were unquestionably saved by the Branch. But you don’t get actionable life-saving intelligence from milkmaids. That came mostly from agents deep within the terrorist organisation who often had to prove their loyalty to those organisations by participating in terrorism, even murder. This was the central dilemma for all three intelligence agencies: to what extent should the state turn a blind eye to crimes committed by its paid agents for the greater good? An agent “can’t sort of say ‘Oh, hang on — I don’t do shootings but I will do bombings,’ you know, ‘come back next week and invite me to do one’,” says a former head of the Branch, Ray White. “No, an agent does exactly what he is asked in relation to those matters.”

However, in some cases it is by no means clear that any greater good did actually come from the more collusive relationships between Branch handlers and agents. The former Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland Nuala O’Loan says “hundreds and hundreds” died because these agents were not brought to justice — a figure disputed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland Chief Constable George Hamilton. Some, however, are alleged to have been serial killers.

One loyalist agent in the UVF in North Belfast, Garry Haggarty, is now facing no fewer than 212 charges, including five murders, six attempted murders and 31 conspiracies to murder with a further 300 offences to be taken into consideration. Some Branch officers are said to have indulged this level of criminality for a decade.

Several CID officers have told me the Branch often obstructed their investigations into killings in which agents were involved.

In my view, however, attempts by Sinn Féin and others to portray the loyalists as “state-sponsored” forces systematically protected by a sectarian police force don’t actually stack up. For a start, the loyalists were remarkably unsuccessful, never managing to kill off the ruling IRA army council. Nor do the large numbers of loyalists prosecuted by the RUC sit easily with this version of history.

Moreover, the kind of collusive relationships that existed between the British state and its informants existed to a much greater extent between the state and its informants in the IRA. The FRU, for example, ran the head of the IRA’s so-called “nutting squad” as an agent. Whilst informing to the British, his IRA role was to identify fellow traitors to the IRA. Some were then tortured into confessing before being executed. To protect this top agent, other lesser agents are said to have been sacrificed. The full truth of this case has yet to emerge but it rather suggests that compared to the agents they were running in the IRA some of the Branch’s loyalist agents “look[ed] like choirboys”, as one ex-Branch officer put it.

How was it that such collusive relationships were allowed to develop in the first place? We now know the answer: there were no proper rules for counter-terrorist agent handling operations. And for the Northern Ireland intelligence-gathering agencies this posed a dilemma that had never confronted Britain when it was fighting its small colonial wars because in places like Cyprus and Kenya there was no domestic media to account to, and the victims were not British citizens.

For Northern Ireland security ministers like Michael Mates (who had also served in the province as a soldier), confronting for the first time a terrorist threat from within our own shores “carried out by people who were our own citizens” (even though they saw themselves as Irish) posed a “unique set of challenges as to what to do with things like agent-handling”.

As head of the Special Branch in Belfast, Ray White confronted Mrs Thatcher directly with this dilemma when she visited the city in the late 1980s.

“I just took the opportunity almost off the cuff: ‘Well, Prime Minister, I would welcome detailed guidance and regulation in relation to what we do’,” explains White. “We were operating in a very grey area in which there was no case law. As a police service, we were making up guidance for ourselves as to how we should morally and professionally behave ourselves and live within the law.”

The then RUC Chief Constable Sir Jack Hermon also asked ministers to provide an agent-handling legal framework. MI5 Director General Sir Patrick Walker also raised this with Mrs Thatcher. Yet such a framework was only finally agreed 13 years later in 2000, two years after the Good Friday Agreement. “The facts speak for themselves,” says today’s PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton.

Officials did make a stab with a draft framework in 1992 — five years after the matter was first raised — but it was so ineffectual that in a handwritten note the Solicitor General, Sir Derek Spencer, wrote: “the thrust of para[graph] 4 appears to be ‘Don’t get caught’! This is unpromising territory for Ministerial approval.”

Despite the security services’ request for a framework, they don’t appear to have pressed the case home to ministers with much urgency. Nor, it seems, did ministers see the need to respond in a hurry. That amounts to a “wilful and abject failure by successive governments”, concludes the former UN chief war crimes prosecutor Sir Desmond De Silva QC, in a review commissioned by David Cameron of Patrick Finucane’s assassination. According to Mates, the security services “thought it would be better if ministers didn’t know the fine detail of these things because they might be asked to account for them and if they didn’t know they could say they didn’t know”.

However, the state’s failure to regulate agent-handling during the conflict has given credence to Adams’s mantra that there should be “no hierarchy of victims”, by which he means an IRA man shot dead by the security forces while attempting to commit murder in cold blood is as much of a victim as anyone murdered in cold blood by a terrorist. Yet when it comes to accountability, Adams seems quite happy for there to be a hierarchy — again, in the IRA’s favour. 

There is manifestly a greater onus on the state to account for its actions than terrorists turned politicians. Even so, you would think the way Adams has placed almost the entire onus on the British state to account for deaths during the Troubles in Northern Ireland might at least bring a blush to his cheeks. The IRA, let us not forget, killed nearly four times as many civilians as the security forces. Evidently this is not a consideration that seems to trouble Adams.

And here’s a reminder of the manner of so many of those deaths: car bombs set off in crowded places; part-time soldiers and policemen shot in the back or in front of their families; bombs in packed bars; the torture and cold-blooded execution of suspected informers. And for all Adams’s later talk about “my Protestant brothers and sisters” the IRA was also not above naked sectarianism, lining up Protestant workers to be machine-gunned just because they were Protestants.

Adams has acknowledged that “republicans inflicted great hurt”, so signing up to the Stormont House Agreement last year which provides a mechanism for “information retrieval” about the past, might seem like a bold step for him and Sinn Féin. The Independent Commission for Information Retrieval (ICIR) will “enable victims and survivors to seek and privately receive information about Troubles-related deaths of their next of kin”. Besides the police and Ministry of Defence, the ICIR will also approach paramilitaries for assistance.

But the IRA no longer exists as an organisation. And when it did, it did not keep records. So when it comes to questions such as which former members of the IRA ordered what IRA atrocity, the IRA’s heir Sinn Féin will legitimately be able to say it can only give very limited help. No doubt that will apply particularly to Adams since to this day he insists he was never in the IRA. “I am completely honest in that,” he says, with straight-faced chutzpah. “Gerry was a major, major player in the war yet he’s standing there denying it,” said his once close friend, the IRA commander Brendan “Darkie” Hughes, who died in 2008, and whose coffin Adams helped to carry.

However, the tables may yet be turned on all this obfuscation. Whilst the PSNI Chief Constable George Hamilton is candid enough to admit that collusion involved “something more” than just “a few bad apples” in the security forces, he is also weary of the one-sided focus on the past.

The Stormont House Agreement also established the Historical Investigations Unit and Hamilton recently allowed RTE to film a high security vault, containing millions of police documents which will assist HIU inquiries. Here lie many of the untold stories of the past. To date, the vault has only been explored for material relating to police and army activity. “I don’t think we should be exempt from scrutiny from investigation in the police service, past or present,” says Hamilton, “I think that’s good, if uncomfortable accountability, but I actually think other people have stories to tell and questions to answer.”

He means, of course, the IRA and loyalist paramilitaries. And while they may not have kept records, as Hamilton says: “We did keep records and I’m not just talking about intelligence documents, I’m talking about plans for covert operations, I’m talking about minutes of meetings.”

And then the Chief Constable adds, deadpan: “There will be material there that will present challenges for individuals and opportunities for investigators. That’s the way it works.”

We may yet see an end to the one-sided reckoning that has so far dominated the history of the Northern Ireland conflict.

The post Collusion Cut Both Ways In The Troubles appeared first on Standpoint.

That is perhaps the only aspect of his judgment that we can be certain Lutfur Rahman, now ex-mayor of the London borough of Tower Hamlets, will not be appealing.

Soon after the judgment, some 2,000 of Rahman’s Bangladeshi supporters and their godless allies on the Left renewed their anti-racist vows with righteous fervour at the Waterlily conference centre in Whitechapel which promotes itself as an “ideal” venue for “Islamic (segregated) wedding parties”.

The court found Rahman personally guilty of making false statements about his main opponent in the 2014 mayoral election, Labour’s John Biggs; bribery; undue spiritual influence; and also guilty through his agents of personation (votes cast by someone other than the registered voter); postal voting fraud; illegal voting after falsely registering as an elector; and illegally paying canvassers. The judge said Rahman had proved himself to be “almost pathologically incapable of giving a straight answer” and was “caught out in what were quite blatant lies”.

The judge also found that Rahman’s “hatchet man” — his bull-necked pitbull election agent Councillor Alibor Choudhury — was “personally guilty of corrupt and illegal practices”. Both men have now been banned from office and a new election for mayor will be held this month.

Addressing Rahman’s supporters at the Waterlily, his mentor Ken Livingstone dismissed the judgment as “a political rant by a judge” who had failed to make “any serious assessment” of the allegations brought by four petitioners. Really? Some 85 witnesses, including Rahman and Choudhury, were questioned over seven weeks in the longest election trial since 1945.

Salivating with self-satisfaction at his own oratory, George Galloway said a “vicious Islamophobic racist coup” had been mounted against the mayor. The now ex-MP for Bradford West thinks Rahman’s fate is to do with appeasing the “the ravenous dogs of UKIP and the Tory Right”.

