Escape from Big Mother: Free Speech of UK in Decay

With Friends Like These

Now it’s one thing to have beliefs, ideals, and a political agenda. But without a high-up place of influence in society, those all have no use. Fiyaz Mughal’s background is an important foundation for understanding how he got to where he is today. There are the obvious founding and establishment of Faith Matters in 2006 and TellMAMA in February 2012, but let’s look deeper. The United Kingdom government has the high standard of allying itself with only the most spotless of civil society organizations.

But there are some very large spots worth pointing in Fiyaz Mughal’s case.

The overall purpose of this page in the first half is to set up the connections network Fiyaz Mughal has to the government and community. It serves to provide a sense of context. This comes into play when we go into the second half. We’ll look at some of the people Fiyaz is associated with who have a history of controversial behaviors and actions. 

Fiyaz Mughal was a Councillor in Oxford between 2002 and 2004. In 2005 Mughal was appointed to the Working Group for Communities linked up with the Extremism Task Force established in 2005 after the 7/7 bombings. From 2006 to 2010 he was a Councillor in Haringey.

But he had some interesting things happen in between. In 2008 Fiyaz became an IDeA Peer Mentor because of his successes working with the authorities on the Preventing Violent Extremism agenda. In June 2009 Fiyaz Mughal was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s birthday honors list as a result of his work in the voluntary sector (this is how he got the OBE added on to his name). That same year he was named special advisor to the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg MP on Interfaith and Preventing Radicalisation and Extremism. During the time Hazel Blears was in the office of Secretary of State for Housing, Communities, and Local Government (2007-2009), she elected Fiyaz Mughal to be a member of the Local Delivery Advisory Group on Preventing Violent Extremism. From 2012 to 2014 Fiyaz was involved in the Government’s Advisory Committee on Tackling Anti-Muslim Hatred. He’s listed as a fellow at the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. On top of all that, Mughal is the founder and director of SAFE Together. A “reducing risk, supporting safeguarding” project.

An extended list made available via Fiyaz’s Faith Matters Biography Page is worth a look. Click here for that.

Something that I’m going to be repeating multiple times throughout this essay is Fiyaz Mughal’s involvement with the Crown Prosecution Service. As recently as 2016, Mughal is listed on the CPS London Scrutiny and Involvement Panel as a member.

It’s one thing to list the positions and jobs Fiyaz Mughal has held within the UK government. But it’s a vital point worth mentioning in order to begin understanding how he got where he is today.

But Fiyaz Mughal’s plans and values wouldn’t have any power or meaning if he lacked the means of enacting them. Even in a simpler form, you can measure the impact of TellMAMAUK by retracing their steps over the past several years. Seeing the people that Fiyaz cozied up with, and where he went to share his views, paints a picture of his and his company’s ideological authority.

The relationships between Fiyaz Mughal/TellMAMAUK and United Kingdom police are the key focal point.

“Tell Mama” was spotlighted by police as a place for the Muslim community to report hate crime as far back as April 2013, if not sooner. By the end of November 2016, they reveal how far their organization’s reach extended to:

“Tell MAMA now has partnership agreements in place with 18 separate UK police forces: Metropolitan, City of London, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Cheshire, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Humberside, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Kent, Surrey, Bedfordshire, Dorset, Warwickshire, West Mercia, British Transport Police and Police Service of Northern Ireland.”

Although their blog post didn’t include hyperlinks to examples of these partnerships, it felt pertinent given the circumstances to add that in, myself. So you can see in action what exactly the relationship between TellMAMAUK and the police authorities entails. The Tell MAMA blog post explains that they were “one of only two community organisations” that entered an agreement with the National Police Chief’s Council back in March 2015. By January 2016 there were 14 different police forces involved in talks of this nature. This partnership allows police forces across the country to share data about anti-Muslim hate crimes with Tell MAMA. They say it’s to give them the opportunity to “build a more accurate national picture of incidents.” Tell MAMA’s Partnerships Officer Jeff Arnold stresses that despite being a “completely independent organisation” their close relationship with police forces is necessary. Tell MAMA positions their purpose now as being capable of “improving the knowledge” at the cop’s disposal when it comes to anti-Muslim incidents. But moreover, it’s spelled out that this guarantees “all hate crimes are taken seriously” thanks to this agreement. The latest of which is version 1.2, put into effect on April 9th, 2018.