Full-on blasts from a familiar bunch of highly-politicised characters with minds as narrow as the Socialist Workers’ Party followed. “We are going to take that judgment and shove it straight back down your throat,” said Glyn Robbins, the failed socialist parliamentary candidate for Bethnal Green and Bow.

“In Tower Hamlets we ethnic minorities are in fact the majority and Islam is the main religion, so black people and Muslims should be running this borough,” said Aaron Kiely, Black Student Officer for the National Union of Students. In other words, anyone who doesn’t see the promotion of an ethnic group as their primary goal is by definition a racist. The BNP and English Defence League would, of course, agree. “This is a fight against Islamophobia and racism,” said Kiely, which “every single progressive . . . should support.” A regressive vista of bearded male faces, vastly outnumbering a tiny, separate enclave of women, stretched out before him.

To Unite’s Chief of Staff, Andrew Murray, the judgment was a “work of unabashed megalomania by a preening puppet of the ruling elite”. Then, his voice rising to an hysterical crescendo: “Yes! You [the judge] ARE an Islamophobe! Yes! You ARE a racist!”

I, like others, had assisted the four Tower Hamlets petitioners who took Rahman to the election court with information and leads, gleaned from having made a BBC Panorama programme called “The Mayor and His Money”. Four days later, the Communities Secretary Eric Pickles sent in the consultancy firm PwC to investigate. Their report led Pickles to send in Commissioners to oversee the mayor and his administration. The final ignominy was the election court.

For two hours, under the banner “Defend Democracy In Tower Hamlets”, we were told that Rahman had been unseated by an “unelected Panorama”, an “unelected PwC”, then “unelected commissioners” and finally by an “unelected judge”, ignoring the fact that the task of resolving election disputes had been given to judges by parliament. Why? Because politicians can’t be trusted to resolve them impartially.

Judging by the applause for all 30 speakers, few if any of the audience seemed open to evidence, or had come to their belief through reasoned argument. So hysterical and zealous has the hard Left’s anti-racist crusade become that Muslims have been brainwashed into seeing the world through the prism of Islamophobia, unable to distinguish between imagined prejudice and the real thing. Islamophobia has become the new racism, and precisely because real racism is wicked and stupid, no one likes to have this label hung around their necks. That is why the relentless cry of “Islamophobia” has so successfully stifled debate about one of the most important public policy issues facing Britain: how to nudge ethnic minorities into the mainstream of British life, and especially those most resistant to this. By most indicators, these are British citizens of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage. Around 80,000 of the latter live in Tower Hamlets, the biggest Bangladeshi community in Britain.

As I left the rally, I had a taste of this zealotry. “Are you John Ware?” asked an angry man in his late thirties. “You need to seek your morals. We find you in places where you want to dig up dirt and manipulate the truth.” As I tried in vain to get a word in edgeways, a crowd gathered. “Are you in UKIP?” a young man demanded. “I’ve been hearing you are.” Then another: “I fink you’re a bit bias and a bit racist, that’s my personal opinion.” Fingers were being jabbed, minds whipped into righteous fury, blind and deaf to the evidence that had unfolded before the election court. It was time to go.

When he became mayor, Rahman’s vision for Tower Hamlets, the most ethnically diverse borough in Britain, sounded laudable. He said his priority was to create harmony across the borough’s diverse ethnicities and faiths through a community plan which he called “One Tower Hamlets”.

Many gave him the benefit of the doubt, ignoring evidence disclosed in a 2010 Channel 4 Dispatches programme by the Daily Telegraph reporter Andrew Gilligan of Rahman being partly beholden to the Islamic Forum for Europe. The IFE is the power behind the East London Mosque, fêted by princes, politicians and policemen who have “ooohed” and “aaahed” at its welcoming embrace.

Both Rahman and his election agent Choudhury described the IFE as “progressive”. It is, in fact, socially regressive, its members having been recorded as favouring theocracy over democracy. Muslims who have abandoned extremism say the IFE is actually an entryist organisation which seeks to counter moderate and secular voices in Islam.

Nonetheless, bien pensants on the Guardian and on the BBC’s “Thought for the Day”, such as the Rev Giles Fraser, saw Rahman as a worthy successor to the East End’s legacy of facing down racism, going back to Sir Oswald Mosley and his Jew-baiting blackshirts.

In truth, Rahman is neither an Islamist nor an extremist. Two residents of Tower Hamlets stand out for exposing him for what he actually is — a shallow opportunist who learned a trick or two from Labour, the party that abandoned him, about how to cosy up to the wrong sort of people to get votes.

The journalist Ted Jeory subjected Rahman and his acolytes to relentless scrutiny on his aptly named blog “Trial by Jeory”. Witty, brave, but always fair, Jeory’s blog has become the model for citizen journalism. Likewise, little escaped the gimlet eye of Peter Golds, leader of the small Conservative group on the council. To Golds, those responsible for ensuring Rahman played by the rules seemed blind to rampant abuse of power and corruption. Council officers, the local police, the Electoral Commission and Ofcom — all were in regular receipt of long and forensic letters raising valid questions. For this Golds (who is Jewish) was likened by one of the mayor’s supporters to a Klu Klux Klan leader, taunted by one of the mayor’s financial backers for being gay and falsely accused by Rahman’s office of having a criminal record.

To me, as an outsider, Rahman cut a preposterously self-aggrandising figure in the manner of autocrats in certain parts of the world. Sitting haughtily aloof in the council chamber he rarely deigned to answer questions, the opposition having been advised by the council lawyer that forcing him to do so would breach his human rights. At public expense, he plastered his face all over the borough, even on dust carts, unlike other mayors who simply promoted the office, not the person. Yet devotion to a single autocratic figure — rather than a political party — seemed to suit his fellow defectors from Labour, an all-Bangladeshi band of brothers, who had swung between up to four parties, including the Conservatives and Socialist Workers.

Rahman was unlike any other directly-elected mayor. None employed so many advisers; none had such a cosy relationship with the local media, in his case local Bangladeshi TV stations and newspapers which seemed infatuated with him; none had reserved to themselves all of the decision-making powers which it was legally possible for an executive mayor to reserve. Rahman exercised more power than any other elected executive mayor in Britain.

I suggested to the BBC that we take a closer look. He was standing for election in May 2014 but Rahman had little appeal beyond his core Bangladeshi vote which made up only 35 per cent of the electorate. Sources told me that for all his talk of “One Tower Hamlets” he seemed to be pursuing a core vote strategy by treating Bangladeshis as if they were the most important community, in the hope of maximising their turnout.

Rahman had given taxpayers’ money to faith organisations because, he claimed, “faith and religion continue to play a prominent role in the lives of the majority of our residents”. He said that the 2011 census showed that “80 per cent of local people have a religious belief”. It showed nothing of the sort. Moreover, the sections of the population for whom religion played a “prominent role” were overwhelmingly Bangladeshis and Somalis. So while the mayor did give money to some churches, two synagogues, and Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu temples, the lion’s share went to mosques.

He also dished out grants to the Bengali media, who repaid this largesse with fawning interviews in the run-up to the election. “Lutfur brother before we go on a break we want to know what you will say to the viewers regarding housing?” asked one interviewer (later jailed for fraud) on the largest Bengali station, Channel S. The mayor obliged, uninterrupted for several minutes. Channels S’s chief reporter was also paid £50,000 a year to advise Rahman on “community media” — meaning the Bangladeshi media. He didn’t have a media adviser dealing with any other community.

Despite claiming a commitment to the “highest standards of probity and transparency”, Rahman had taken the process by which he awarded grants to the borough’s thriving third sector behind closed doors. Our spreadsheet analysis of grants totalling £9 million and involving many hundreds of calculations showed the mayor had doubled the share to Bangladeshi and Somali organisations recommended by council officials.

Grants were supposed to be awarded on the basis of need. Yet officials had already factored need into their recommendations. Moreover, in the confidential audit trail, we could find no rationale for this enormous change beyond just two words: “local knowledge”. Our findings have since been confirmed by PwC and adjudged as bribery by the election court. So when I told the mayor I wanted to interview him, I was surprised that he agreed, not least because he so rarely presented himself for cross-examination. As he greeted me he smiled broadly.

What’s he got to smile about, I thought? He knew I was going to ask him whether he’d been buying votes. Looking back, I should have guessed something was up.

What I didn’t know then was that he thought he had a trump card: a young Bangladeshi researcher we had hired at the start of our research had defected to his office. Concerned over her reliability, we had asked her to leave. She had run to the mayor, saying we were “Islamophobic bullies”.

Armed with her fantastical claims and at a cost to the public purse of £127,000, the council had hired a City law firm and a PR agency which Rahman hoped would persuade the BBC we were indeed racists, so they would pull the programme.

Four days later, on a Friday night, Rahman made his pre-emptive strike. Into the weekend email inboxes of the BBC’s editorial high command came letters from the City law firm, the council’s legal department and from the mayor himself. These letters accused me and my colleagues of racism and Islamophobia. They called on the BBC to withdraw the programme.