They promise both parties swear to anonymity when it comes to the reporting parties. Tell MAMA only sharing personal info to the police under your approval, and the data being given by police to Tell MAMA is anonymous to protect victim identities.

This relationship between the police and TellMAMA includes coordination on investigations involving the Muslim community. Volunteers from the organization worked with West Midlands Police during Britain First demonstrations. The public face focuses on religious hate crime issues, with the authorities propping up TellMAMA as their equals. The cops and Fiyaz Mughal have meetings together. TellMAMA takes part in group debates between police and other civil society organizations about hate crime. The reality of it is Fiyaz serves as a teacher to the cops, as you can see here when he did a talk about racial harassment to the Sussex Police. Lancashire and NW police officers attend “training” from TellMAMA about subjects like the impact of anti-Muslim hatred.

One can’t help but think there’s more to it when looking at Fayiz Mughal wining and dining with the likes of Sadiq Kahn at a National Association of Met Police dinner party.

But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows with the Fiyaz/TellMAMA relationship to UK police. On July 26th, 2016, Mughal whined to the Guardian about how the Met police were “failing to protect” them as of late.

“A national hate crime project under constant abuse and focus by anti-Muslim bigots and far-right extremists clearly fits into a project that has risks. We are in a complex and fast-changing environment where my team should not have to put up with a poor response from the Met and with assessments of risk that have no relevance to the actual risk.”

Fast forward a few days later. Fiyaz Mughal wrote about this drama himself, publishing a recounting of his woes on The Guardian three days after the initial story. He opens by telling readers of the nine-day harassment siege against him and TellMAMA. Their telephones overrun with an avalanche of sexism and racism that Fiyaz says has left his organization unable to function. Mughal establishes the usual backstory of what his organization does (“map, measure, and monitor anti-Muslim hatred) and his relationship with police. He describes them in general as “underpaid and overworked,” but signals out the Metropolitan police as “the weakest link.” Fiyaz says he routinely demands risk assessments from them on TellMAMA and made a point of doing so after the murder of Jo Cox.

He then slides this in. Fiyaz Mughal wants the risk assessment from police to be tailored to his set of personal standards.

“I made clear that any assessment should take into account firstly the specific threats, intimidation and harassment against us, which we have reported to the police; secondly the fact we are a high profile project and consistently targeted; and thirdly that the context of the environment in which we work has changed after the recent incidents..”

Fiyaz condemns the Met police for losing call logs they made of incidents dating back to 2012, and for grading TellMAMA as “low risk” in the threat assessment. He seems mad that his organization isn’t considered more of a target in the eyes of the police. It’s rare for me to ever use the “victim card” line (seems cliche), but in this case, I’m making an exception. Fiyaz’s entitlement complex shines through afterward. He describes the Met police as lazy and inept at social media before chastising how they investigated the siege of harassment they recently received via telephone.

But surrounding the police angle here, Fiyaz Mughal’s reach extends to several different societal arms. Sometimes the cops give him a hand there, too. Fiyaz collaborated with Chief Supt. Mark Warrender to give a panel talk for the Welsh Muslims. TellMAMAUK partnered with Sultan Bahu Mosque in a solidarity campaign responding to Punish A Muslim Day, did a workshop at Kings Heath Mosque, and Fiyaz has had meetings with the Muslim Council of Scotland. All in an outreach effort. Does it show? Well, with places like the Bangor Islamic Centre propping Tell MAMA up in full confidence, we can see it does.

But it’s important to keep in mind that Fiyaz Mughal isn’t just involved in the Muslim community with TellMAMA. His main organization Faith Matters is an interfaith group, which means he has ties to other religious communities. This grants Saint Fiyaz Mughal the capability to go around and preach the gospel of TellMAMA. That element plays out as Mughal does speeches at the Barnet Multi-Faith Forum, the London Faiths Forum, and organizing a solidarity event with the Leicester Council of Faiths for the “Punish A Muslim Day” situation. When it comes to the Church of England, Mughal has done talks at places like St Ethelburga’s. His attention is more drawn to the Jewish community given his belief that the plight of Muslims is somehow on the same caliber as antisemitism. To that effect, Mughal has spoken with the Shomrim of Stamford Hill, done panels with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and he’s even a Trustee for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust UK. Lastly, it’s worth pointing out the relationship between Community Security Trust (CST) and TellMAMAUK. Mughal’s anti-Muslim incident monitoring organization is designed from the same framework built by CST starting in 1994. The only difference between the two is CST’s establishment being to monitor antisemitism.