Rightly, the BBC takes such accusations extremely seriously. The BBC’s own legal department was tasked with combing through our files of emails and source notes to see if there was any basis to the claim. They satisfied themselves that there was none. When the mayor realised the BBC was not going to cave in, he and his office resorted to dirty tricks. Before even a frame of Panorama had been transmitted, he fired off a salvo of statements, threatened a Twitter storm against us, and launched a glossy — and defamatory — counter-documentary about us on the internet which his team had obviously been preparing for weeks.

Beside “One Tower Hamlets”, Rahman’s other Gandhi-like watchword for the borough was “No Place For Hate”. That, too, was put on hold. A series of hate-filled tweets screamed hysterically from his closest supporters that the BBC licence fee had been “used to preach hate”, to “demonise Muslims” and to “peddle racism and Islamophobia”.

Rahman also issued a statement falsely claiming the BBC was under “criminal investigation” for a “racist and Islamophobic programme” — before he’d actually seen it. He had the chutzpah to protest that the programme would “reduce the chances of a free, fair and credible election” — while he and his agent were themselves engaged in cheating.

The election court found that a plot to portray his Labour opponent John Biggs as an out-and-out racist was already under way — even though Biggs had been a long-standing campaigner against the far Right.

To generate the idea that Biggs was a racist, Choudhury used a forthcoming EDL march through Tower Hamlets which the EDL had planned on the same day as Labour happened to be holding their annual summer barbecue. From the mayor’s office came a statement accusing Labour of preferring to “let their hair down over nibbles” instead of joining a “diverse community coalition” to show the EDL that “Tower Hamlets is no place for hate”. In other words, Biggs and Labour were portrayed as being half-hearted about racism, allowing Rahman to adopt a “more anti-racist than thou” posture.

What was so cynical about this ploy was that it was well known that Labour’s barbecue been arranged long before the EDL march, which Biggs had urged the Home Secretary to ban. The mayor was also the lead signatory to a Guardian letter demanding a ban. According to the judge, the mayor organised the letter but “took good care . . . to ensure that Mr Biggs was neither informed of the letter nor asked to be a signatory”.

Biggs had also told the BBC that the mayor was pursuing a core Bangladeshi vote strategy. While Bangladeshis were a “very important community in Tower Hamlets” they were not “the only community”. Biggs’s vision was for a “more outward-looking borough where different communities work together, live together and maximise our opportunities”.

He had a valid non-racist point. With little affinity to anyone outside the Bengali community, the mayor’s all-Bangladeshi group was unlikely to inspire fellow Bangladeshis to move away from self-segregation towards more social mixing with the mainstream. Some 44,000 Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets still use Bengali as their main language, an insularity reinforced by Bengali TV stations. Lack of fluency in English reduces job prospects and social mobility, and reinforces deprivation.

Nonetheless, Rahman and Choudhury claimed there was “outrage” over Biggs’s comments — even though no evidence of outrage had surfaced either in social media or even in the Bengali media. Rather, this “outrage” was timed for the start of the mayor’s re-election campaign.

Five months after Biggs’s comments, out of the blue came an announcement from Choudhury that he had reported Biggs to the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, claiming his comments were “untrue and inflammatory and are doing lasting damage to community cohesion in the East End”. Next, Choudhury likened Biggs to Sir Oswald Mosley. Small wonder younger voters were coming up to Biggs and saying, “You’re a racist. Why should I vote for you?” Associating Biggs with the National Front, the BNP and the EDL, one of the Mayor’s key councillors tweeted: “Different face, same message . . . NF, ‘you fucking Paki’, BNP, ‘you Paki’, EDL, ‘you f’ing Muslim’, now John Biggs, ‘You Abdul’.” In a kind of reverse racism, the editor of the London Bangla ran a headline: “Labour’s Hate Campaign . . . Labour leaders still think they rule an Empire in which the Asian thinks like the white man wants.”

Choudhury told the judge that Biggs had started “this race war”. The judge found that Rahman and Choudhury had broken election law by falsely stating that Biggs was a racist when neither had a reasonable belief that he was.

Besides the race card, the mayor also played the faith card in what the judge described as a “double act” with Tower Hamlet’s most influential imam — Mauluna Shamsul Hoque, chairman of the Council of Mosques, which represents the borough’s 45 mosques. At a rally with Rahman at his side as the “chief guest” Hoque urged his religiously observant Bangladeshi audience to vote for him “in order to retain truth, righteousness and practice belief”. Truth? In the witness box Rahman denied Hoque had said any such thing, or that it was an election rally. Hoque, also on oath, said likewise. Unfortunately for both Hoque and Rahman, the court had a near-contemporaneous Facebook account of the rally from the organiser — himself a supporter of Rahman.

A week later, Rahman and Hoque attended a Bangladeshi wedding. Again Rahman was guest of honour and again both he and Hoque on oath denied that Hoque had urged the guests to vote for him. Again, unfortunately for Hoque and Rahman, there was a record of what both men had said — this time a video (as is the custom at weddings) which recorded Hoque as having said: “We have decided to nominate our mayor again . . . we will elect the mayor again and celebrate his victory . . . We have to forget ‘win or lose’; this election is to sustain our own existence and asking you to prayer.”

On the last Friday before the election — presumably, said the judge, intended for discussion at Friday prayers — a letter signed by Hoque and no fewer than 100 imams was published in a Bengali weekly paper, the Desh, with a readership of 20,000. It condemned the mayor’s opponents for “spreading jealousy and hatred in the community. We consider these acts as abominable and at the same time condemnable.”

The letter continued: “. . . for the sake of truth, justice, dignity and development, we express our unlimited support for Mayor Lutfur Rahman and strongly call upon you, the residents, to shun all propaganda and slanders and unite against the aforesaid and injustice.” Labour and Panorama were singled out.Since the letter was published only in Bengali, it was clearly directed at Bengali-speaking Muslims.

On oath, Rahman insisted he had never read the letter, a claim the judge said “beggars belief” given that he had enlisted the support of the borough’s most influential imam to tell his fellow Muslims it was their religious duty to vote for him.

While a priest or an imam has every right to implore his congregation to vote for X or Y, what election law does not allow is to “appeal to the fears, or terrors, or superstition of those he addresses”. The judge found that this was what Rahman and Hoque had done. As he himself acknowledged, this will likely be controversial verdict for it depended on finding that their Bangladeshi audience would have accepted the word of their religious leaders as authoritative because they were traditionalist, conservative, strongly religious and not fully integrated. In court both English- and Bengali-speaking witnesses gave evidence that on election day voters ran the gauntlet of Rahman’s supporters, shouting that it was the religious duty of faithful Muslims to vote for him.

As Britain transitions into an increasingly multi-faith and multi-ethnic society, so faith is intruding ever more into politics and public life. How do we guard against the divisive misery that religion has brought to other parts of the world when it gets mixed up with ideology? Parliament saw the danger as recently as 1983 when it decided we still needed a law to prevent the misuse of religion for political purposes. Yet the outcry from Rahman’s many Bangladeshi supporters and no doubt many other Muslims shows that this law is double-edged. Should we keep it? It is a question that Mr Commissioner Mawrey has invited us to ponder.

His judgment speaks volumes about the urgent need for a much more open conversation about how this country accommodates the rapidly growing variations in ethnicity, faith, values, outcomes and performance — the entire multicultural and multi-faith gamut — to avoid sleepwalking into some kind of Balkanised disaster. This conversation can’t happen unless we feel free to talk about these things in the same way we talk about, say, social class — free from the emotion whipped up by real racists and by those who use anti-racism to define the limits of what is acceptable even to debate.

The post The Rotten Borough Lutfur Rahman Built appeared first on Standpoint.

With Islamist terrorist plots now running at more than one a month, the UK counter-terrorism effort can deal only with the crocodiles that are bumping against the boat. So the Home Office is setting up a special unit that will analyse the effectiveness of government measures aimed at “draining the swamp” as the Prime Minister has put it.

The Extremism Analysis Unit (EAU) will be the first of its kind in government to gather empirical evidence about the behaviour and ideologies of extremists. In some ways, this may be even more challenging than the task performed by its companion unit—the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), which analyses intelligence on the terrorist threat. While JTAC’s job is to stop terrorists from killing, the EAU will analyse the extremist spectrum from its violent to its non-violent end. It will also explore the relationship between integration and extremism. 

Many Muslims in Birmingham, Luton, parts of London and the old northern mill towns seem resistant to integrating into the liberal mainstream. More British Muslims have gone to Syria and Iraq than there are Muslims in the British army. I understand that officials have been unable to demonstrate that any initiatives by this government or the last to promote integration have had any beneficial impact.

The EAU will attract controversy because while it will, of course, analyse all sources of extremism, its principal focus will inevitably be on Islamist extremism, because this will pose the greatest threat to national security for the foreseeable future.

The reaction here to the slaughter of 17 people in Paris offers a glimpse into why extremism presents a generational challenge. The journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo magazine were executed for lampooning the Prophet Muhammad and the Jews shopping on the eve of Shabbat just because they were Jews. Paris probably inspired the Danish jihadist last month to target a Copenhagen synagogue killing a Jewish guard after killing a film director at a free speech debate hosted by Lars Vilks the Swedish cartoonist who has also sent up the Prophet.

How do you persuade those British mosques in London and the Midlands reported to have expressed greater offence over Charlie Hebdo‘s cartoons than the fate of the massacred that such attitudes won’t create the common life required for a cohesive, harmonious society? Rather than demonstrate around the Cenotaph against global jihadi terrorism, 1,000 Muslims instead waved banners warning non-Muslims to “be careful with Muhammad”, and telling them to “learn some manners”. 

“Whether Muslim people say it or not, deep down they are probably happy with what happened,” the Muslim manager of a small supermarket in Slough told the BBC Today programme. “Not in the sense of people having lost their lives . . . but in the sense that something needs to be done to stop insulting our Prophet.” The reporter pressed him. “Are you really saying what’s happened [in Paris] has taught those who insult Islam a lesson?” He replied: “To be honest, it’s not as if people are going to be jumping around the streets for joy but (it’s also) not as if people are going to be mourning their deaths, in my opinion.” Some mosque congregations are also reported to have been told that the killers simply could not have been Muslims. Mossad then? 9/11 déjà vu.

On the streets, verbal and physical abuse against both Muslims and Jews is sharply rising, with George Galloway, the Respect MP for Bradford West, claiming that the attacks on the former were “many times more” than the latter. Maybe, but per capita? The British Jewish population is just one tenth of the Muslim population. Galloway’s moral strictures on the evils of anti-Semitism expressed on BBC Question Time last month also sit oddly with his support for Hamas and its genocidal outbursts.

A priority for the EAU should be an examination of the relationship between what the government calls “non-violent extremism” and “violent extremism”. The government’s current Prevent programme is aimed at restricting space for non-violent extremists who ministers say spread hatred and fear. The Prime Minister believes it is this ideology that lies at the root of violent extremism. Islamists not only insist that no such link exists but that to suggest it does represents yet another attack on Islam—”criminalising Islam” as they put it. They argue that the sort of behaviour the government regards as “extreme” is actually representative of orthodox/mainstream Islam.

Such are the claims of clerics like Sheikh Haitham al-Haddad, who espouses an ideological version of puritanical Wahhabi Salafism as practised in, and exported by, Saudi Arabia. In Britain, as in Europe, Salafists are gaining in popularity and influence, particularly among the Islamic societies of our universities.

A staunchly pro-Haddad website called “Islam 21C” describes the Saudi- and SOAS-trained sheikh as “someone well-known for propagating beliefs and practices that enjoy a unanimous consensus among classical schools of Islamic thought, which most Muslims ostensibly claim to follow.” If Haddad does indeed represent mainstream Islam in this country, then we are in trouble.

In his popular and sometimes witty lectures on Islam to mosques, Islamic centres and on satellite TV channels, Haddad disdains Western values. He has described parliamentary democracy as “filthy”, yet encourages his co-religionists to exploit the ballot box for the far-distant but ultimate purpose of establishing a Muslim majority in parliament as a prelude to a caliphate. He has described gender equality as “a very evil thing” and for citizens of Islamic states he advocates the death penalty for apostates (Muslims who leave Islam) and adulterers.

Where does Haddad stand on violent jihad, as opposed to its spiritual version? He argues against Muslims who say that jihad is just “spiritual” inner struggle: this is “not an acceptable opinion whatsoever . . . whether they will take us all to prison, or they don’t, okay, it is up to them . . . this is “part of our deen [religion], yeah?”

To be clear, Haddad does not advocate violent jihad against the UK, or what he defines as innocent civilians. Yet speaking about the Israel-Palestine conflict, he seemed to expand its regional context to a wider one by referring to “the conflict between Islam and the enemies of Islam” as an “ongoing conflict and we should pay the price of this victory from our blood and Muslims are ready to do so”. He went on to say the Israel-Palestine conflict “clearly encouraged all Muslims to prepare themselves for jihad, all Muslims all over the world”.

Another popular Salafist cleric on the speaker circuit is Murtaza Khan, who has likened living in Britain to being “surrounded” by an “epidemic” of “evil”. He laments that too many British Muslims are following one or other of two “accursed nations”. He means Christians and Jews. Khan is an Islamic Studies teacher at a primary school in London and a visiting preacher at East London University. He seems to be permanently on fire, and the sheer aggression of his delivery and words can make the genial but hard-line Haddad look kitten-like by comparison.

Like Haddad, Khan has not advocated violence against his fellow UK citizens, but what might his audience have made of his tirade about the meaning of jihad when he explained that the “glory of the Muslim ummah” [global nation of believers] would only be revived when the “black ink . . . of the scholar” on a map of the world and the “red ink of the martyr . . . are put together”. He said that to restore the map “to its original format [i.e. the Islamic empire] . . . only a few individuals . . . strive to . . . raise the word of Allah once again” but get “blamed” for “encouraging people . . . towards terrorism, towards bloodshed, towards evil action, to upheaval . . . Where is the evidence for this type of belief?”

According to Khan, when Islam finally dominates the map again, he “envisage[s] a beautiful time of victory” when Muslims can be “stern towards the disbelievers” and you will have “the right to show the power and the dominance of Islam. Even walking in the streets you shouldn’t give them way.”

While not advocating violence against UK citizens, it might be thought blindingly obvious that this angry and extreme world view championed by the likes of Khan and Haddad at least helps prepare the ground for violent extremism.

After all, terrorism is not just about violence for a specific purpose. Terrorists always draw on extreme ideology and the British jihadists who have joined IS have justified violence on the grounds of their beliefs. Non-violent extremist clerics like Haddad and Khan share some of the ideology of al-Qaeda and the extremist groups broadly sympathetic to them: namely, a triumphal belief in the superiority of Islam, a duty to work for the re-establishment of a caliphate by uniting Muslims under one interpretation of sharia, contempt for the West and its mores, and support for brutal punishments for “crimes” like adultery and apostasy, regarded in the West as matters of free conscience.

To take just one of those shared beliefs: hostility to our liberal, democratic, capitalist society, a view Salafist speakers often present forcefully to university Islamic societies. In 2008 Professor Martin Innes of Cardiff warned—presciently—that the threat to the UK from jihadist terrorism might increase. His research on behalf of the Association of Chief Police Officers showed that:

Increasing numbers of young Muslim people are becoming sufficiently disaffected with their lives in liberal-democratic-capitalist societies that they might be willing to support violent terrorism to articulate their disillusionment and disengagement.

Do those who discount a relationship between non-violent extremism and violent extremism believe that sentiments like Haddad’s about democracy being “filthy” are likely to dispel, or exacerbate that “disillusionment and disengagement”?

Still, the Salafists rely heavily on a recent report from the former editor of Race and Class, now lecturing in terrorism studies at John Jay College, New York. Professor Arun Kundnani is also the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism and the Domestic War on Terror. He says the idea that terrorism is caused by extremism—as defined by opposition to British values—”does not stand up to scholarly scrutiny.”

Kundnani has set up a straw man. For he also says that the “factors which lead someone to commit acts of terrorism are complex and cannot be reduced to holding a set of values deemed to be radical.” No one has said otherwise.

A sense of alienation fostering an identity crisis, absence of role models, foreign policy—all can interact with theo-political factors without pushing a person into violence. The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has said as much. But as she also says, the “damage” caused by non-violent extremism that “promotes intolerance, hatred and a sense of superiority over others . . . is reason enough to act. And there is, undoubtedly, a thread that binds” these beliefs “to the actions of those who want to impose their values on us through violence”.

Kundnani appears to want to erase this ideological thread from the equation entirely. If not ideology, then what drives the thousands of Muslim youths from Muslim countries—some of them under the control of sharia—to become terrorists?

Kundnani’s paper has been published and promoted by an organisation called Claystone Associates, which says it is an “an independent think tank formed to offer research, analysis and reasoned solutions to foster social cohesion in relation to Muslims in Britain”.

How “independent”? One of Claystone’s directors is also a main writer for Islam 21C, which says it is the “flagship website of the Muslim Research & Development Foundation (MRDF).” Until March 2014, MRDF’s managing director was Haitham Haddad. It is hard not to see Kundnani’s paper as part of an attempt to rehabilitate ideological Salafism as mainstream Islam in Britain today.

And Islam finds it hard to reconcile itself to being a minority. As the late Zaki Badawi, founder and principal of the Muslim College in London, said, Islam has an inherent drive for expansion beyond spiritual into politics, society and law: “A proselytising religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavours to expand in Britain.”

For the benefit of the wider Muslim community in Britain, there is a pressing need to settle this dispute between the government and Islamists over whether non-violent extremism helps push Muslims into violent extremism. The battle lines have been too fuzzy for too long. They urgently need clarifying to allow an open and honest debate, based on hard evidence.

Following the slaughter over Charlie Hebdo, four British Muslims went on a BBC Panorama documentary that I presented to explain why they believed the government was right—that their non- violent but extreme co-religionists were taking Muslims to the front door of violent extremists who then opened it. Whether they go through that door can also depend on the other factors I have mentioned.

The response was a fusillade of vicious personal insults at these Muslim interviewees. Bad manners again got the better of “Islamic etiquette”. Some of this abuse was also irresponsible. Abu Eesa, an imam and lecturer, implied the interviewees were “apostates”. In the current febrile climate, it is not fantasy to fear a fanatic might try to impose the death penalty. A poll has suggested that a third of young British Muslims support execution for apostates. Abu Eesa also complained that under the Prevent programme “scholars [presumably like Haitham Haddad and Murtaza Khan] cannot express basic Islamic facts to those willing to better themselves”.