Fiyaz Mughal further maximizes the effectiveness of his message by making sure he has a presence within civil society (NGOs) at-large. By having panel discussions about this work at events held by Amnesty International Hillingdon Group and Humanists UK, Fiyaz elevates himself to a social position that allows him to rub elbows with influential people. Like Javed Khan, who is the chief executive at Barnardos (largest and oldest UK children’s charity). But this involvement also has risks for Mughal’s image, as getting involved in discussions at events held by think tanks like The Quilliam Organization carry the risk of backlash.

But when it comes to spreading the message, the benefits outweigh the blowback for Fiyaz. It opens the door to allow him to speak at Universities and mold young minds to follow his political agenda. Think about how difficult it is for someone with right-wing views to get their foot in the door of a campus. Yet someone like Fiyaz Mughal is able to waltz through St Mary’s University, The School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, Queen Mary University of London, the Faith Debates at Lancaster University, Manchester Metropolitan University Madinah Society, and Centre for the Study of Islam in the UK – Cardiff University with ease. Any sort of student push to resist Fiyaz’s platforms at these places might as well be nonexistent. But it’s par for the course whenever a right-winger wants to speak at even ONE of these sorts of places. Look at Spiked’s Free Speech University Rankings charts for proof to that effect. 63 out of 115 schools meet the RED requirement, meaning they have banned and actively censored ideas on their campus through their actions and policies.

Even a public space like Speaker’s Corner had a wide margin of doubt when it comes to being a platform to speak to an audience from.

That dynamic of what’s considered “acceptable” applies to the UK government too. Remember when Lord Pearson sat down with Tommy Robinson back in March? For a simple conversation about Islam, Pearson was socially ostracized by his colleagues in UK parliament for having such an association with Tommy. TellMAMAUK doesn’t have that sort of social problem. Sir Peter Bottomley (Conservative MP for Worthing West), Thelma Walker (Labour MP for Colne Valley), and Caroline Lucas (Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion) had no issue with being involved in the #No2H8 campaign Tell Mama put on. Nobody bats an eye when Fiyaz Mughal and Syed Kamall (Conservative MEP for London) meet out in the open to talk politics. They don’t give a second thought when Sirajul Islam (Labour Councillor at LB Tower Hamlets) has Fiyaz Mughal swing by to preach his views.

There’s not an even playing field for Islam and the Right-wing to exchange their views and ideas.

Governing bodies like the Hackney Council work in tandem with TellMAMAUK whenever the desire arises. The Westminster Council considers TellMAMAUK on equal footing with them in terms of messaging. Their political agendas are aligned on what to broadcast to the public eye. Not just within the country either, but UK representation abroad as well. As seen with the Foreign Office and the UK in Spain. What it comes down to on the international scale is the UK government sees Fiyaz Mughal as a worthy representative of the country’s political interests and allows him to have a say in shaping the course of that for everyone. Fiyaz Mughal was a part of the Human Rights Committee for The UK Delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), with his specialty being the topic of hate crime.

It puts into focus the point that needs to be made with all this. Fiyaz Mughal is someone in a position to designate the consensus on what is considered to be a hate crime. By having connections to local police, religious organizations, other civil society groups, and the UK government? His words and beliefs travel a long distance. That has an impact. The mindsets of students are shaped, and the perspectives of politicians within the UK and around the world are malleable to his agenda.

What hits this point home is examples of Mughal’s involvement within All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG) on Race & Community. Back in July 2013, Fiyaz Mughal met with police authorities and other community leaders on the topic of how politicians should respond to the Lee Rigby murder. Years later in December 2017, Iman A’tta and TellMamaUK were central in the launch of the APPG on Hate Crime in Parliament.

TellMAMA’s views and Fiyaz Mughal’s views become the official views of the UK government.

Let me hit the point home further. Fiyaz Mughal has a measurable degree of sway over the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They listened to him to get an insight and understanding on what qualifies as offensive anti-Muslim language and hate crime. Fiyaz Mughal is what CPS uses as a definition of the standard.

As you can see here in this December 2013 article from the Guardian, Fiyaz Mughal had his sights set on this. He wanted CPS to have much tougher sentencing guidelines in the realm of social media.

“They raised the bar of prosecution significantly. Now, unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.”

Fiyaz Mughal was a centerpiece of the CPS #HateCrimeMatters campaign. In August 2017, the official video they put out featuring him starts off by making it clear that hate crime is something “anyone in the community” can report. It’s not limited to the victim itself or someone who witnesses it. The definition is expanded to the broadest possible terms.

So as we arrive at the second part of this page, I want to ask and answer one simple question. Does TellMAMA and Fiyaz Mughal have enough ties to warrant the label of being considered “extremist?”

Let me state directly that it says on TellMAMA’s website that they aren’t a project under the umbrella of PREVENT (which we go over on the next page). Yet we can use the principles outlined within that UK government policy as a measuring stick of appropriate behaviors.

Baked right into the heart of the strategy from the beginnings in 2011, it says (on page 13):

“Across all our Prevent work we will increase the monitoring and evaluation of projects. Counterterrorism in general must provide value for money. Prevent in particular must not waste public funds on projects irrelevant to its objectives. Nor will we fund or work with extremist groups; we will carefully evaluate the credibility of those we support.”

What to take away from this is that it’s reasonable, in theory, to assume the same expectations apply to TellMAMA. Why not? It’d be more unusual to give them special treatment that makes it appropriate for them to engage in extremist activities.

Nazir Afzal

I mention Nazir Afzal as a control group when it comes to the allies of Fiyaz Mughal. This guy is the only one out of the bunch that doesn’t have something egregious in his closet. As far as I know. A source close to Fiyaz pointed Nazir out to me, saying Mr.Afzal was a close ally of both Mr. Mughal and his immediate family.

I have to applaud Nazir Afzal’s efforts to bring the grooming gang issue to the mainstream, in fact. Given the difficulties presented to a man in his position, his choices to push for prosecution on these matters must’ve been hard to make.

Nazir Afzal’s position as the Crown Prosecution Service’s lead on child sexual abuse and violence against women and girls means he’s in a position of overseeing all child sex abuse cases in England and Wales. In September 2014 he had thoughts on the Rotherham report’s suggestion that political correctness was involved in the blind eye response from authorities in the face of 1400 children being abused in a 16-year period.

“I don’t want to play it down. The ethnicity of these perpetrators is what it is. It is a matter of fact. It is an issue that has to be addressed by the state, and the authorities and the community – but it’s important to contextualise this,” he said.

His rebuttal is that the media coverage between cases involving Asian men compared to white perpetrators of sex abuse wasn’t given equal airtime. More to the point, Nazir Afzal had views on people’s conclusion that these situations have primarily religious motivations.

“There is no religious basis for this. These men were not religious. Islam says that alcohol, drugs, rape and abuse are all forbidden, yet these men were surrounded by all of these things. So how can anyone say that these men were driven by their religion to do this kind of thing? They were doing this horrible, terrible stuff, because of the fact that they are men. That’s sadly what the driver is here. This is about male power. These young girls have been manipulated and abused because they were easy prey for evil men.”

In May 2017 Nazir Afzal revealed he needed police protection due to threats from the far right. He says this was because he overturned a decision not to prosecute members of Rochdale grooming gang. Afzal told BBC his work challenged their narrative, and the far right created “lots of fake news” to obfuscate the situation.

“It led to thousands of emails calling for me to be sacked and deported. It led to an English Defence League demonstration outside my home. It led to Nick Griffin door-stepping me outside my office. It led to my children having to go in a taxi to go to school for two weeks because the security threat was what it was.”

Now there was more to Nazir Afzal than meets the eye. At the tail end of May 2017 (after the Manchester attack), he announced via Twitter his resignation as CEO of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. Reason being was at least two APCC board members expressed concerns about Nazir’s media interviews he took up in the aftermath of the terror attack. The official statement from the APCC board made it clear that doing media appearances without the APCC board’s consent was in breach of his contract.