That is untrue. There is no law against saying that gender equality is “evil” or that homosexuals are worse than “animals” or that democracy is “filthy” or that apostates should be executed. Nor should there be—and if the government’s Counter Terrorism Bill does restrict the expression of such beliefs, that would be like poking a beehive and would be unwise. Yet it’s happened because the government believes the Muslim community has shown itself to be incapable or unwilling to put its own house in order.

Where then, does the organisation that claims to most widely represent Islam in Britain stand on the impact of non-violent extremism?

The Muslim Council of Britain’s (MCB) secretary-general is a physician, Dr Shuja Shafi. He is reported to have said he has “no idea” why some young people become radicalised. That hasn’t stopped the MCB from saying what they don’t think causes radicalisation.

Like the Salafists, the MCB says there is no evidential link between the government’s definition of non-violent extremism and violent extremism. It also says there is no justification for the Prevent programme to focus on Muslims when “the vast majority of terrorist attacks in EU countries have for years been perpetrated by separatist organisations, with less than 2 per cent being by Muslims”. They point to an EU Europol report which says that two out of 152 terrorist attacks in 2013 were “religiously motivated”.

Aside from the fact that Prevent does address all sources of extremism, what the MCB does not mention are the 216 arrested for religiously inspired attacks in 2013. This figure also appears to exclude the UK, which would boost it appreciably. Nor does the MCB mention that attacks from separatist organisations have decreased significantly and that 41 of these can be attributed to dissident republicans in Northern Ireland. Nor, unlike violent jihadists, do separatists go for mass casualty attacks. They tend to target infrastructure and, unlike jihadists, they pursue a limited goal of separatism—not changing the fabric of society or way of life in the West.

Nor does the MCB agree with the government as to what constitutes extremism. Two official inquiries into the so-called “Trojan Horse” plot affecting 16 Birmingham state schools found evidence of Muslim children being warned not to listen to Christians because they were “all liars”, how they were “lucky to be Muslims and not ignorant like Christians or Jews”, of children being warned they would go to hell if they didn’t pray, of segregation, of homophobia, a hard-line curriculum, contempt for the armed forces and even scepticism about the near-beheading of Drummer Lee Rigby and American civilians killed by the Boston nail bombers. Yet the MCB dismissed most of this bigotry as merely evidence of “conservative Muslim practices”.

At a recent London conference of head teachers, Muslim boys were reported to have turned their backs on girls dancing in a school performance and insisted that they needed to leave their classrooms in the middle of lessons in order to pray at set times.

Dr Shafi is reported to have supported the boys, only conceding that they should have adopted school rules after repeated questioning. Is it any wonder that those children opposed the British value of tolerance? Yet one can only imagine the furore had the head tried to enforce school rules with detention.

I have never heard the MCB condemn the bigoted beliefs which non-violent Salafists like Haddad and Khan proclaim as mainstream Islam. They agree with the Salafists that the current Prevent programme should be closed down. And like the Salafists-and other Islamists—they have a reflex tendency to dismiss criticism of such beliefs as “Islamophobic” and motivated by a right-wing “neo-con” agenda.The problem is that Islamists don’t seem to know their Left from their Right. And we don’t help by calling them “radical”. The broad spectrum of Islamist ideology is not radical. In its views about equality, women, gays, freedom of conscience, and the economy, Islamism is, in fact, regressive and right-wing.

If you want to know just how much our deference to Islamic sensibilities has muddled our Left-Right thinking, look no further than the current “Stand Up To Racism” campaign, sponsored by the MCB, trade unions and the Communist newspaper the Morning Star. One of its speakers last month was billed as Shakeel Begg, for the past 14 years the chief imam of the Lewisham Islamic Centre in south London.

Some of the speakers whom Begg’s Islamic Centre has given a platform to are very regressive indeed. Like the Saudi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Salih Al-Munajjid, who runs an online Q&A about Islam. Asked online what should be the punishment for gays, the sheikh quoted sacred texts saying they should be burned, or “thrown from a high place, then have stones thrown at them”.

Islamic State literally enforces this. A man in his fifties, said to be gay, was recently thrown off a seven-storey building by IS. He survived the fall, only for a baying mob to finish him off with stones.

Again quoting from sacred texts, here’s what the sheikh says about taking non-Muslims as friends: “Allah forbids all this.” Why? Because Muslims are “forbidden” from appointing kaafirs [disbelievers] to positions where they might “find out the secrets of the Muslims and plot against them by trying to do all kinds of harm” like “bring[ing] our children up as kaafirs“.

Why would Shakeel Begg, the imam of an Islamic Centre in London, which has given a platform for clerics like Sheikh Al-Munajjid, Murtaza Khan, Haitham Haddad and other regressives be seen by the “Stand Up To Racism” campaign as a champion of progressive thinking?

The premise on which this far-right Islamist alliance with the British Left and far-Left is based seems bogus. The Islamists need the support of Britain’s Left to mainstream themselves, while the Left has needed the Islamists to inject new revolutionary life into last-century Marxism.

We need to change the language. The Beggs, Haddads and Khans of this world aren’t radicals. The radicals are the four Muslims who appeared on Panorama challenging their regressive ideas, precisely because they are the progressives.

All four were observant Muslims in their own right and they dared to speak the truth that too often has not dared speak its name: that violent extremism is evidence of a terrible schism within Islam. Politicians reach out to Muslims after every major atrocity by emphasising that it has “nothing to do with Islam”, but rather, a “poisonous ideology.” This reflex is a measure of how successful the Islamist-propagated catchphrase “religion of peace” (like “Islamophobia”) has become. And of course as a personal faith rather than a political ideology Islam is genuinely a religion of peace for many millions of Muslims. Yet people aren’t stupid. They wonder why—if all that can be said about this ideological version of Islam is that it’s “poisonous”—its believers keep coming back to the religious texts.

The fact of the matter is that the Prophet Muhammad was a warrior and the Koran does contain many passages which, if taken literally, sanction the foulest deeds imaginable. The Koran also contains passages that furnish the basis for religious pluralism. The problem is there has never been an exclusive truth about how to interpret these conflicting narratives in the 21st century from Islam’s two prime sources—the Koran and the Hadiths.

The near daily news of atrocities across the world committed in the name of Islam may have nothing to do with traditional or classical Sunni jurisprudence. But the gap between those traditionalists and the Islamists has been growing for more than a century and it has accelerated more recently. Until that gap is closed, there will continue to be a “problem with Islam”.

Baroness Warsi, who resigned last year as minister for faith and communities, says she wants the government to engage with a wider cross-section of Muslims, rather than only the “dozen people” who agree with it. She urges ministers to re-engage with the MCB. Yet she also acknowledges that the MCB “continues to produce a leadership that is neither equipped to represent, nor is genuinely reflective of, the contemporary aspirations of large sections of British Muslim communities”. So what exactly is there to re-engage with?

The Baroness also says that Muslims will speak up for British values only when they know their concerns will be heard. Yet since 9/11 we have heard little else but these concerns from Muslim community leaders, while the rest of us are waiting to hear more of those voices that spoke out on Panorama. We know there are many more but they fear the abuse they know will be heaped upon them. There is also a natural reluctance to fracture the unity forged by faith, and a sense of being under siege. “The problem is they get stuck in the Muslim First camp,” a Muslim friend told me. Not for much longer, we must hope. We risk becoming a very fractured society and we are running out of time. 

The post Inside The World Of ‘Non-Violent’ Islamism appeared first on Standpoint.

This was not the Saudi capital, Riyadh. It was Britain’s second city, Birmingham, and the teachers were from one of the secular state schools targeted by religious hardliners in the so-called “Trojan Horse” plot which attempted to convert them into Islamic faith schools in all but name.

At another school, a male governor pointed disapprovingly to a young teacher wearing a short-sleeved dress. Turning to an older teacher, he demanded: “Can you ask her to cover her arms please?” “No,” replied the teacher. “Why not?” asked the governor. “Because she’s 25 and I’m 60.” “Can’t she wear a shawl, then?” “No! She’s wearing standard Western dress.” 

How was it possible that female teachers faced criticism merely for baring their arms in school? What explains the intolerance towards such a basic liberty? The right of a woman to be able to uncover her arms is not, admittedly, a right on a par with the right to free speech or a fair trial. But being free in a state-funded institution to dress in clothes which have not been given the seal of approval by highly conservative Muslims is nonetheless a valuable right, and one which most women in this country wish to preserve.

The incubator of that intolerance has been officially identified as the Park View Educational Trust, which runs three state schools and which tried to export its “Islamising blueprint” to several other schools in east Birmingham, where most of the city’s 140,000 citizens of Pakistani heritage live.

In July, as 600 pupils streamed through the gates of Park View School to start their summer break, the acting principal bade them a confident farewell: “See you in September,” said Monzoor “Mozz” Hussain. But he won’t. Hussain is alleged to have been the administrator of a semi-secret group called the “Park View Brotherhood.” He has been suspended and may face a professional misconduct hearing before the National College for Teaching and Leadership, an agency of the Department for Education (DfE).

Children returning this month to some schools affected byTrojan Horse will find they are being taught by a record number of supply teachers. At one secondary it’s approaching 20 per cent. There’s been an exodus of disheartened teachers. “The heart has gone out of the school,” said a former teacher. “Nobody to lead it and nobody to love it.” Yet more suspensions are forecast after the two latest official inquiries into the impact of Trojan Horse. 

These two inquiry reports cry out for a national debate for they mark a seminal moment in the challenge that faces this country: how exactly do we create a common life with fellow citizens who have shown a greater reluctance to assimilate than most other ethnic minorities, who already practise Britain’s second largest religion, are projected to form 8 per cent of the population by 2030 and whose observant followers are becoming more socially and religiously conservative?

Unfortunately, the two reports were published as Parliament rose for the summer recess. Partly as a result, they’ve barely had a hearing but the evidence they present is explosive.

The most detailed and hard-hitting of the reports was written by a former head of counter-terrorism, Peter Clarke, assisted by a 14-strong team of senior civil servants and experts. He was appointed by the former Education Secretary Michael Gove. Someone with access to Clarke’s draft sought to limit the damage with a controlled explosion by leaking it to the Guardian days ahead of publication. This worked. Newspapers gave Clarke minimal, inside-page treatment. 

The second report was written by a respected former head teacher in Coventry, Ian Kershaw, who now runs an education consultancy. He was appointed by the local education authority, Birmingham City Council. Although Clarke and Kershaw shared some witness evidence, I am told that they did not discuss their conclusions with each other. That fact makes the striking similarity of many of their findings all the more significant. 

Between them, Clarke and Kershaw identified 16 state schools as having been the target of takeover tactics, albeit at different stages, by male Muslim governors and teachers mainly of Pakistani heritage. Clarke says that the Park View Brotherhood was at the heart of this “pre-determined plan” deploying “coordinated, deliberate and sustained action” to “introduce an intolerant and aggressive Islamic ethos” into the schools. 

We learn that when asked to present the sex and relationship curriculum for the approval of a secondary school’s governors, a senior female teacher was shouted at and told that she was “trying to get our boys to masturbate”. One governor refused to speak to her solely because she is a woman. 

Governors and staff at Park View Trust schools were openly homophobic. Nansen Primary staff said they were told to teach that homosexuality is a “sin”. And here’s what the Nansen Primary’s recently suspended deputy head, Razwan Faraz, thinks of gay people: “These animals are going out full force. As teachers we must be aware and counter their satanic ways of influencing young people.” Faraz implores “Allah” to “further expose this and give us the strength to deal and eradicate it”. 

A Muslim head teacher was sworn at and hissed at by parents and teachers in the playground after being the victim of rumours that she was sexually promiscuous. She was also branded a kaffir (unbeliever). How was such bigotry tolerated in secular state schools when Birmingham City Council had frequently been warned about similar behaviour going back to the early 1990s? It seems the answer is that officials feared they might upset Birmingham’s Muslims if they intervened. The council’s Equalities Division apparently advised action could “destabilise relationships across the city”. 

When the first trickle of Trojan Horse stories emerged last spring, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) dismissed them as “idle chatter” and demanded: “End this witch-hunt of British Muslims.” Yet Clarke and Kershaw disclose numerous examples of offensive behaviour — not just of sexism, homophobia, bullying and aggression, but also of discrimination against non-Muslims, financial impropriety and nepotism, with jobs going to friends and relatives of governors.

Some governors and teachers are also said to have used children to humiliate staff who didn’t toe a more fundamentalist line: governors encouraged pupils to criticise head teachers; children were told to tell their non-Muslim teacher that she wore too much make-up; another Muslim teacher was ridiculed by a male Muslim teacher for showing her neck. 

After one sex and relationship lesson at Park View School, boys told girls they couldn’t refuse husbands sex. A team of 160 students was also alleged by staff to have been appointed as a kind of religious police to report the names of staff and pupils who behaved in “unacceptable” ways, like boys and girls talking to or touching each other. The school vigorously denies both charges.

Clarke also says children were coerced into praying — even though it wasn’t a faith school. Clarke cites a teacher using a microphone from a high window to shout at children in the playground after the daily tannoyed call to prayer had gone out (it was switched off when government inspectors arrived).

The Park View Brotherhood weren’t motivated just by religious conservatism. Clarke finds there was also a political “Islamist” dimension: anti-Western rhetoric, particularly anti-US and anti-Jewish, “highly offensive comments about British service personnel”, and scepticism about the truth of the terrorist murders of Drummer Lee Rigby and American civilians killed by the Boston nail bombers, with links to conspiracy theorist videos about both outrages. 

The Brotherhood was seeking to “impose upon children . . . the segregationist attitudes and practices of a hard-line and politicised strand of Sunni Islam”, says Clarke, which “claims to represent and ultimately seeks to control all Muslims”.

In the face of such a disturbing picture of extreme and intolerant beliefs, one might have expected universal condemnation from public figures who consider themselves to be enlightened and progressive. So what was the reaction from the former heads of Education in Birmingham, the Runnymede Trust and the National Youth Agency? “A biased mix of uncorroborated smear, anecdote, hoax and chatroom gossip,” said Sir Tim Brighouse, Robin Richardson and Tom Wylie in a jointly-signed letter to the Guardian. The evidence adduced was “not forensic” and was “unlikely to bear scrutiny”. 

One of the reasons Gove asked Clarke to investigate the Trojan Horse affair was because, as a former policeman, he had a reputation as a patient investigator who understood the difference between hard evidence and hearsay. 

Shahid Akmal, a former Revenue and Customs official, was chair of Nansen Primary governors. What is his view of women — especially non-Muslim women? While acknowledging that women can be as intelligent as men, Akmal considers that “emotionally women are much weaker . . . they are not on the same level”. He also thinks they should stay at home to “look after the house, look after the children”. He disapproves of women who become “high-flying” politicians: “She has to sacrifice her family, she has to sacrifice her children, she has to sacrifice her husband, all in the name of equality.” 

Recorded by an undercover reporter, Akmal also says: “Our women are much, much better consciously in the heart than any white women . . . White women have the least amount of morals.”

Equally revealing have been the 3,250 postings from the Park View Brotherhood’s discussion group on WhatsApp, a messaging application. Set up and administered by Park View School’s acting principal Mozz Hussain, its core contributors were mainly teachers there or at Nansen Primary, or the Park View Trust’s other school, Golden Hillock secondary. 

Here’s a sample of the posts. Commenting on a BBC report about gays in Pakistan, Teacher A says: “If you have just eaten, read after two hours. Caution advised.” To which Teacher B replies: “This stuff is disgusting and must happen but we should try to lift our imam (faith) in these difficult times rather than buy into this type of cheap sensational garbage . . .” 

Teacher A goes on: “. . . these filthy crime is happening in the land that our parents belong to . . . the practice of homosexuality is certainly the signs of the end of times. This agenda is also being promoted by our government in the UK, therefore, it’s imperative that we as educators don’t shy away from this . . .” 

Besides children being encouraged to disparage Christmas — with celebrations banned at two primary schools, Nansen and Oldknow Academy — Clarke cites allegations of “racist attitudes promoted in assembly”. One example is the teacher reported to have told children that Christians were “all liars”. A teacher is also said to have told children Christians and Jews were ignorant.

The fact that Gove chose a former head of counter-terrorism was widely interpreted as proof that he was Islamophobic. He was accused of conflating ordinary religious conservatism with extremism, and therefore terrorism. 

A chorus of disapproval came from the Chief Constable of West Midlands Police (“desperately unfortunate”); Birmingham MPs (Shabana Mahmood: “deeply provocative”, Liam Byrne: “Parents are bloody angry”); former Respect leader Salma Yaqoob (“a disaster for community cohesion”); the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (“Politically motivated”); and Guardian commentator Seumas Milne, who asserted that Gove wanted to “humiliate the Muslim community”, while the paper’s education correspondent concluded: “There’s not much evidence of anything.”

Of course Clarke found no evidence of AK47s being stored in school lockers — but then he never imagined he would. As he repeatedly stressed: “I most definitely was not approaching my role from the perspective of looking for evidence of terrorist activity, radicalisation or violent extremism.”

Nonetheless, the MCB, Salma Yaqoob, Liam Byrne and others endorsed the “straw man” argument that looking for radicalisation was what Gove had tasked Clarke to do. And because Clarke found no such evidence, his critics reached the bogus conclusion that, as Yaqoob put it, the “central allegation . . . remains unproven”. 

But the central allegation was emphatically not that schools were directly radicalising children. It was that a group of conservative-minded governors and teachers was using entryist tactics to take over secular state schools — an Islamist version of the 1980s plot by the Militant Tendency to infiltrate the Labour party — that risked making children vulnerable to radicalisation.

These tactics were set out in the now infamous and anonymous “Trojan Horse” letter. That letter purported to be the outline of a five-stage plot to remove those head teachers in state schools with a majority of Muslim pupils who were not prepared to run their schools on strict Islamic principles. The idea was to replace them with heads who would. In recent years ten heads in east Birmingham have resigned or been dismissed, with the ousted female non-Muslim head of Oldknow Academy having been subjected to “relentless” pressure.

The MCB has sought to undermine evidence that there was a plot to take over schools in that way. “The document proved to be a fake,” complained an MCB statement, “but accusations of an extremist plot still exist.” 