Nazir kept going with the media work, regardless.

On the 5th of June 2017 former chief crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal spoke out against CAGE and Prevent Watch for “distorting” the truths of the government’s PREVENT strategy. Spokespeople for both of these places replied by pointing out what Nazir described as “myths” were real experiences and concerns people were having, and he should have had a more impartial eye in that regard. Afzal went a step further and chastised the Muslim Council of Britain for their inaction in radicalization matters.

That same day Nazir Afzal wrote an extended piece in the Daily Mail, detailing his thoughts. He sees the PREVENT program has flawed but necessary in dealing with the issues of extremism. His main gripe is the government ought to focus their resources for PREVENT more so in schools/colleges instead of mosques.

In a surprising twist, Nazir Afzal went against the narrative grain in July 2017 by demanding Muslims “stop blaming victims of child sex abuse.”

“There’s no escaping the fact that Asian and Pakistani men are disproportionately involved in localised street grooming of vulnerable young girls. Our jails are filling up with Muslim prisoners and yet the crimes they’re committing have become a taboo subject.”

In a New Statesman interview from March 2018, Nazir says his first direct involvement grooming gangs was an operation with Rochdale in 2011. He admits that awareness of these sorts of issues beforehand in his career and that it wasn’t getting enough attention. Afzal explains the commonality of the grooming gang cases was these groups of men working in the night-time economy were hiding their predatory pursuits behind the guise of business. They have easy access to both the lucrative vices of drugs, as well as young girls seeking such things out. Nazir Afzal says this sort of lifestyle is used by the far right for recruitment. He argues against the notion of the handling of things on the police’s part being a cover-up, but a lack of administrative competence to put the legal process in motion to deal with the matters.

Shahid Malik

On August 21st, 2014, TellMAMA announced Shahid Malik was joining the organization as a co-chair alongside Richard Benson. The blog post outlines his political career holding positions such as Commissioner for Racial Equality in Great Britain and as Equality Commissioner for Northern Ireland. Malik was the MP for Dewsbury until he lost in the 2010 general election, with four ministerial roles among the Department for International Development, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Ministry of Justice, and the Home Office.

These are Malik’s remarks at the time of the blog post:

“I am looking forward to working with Richard and Fiyaz to continue the development of this excellent initiative and ensure that it is universally viewed as the pre-eminent source of independent data for policy makers and practitioners alike in the fight against bigotry and hatred in our country. The fight against Islamophobia is not a Muslim fight and as Richard demonstrates, it is a fight for all those who believe in a fair and just society – hatred towards any group in our society should be a call to action for every group in our society.”

I don’t consider TellMAMA’s blog post as giving an entirely accurate career history of him. There’s a lot that’s left unsaid.

Generally speaking, this “TheyWorkForYou” website that tracks UK politicians in office gives a solid timeline (with dates!) on the particular positions Shahid Malik held. He was in office from May 5th, 2005 to April 12th, 2010.

There’s still a lot left unsaid in that TellMAMA blog post. Like that time Shahid Malik called the Hamas Government “a great example to be followed.” For people unfamiliar with Hamas, they’re a Palestinian Sunni-Islam fundamentalist organization. Their methods and reputation are extreme enough that they are considered a terrorist organization in the European Union, Israel, and the United States.

Now the way it’s said in the article, there’s room for alternate interpretations as to who Shahid is referring to there. But there’s more. Like a photograph of Shahid Malik with Hamas politician, Ahmad Al-Kurd.

In another one, Shahid is seen with Essam Mustafa, a major figure in Hamas’ UK operation (which we can confirm by this picture of Essam worshiping the grave of dead Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin).

If none of that is enough to convince you, here’s a picture of Shahid Malik with Hamas senior political leader Ismail Haniyeh. Tensions between Israel and Palestine aren’t exactly good. In fact, they’re the opposite of that.  For context, the United States declared Ismail an international terrorist at the end of January 2018.  On April 21st, 2018 Hamas accused Israel of being behind the murder of a Palestinian engineer, who got shot to death in Malaysia.