They do — and for the simple reason that whether the letter is a fake is not the issue, nor ever has been. The issue is whether the substance of the letter was true. Clarke and Kershaw found that it was, with evidence that some, or all, of the five Trojan Horse steps were present in at least 14 primary and secondary secular state schools, and two state faith schools.

Although neither inquiry found evidence of “direct radicalisation or violent extremism”, Clarke did find “clear evidence” of teachers and governors “who espouse, sympathise with or fail to challenge extremist views . . . however intolerant or obnoxious”.

Kershaw did not find evidence of an anti-British agenda. However he did not have access to some evidence available to Clarke, like the Park View Brotherhood’s WhatsApp messages, which Clarke reveals contained a “total lack of challenge” to any views unless critical of other Muslims, including “anti-Western rhetoric” and “explicit antagonism towards the British military”. A class at Golden Hillock secondary was reportedly “shown images of jihad, involving a battlefield and rocket launchers”. Some governors actively stopped the police from teaching children the Prevent strand of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, which explains how to avoid being drawn into terrorism. I’m also told that at one school, two governors appointed by Birmingham council were on the counter-terrorism “sympathisers” watch list. 

The fact that children were also learning to be intolerant of difference and diversity falls within the Prevent programme’s official definition of extremism. That definition includes “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values”, such as “mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs”. There were also numerous links posted to speakers known for their extremist views, some of whom were invited to speak to the children. Sheikh Shady Al-Suleiman, for instance, has called on God to “destroy the enemies of Islam . . . to give victory to the Muslims in Afghanistan and Chechnya . . . to give victory to all the Mujahedeen all over the world” and to “prepare us for the jihad”. 

The sheikh was invited to talk to 15- and 16-year-olds at Park View school but the acting principal, Mozz Hussain, said he merely focused on the importance of exam revision. Staff, however, told Clarke that some students were so shocked by what he had said that they talked about it for days, saying things like: “Oh my God I can’t believe what he has just said — there are people dying in Afghanistan.”

The man named in the Trojan Horse letter as the prime mover behind the plan was the chairman of the Park View Educational Trust, Tahir Alam, a former BT engineer turned educational activist and governor of six schools, well known for his energetic promotion of Islamic education. He was also an Ofsted inspector.

In a mostly unpublished interview with BBC Radio 4’s The Report, Alam said the school had checked out Sheikh Shady Al-Suleiman before he was invited to speak but no evidence of extremism had been found. This is strange because evidence of his extremist views is available on the internet at the click of a mouse.

The police were told that at school assemblies children were sometimes reminded of military conquests by the Prophet, and that non-Muslims were referred to as kaffirs. IT technicians are also said to have been asked to record what appeared to be al-Qaeda terrorist videos on a DVD, and one teacher recommended staff and children listen to lectures by the al-Qaeda ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki, considered so dangerous by the Americans that he was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in 2011. 

Alam says these claims are nothing but “a work of fiction”. He also asserts that “none of the facts” in the Trojan Horse letter “are true”. He insists that none his three schools practised segregation by gender, save for PE, as most schools do. To the extent that there was segregation in other subjects like Religious Education and PSHE (personal, social and health education), this was “purely for timetabling reasons” simply because RE and PSHE were timetabled against PE. I am told, however, that a 2008 design for the refurbishment of Park View School included separate gender entrances to the school hall. In one of the “Park View Brotherhood” message discussions, a teacher also said he wanted to increase classroom segregation.

Asked what he thought of the Brotherhood’s messages, Alam said the “first time I came across them” was in Clarke’s report. Can that be right? Alam reportedly made regular visits to Park View School for prayers and lunch, and to the other schools under his control — Nansen Primary and Golden Hillock. Present and former staff told Clarke that Alam dominated all decisions.

Alam insists that he was not “doing anything that a faith school would do. ” Why then were Friday prayers introduced at his schools? 

The MCB suggests Clarke has ascribed guilt to Alam by “conflating conservative Muslim practices to a supposed ideology and agenda to Islamise secular schools”. Why then was the word “Islamising” used by the Park View Brotherhood to describe the purpose behind its step-by-step approach to take control of schools?

For example, referring to the new head of a large secondary school in the Brotherhood’s sights, Razwan Faraz messaged: “Don’t pressurise her to start the Islamising agenda first. That will be a lot easier when she is respected as a leader.”

Furthermore, many of the changes in schools introduced by Alam and the Brotherhood replicate those in a 2007 MCB pamphlet which set out the purported needs of 400,000 pupils from different Asian ethnicities, but whom the MCB defined only as a single homogenous group, identified solely by their faith as “Muslims.” That pamphlet promotes the Islamist view that faith commitments encompass all aspects of life for British Muslim children. The word “should” is used over 90 times, mostly in demands for concessions. 

Alam co-authored the pamphlet with the MCB secretary-general because Alam chaired the MCB’s education committee. Why does the MCB have an education committee and not, say, a transport committee? Because for Islamists education is the key to promoting Islamism.

One of the pamphlet’s appendixes lists seven items, six of which are in-house productions of organisations inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood movement. 

Gove chose Clarke not, as the MCB implies, because he is “hostile to the British Muslim community”, but because, as a former head of counter-terrorism, he understands the complex spectrum of Islam, ranging from its political variants to its purely spiritual ones. He knows that radicalisation does not inevitably follow from social and religious conservative Islam. 

But he also knows that if children are being educated in a more politicised environment that signals hostility to Western society and to the mores and attitudes of non-Muslims, one result can be that it makes it easier for Muslims — and especially impressionable young Muslims — to adopt a grievance-mongering “them and us” mindset, which portrays Muslims as one homogenous community under attack. That attitude can be the first step on a journey which can end with a desire to engage in terrorism. 

Tahir Alam has dismissed evidence from anonymous teachers who spoke to Clarke and Kershaw and suggests they were disgruntled “because they did not get a promotion”. Clarke counters that they sought anonymity because the “levels of anxiety and indeed evident distress shown by some witnesses cannot be overstated”.

A graphic illustration of the sort of distress that can be caused is provided by the sheer ruthlessness by which the Sikh head teacher of Saltley School was pushed out last year by hardline Muslim governors just 16 months after taking office.

Balwant Bains says he experienced the classic Trojan Horse treatment to wear down and ultimately remove a head teacher resistant to Islamising the school. Within three months a campaign of “harassment, bullying and intimidation” began. Bains says he had to write a 300-page document for every governor because the chair of governors demanded that he justify every decision he had made so far. As one teacher told me: “There’s no way you can run a school in the inner city and keep your eye on the ball when you’ve got such a lot of invasion of your time.” During an Ofsted inspection, the governors complained that under Bains academic standards had declined. In fact, the GCSE results were the best in the school’s history.

Appealing to Birmingham City Council for help, Bains said the governors were making “decisions not in the best interest of the school and the pupils but in the interest of relatives and friends of the school”. He urged the council to dissolve the governing body “so that I can get some sort of grip on my school which is now being influenced internally and externally”. But Birmingham didn’t.

In June 2013, a Muslim boy brandishing a knife demanded money from six other children. A non-Muslim boy had hidden the knife although he took no part in the threats. Bains decided to exclude the Muslim boy permanently and the non-Muslim boy for a term. 

The governors considered this to be evidence of racism and “Islamophobia” by Bains, and ordered him to reinstate the Muslim boy and to read out to staff a letter suggesting his decision had been motivated by prejudice. In effect Bains was required to humiliate himself in front of his own staff. When he refused, the letter appeared on the school noticeboard. Staff divided between supporters of Bains and opponents who thought he was “racist basically. He’s Islamophobic.” Prior to a demonstration which Bains says was organised by governors, a Facebook post texted to children read: “Saltley School’s Head teacher is racist. He suspended a Muslim pupil and does not suspend non-Muslims.” A Twitter war erupted, with the all-white senior leadership team also being accused of racism because they supported Bains.

Worn down, and with Birmingham Council seemingly unwilling to confront the governors, Bains decided that continuing as head was impossible. To the apparent relief of the council he resigned. Paying off the victims of Trojan Horse tactics rather than confronting their perpetrators was the council’s preferred option, said Clarke. “They’re frightened of being called Islamophobic,” one ex-senior teacher told me. “They’re frightened of their own shadows.” 

Was the council’s close relationship with Alam also a factor? It had employed him to train governors and also urged other schools to partner with him. The schools refused, but after the head teacher of Golden Hillock secondary school resigned, having suffered similar treatment to Bains at the hands of the Park View Brotherhood, the council seized its chance, and pushed Golden Hillock into the arms of Alam’s Park View Educational Trust. “Tahir and the authority had a love fest going on,” says a former Golden Hillock governor.

Soon after Bains left Saltley, the chair of governors used school funds to launch “Operation Saltley”, paying a private investigator to access Bains’s emails. This was only stopped when a senior teacher who discovered what was going on pointed out that the governors and their gumshoe were about to commit a criminal offence, because Bains’s emails contained highly sensitive and personal information about parents and pupils covered by the Data Protection Act. 

Why did the governors want to spy on Bains? They said it was to “protect the senior leadership team from accusations of racism” following the Twitter war. Bains believes they were fishing for evidence of racism so they could avoid paying him off.

For his part, Tahir Alam says his sole motivation has been to improve education for Muslims, having been moved to tears by a 1993 BBC Panorama programme called Underclass in Purdah which featured Park View, where he had been a pupil. “Park View was a poor, struggling school then,” says a teacher familiar with the school at that time. “The atmosphere was just dreadful. Unsafe, unloved, shabby — kids out of control. There was definitely a job to be done. I remember Tahir ranting at staff — it was a tirade. Actually he was horrible to them.”

Still, thanks largely to Alam’s drive, over time Park View had an impressive improvement in GCSE results, albeit at the cost of a much-narrowed curriculum with its emphasis on maths and English, and also — according to Ofsted — at the cost of not preparing the children for life in modern multicultural Britain. Alam says he has merely responded to “the aspirations of parents and children . . . it’s just a very basic courtesy that one must extend”.

Clarke and Kershaw don’t accept this explanation. Both conclude that most parents have not demanded a conservative religious ethos at school. As Clarke says, it would be “absurd and deeply offensive” to argue that Muslims in east Birmingham share the Brotherhood’s intolerant views. Why then were only a few parental voices publicly raised in protest? 

Fear of the consequences is one possible answer. Khalid Mahmood, Labour MP for Perry Barr, dared to risk the highly personalised invective that challenging the Islamist narrative so often generates by saying that he believed the allegation of an Islamising plot was true. A Brotherhood-friendly blogger and retweet favourite of some of the accused governors hit back by calling Mahmood a “House Negro” — the pejorative description by the black American activist Malcolm X of a slave who worked in the master’s house. “I swear that the speaker was talking about your good-self,” sniped the anonymous blogger, who also posted: “Khalid Mahmood: The Brown Neocon Driver of the ‘Trojan Horse’ Plot.” 

Yet Alam’s claims of parental support is consistent with the fact that the school was oversubscribed and with the trend so visible today on the streets of east Birmingham and elsewhere: that Britain’s more observant Muslims are becoming more socially and religiously conservative.

There are more burqas, jilbabs and hijabs, less alcohol at restaurants. Even some lifelong Muslim friends of non-Muslims have become conditional friends who insist that when their non-Muslim friends visit, husbands and wives who used to socialise in jolly foursomes now socialise separately: wife with wife in the kitchen, husband with husband in the lounge.

Girls in Alum Rock oscillate giddily from demure and devoted Muslims to feisty young women in figure-hugging jeans and lipstick, taking in their traditional salwar kameez skin-tight. 

But it is also these girls whom the brothers, fathers and uncles have in their sights: they want them educated but ultimately, as Tahir Alam’s fellow Park View governor Shahid Akmal let slip, they also want them at home. Not for nothing has one school built in enclosed spaces so that boys and girls of different heritages can mix and study in freedom, just as teenagers do in every other part of Britain.

The government may hope to wind up the Park View Brotherhood with the removal of key teachers and governors. But if the authorities are to stop deeply committed Islamists from building more Trojan Horses, whether in Birmingham or elsewhere, there will need to be much better policing of the state school system. That system is increasingly fragmented by new academies and free schools no longer under local authority control. 

What Clarke and Kershaw found was that although Birmingham City Council, the DfE and Ofsted had each been separately warned that hardline Muslim governors were targeting schools, none of them were talking to each other or to the Education Funding Agency, whose job is to ensure that the new academies like Park View and free schools comply with funding rules. “There was absolutely no sharing of intelligence,” said one official.

To Labour, this is evidence of the failure of Gove’s education policy. The Trojan Horse breached the state’s secular walls because of the speed with which he established new schools to disperse what he calls “The Blob”: the bloated mass of vested interests stifling all efforts to reform education so as to ensure that children emerge from school better qualified to face the challenges of the modern world. In Gove’s haste to establish the schools, he failed to protect them from unscrupulous elements.

Yet the roots of the Trojan Horse agenda predate Gove by at least a generation. They go back to the creation of the main umbrella for Muslim schools, the Association of Muslim Schools UK (AMS UK), the International Board of Educational Research and Resources (IBERR), and the MCB. Tahir Alam and some of the Park View Brothers have been associated with or held positions in these bodies, which have been inspired by a broad global Islamist movement that has morphed from the original Cairo-based Muslim Brotherhood. That movement sees no distinction between Islam as a spiritual faith, a way of life and a political ideology. Some say that following the collapse of Communism, Islamism is history’s next big idea.

Certainly it doesn’t lack ambition: “Think global, act local” is a favourite Brotherhood slogan. Perhaps that explains why Akram Khan Cheema, founder of AMS UK and a member of its shura council, has also been chief executive of the IBERR, which has espoused the global Islamification of the school curriculum. He is also an Ofsted inspector and trains inspectors.

Yet Akram Khan Cheema says he wants to “bring Islam to the classroom”. Why? This is not an Islamic country. 

At the AMS UK 2013 conference, he conducted a conference workshop titled “Islamification of the whole school curriculum.” 

However effective more robust policing might be in thwarting Islamist attempts from building future Trojan Horses, what it won’t do is suppress the growing demand from socially conservative parents for greater recognition of their faith and culture in schools — and for more state-funded faith schools.

Currently there are just 12 state-funded Muslim faith schools. The Church of England and the Catholic Church run more than 6,500. If Muslims were as well served as Christians, they’d be entitled to another 500. Most would be concentrated in cities with large Muslim populations like Birmingham and Bradford.

In principle, no fair-minded person could object to Muslims having their fair share of faith schools. On the other hand, most state-funded church schools are an historical hangover from when churches educated poor children before the state stepped in. They tend to be faith “lite” with religious instruction rarely the main focus of the curriculum. Indeed, the schools are often more culturally diverse than community schools. 

How, then, to respond to the anticipated demand from Muslim parents for equal treatment without a culture war breaking out?

The government will need to send a clear signal: that Muslims are every bit as entitled to state-funded faith schools as any other faith provided the core values that underpin Western civilisation are promoted — genuine tolerance of other faiths, equality of gender and sexual orientation, an appreciation that the secularisation of knowledge is the foundation of modern education, with no concessions to the ideology of Islamism, in which religion and politics are fused as one. 

The Department of Education has tried to send that signal with its response to a recent Channel 4 investigation into Britain’s newest state-funded Muslim faith school in Blackburn. Channel 4 showed primary school children being discouraged from clapping because it’s a form of entertainment which distracts from the worship of God. 

The school was also said to provide limited music and to have paid its respects to an extremist preacher banned from Britain who has said gays are “worse than animals”. Hardly the model of “progressive, mainstream and positive Muslim free schools” the Tauheedul Trust, which runs the school, claims it to be. 

An emergency Ofsted inspection followed. How Ofsted satisfied itself that “British values” were being “promoted well” is, to say the least, curious. The school is aligned with Deobandism, the dominant branch of Islam in Britain, whose most pious members can make the Park View Brotherhood seem almost enlightened by comparison. 

Still, I understand the DfE is prepared to give the Tauheedul Trust the benefit of the doubt because officials are satisfied its religious conservatism lacks the Islamising political ingredient which Clarke says was present in the Park View Brotherhood. Unlike the Brotherhood, the Trust has also “bent over backwards” to find out what the DfE wants for the school to be thought acceptable. Yet Islam does not fall into neat hermetically sealed spiritual and political compartments. Park View tells us that the membrane between them can be quite porous. 

If we’re really serious about helping British Muslim children prepare for multi-ethnic, multi-faith, democratic life in Britain, radical changes will be needed to the inspection regime of state-funded Muslim faith schools. 

Currently, the Brotherhood-linked AMS UK is licensed to inspect the Islamic life of a school, its collective worship and its religious education. I understand the DfE is minded to replace AMS UK for this function with a non-Islamist body, yet to be chosen, but one considered to be more representative of mainstream Islam. The MCB asserts that it is “not for the state to define the theological boundaries of the Islamic faith”. But when the state is funding a school, ensuring that public money does not bankroll an intolerant and bigoted doctrine is surely a legitimate state role. 

I understand the DfE also wants to wind up the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, established by Labour in 2008, which in effect has allowed private Muslim and Christian faith schools to be self-policing.

Will these measures be sufficient to prevent British Muslims from drifting into deeper cultural separation? We must hope so. And “hope” is the word. The Park View Brotherhood may not have been typical of schools in East Birmingham where governing bodies with moderate Muslim members have operated appropriately. But those of us who are not particularly religious also underestimate just how seriously very religious people can take their faith, and just how divisive this can become when commitment to a political ideology incompatible with secular democracy is held to be an essential part of faith.

The law requires that daily collective worship in school should be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character. In practice, in multi-faith Britain most head teachers hold assemblies that promote broad-based values with no emphasis on any particular faith. “I never wanted to see Christians going this way, Muslims that way, Sikhs another way, and Hindus yet another,” said a former head of a majority-Muslim school.

But for the Park View Brotherhood and their supporters, Islam is the alpha and omega of their existence. The triumphal WhatsApp message of a narrow 8-7 governor vote in favour of Islamic collective worship for yet another school in their sights speaks volumes: “A battle was fought and won tonight . . . overturning five years of ‘children pray in their own way and language’!” exclaimed a governor overcome with joy. “The GB [governing body] is now polarised on faith grounds.” 
Some victory. Some hope.

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