You might be thinking something like “these happened after he was out of office” to yourself. Well, yeah. But Shahid Malik couldn’t keep himself away from Hamas even while serving his post.

“Minister told to stay away from Islam event by Labour officials,” is the title of a Guardian article published on July 13th, 2008.

While serving as international development minister, Shahid Malik was prevented from addressing an Islamic conference because of the political affiliations of the event’s organizers. Hamas. Hours before the event was happening, Shahid got in touch with their organizer Anas Altikriti and said he wasn’t able to come anymore.

“It’s quite breathtaking … to ban one of the most prominent Muslim politicians and [stop] him saying what he wishes. [Malik] had been told that among the organisers were people associated with Hamas. This isn’t a Hamas project,” said Altikriti.

TellMAMA glamorizes the political career history of Shahid Malik. There was more ugly controversy to it than Fiyaz Mughal is letting on. In May 2009 it came out that as the Justice Minister, Shahid Malik had run up the highest expenses claim of any MP, ever. When questioned by the media on the issue, Shahid Malik blamed the allowance system for being so exploitable.

“Since being elected in 2005, Mr Malik has claimed the maximum amount allowable for a second home, amounting to £66,827 over three years. Last year, he claimed £23,083 from the taxpayer for his London town house, equivalent to £443 per week. The Telegraph disclosed that the “main home” for which Mr Malik pays out of his own pocket – a three-bedroom house in his constituency of Dewsbury – has been secured at a discounted rent of less than £100 per week from a local landlord who was fined for letting an “uninhabitable” house.”

But Shahid felt generous and said he’d be donating £1,050 he claimed for on a television.

“I will not be giving it to the authorities in Parliament because it is legitimately mine,” he said. “But as a gesture I am giving that to good causes in my constituency, and I think it will be appreciated by those who receive it.”

On May 15th, 2009, Shahid Malik stepped down for a brief time. Gordon Brown ended up suspending him for his outlandish responses in the face of the public outcry. Don’t worry though he ends up coming back a month later, on the 10th of June. Which meant almost immediately the allegations he was cleared of previously, came back around to haunt him again.  In September 2010 Shahid was found guilty of breaching expenses rules after it was discovered he charged taxpayers £235 for insurance on his wife’s engagement ring.

TellMAMA’s blog completely omitted that stint Shahid Malik had working as a mayor adviser to Lutfur Rahman back in February 2012. His task was “advisor on equalities matters for one day per week at a cost of £200 per day,” according to the discovered findings. His claim to fame was a double-decker of two firsts. He made history for being the first directly elected mayor of Tower Hamlets. He was also the first directly elected mayor removed from the post after being found guilty of electoral fraud. Lutfur was also a solicitor, but he eventually lost his privileges to that too. There was a ton of brouhaha surrounding Lutfur’s ousting in April 2015, including instances of the police being used to pressure the key court opponents of Rahman.

It’s rather revealing that Shahid Malik was orbiting himself around such a corrupt individual like Lutfur Rahman. But this isn’t about him. This is about Shahid. There happens to be one more thing worth mentioning in that regard.

Between 2008 and 2013 Fiyaz Mughal got  £798413 from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (DCLG) according to a Freedom of Information request done in October 2013. As shown in the TheyWorkForYou page, Shahid Malik served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Communities and Local Government (10 Jun 2009 to 11 May 2010). This is further confirmed from official sources if you doubt the credibility of TheyWorkForYou.

This puts him in a position to give funding to things like Faith Matters. People like Fiyaz Mughal. 

According to public business records, SCIENTIA COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED had Shahid Malik and Fiyaz Mughal as their two directors. Both of them starting on December 22nd, 2010, all the way through to the company’s dissolution on August 6th, 2013. That Freedom of Information request shows a £397,000 sum was given to Fiyaz for a three-year period between 2010 and 2013. Which just happens to coincide with the longevity of this SCIENTIA company.

I’m not going to make any conclusions as to the “why” here. I simply hope that Mr. Mughal provides transparency in light of these facts and explains what it was for himself. It just so happens that Shahid Malik had a questionable history in his time at Parliament, worked for a Mayor guilty of corruption afterward, and has a record of friendly interaction with Hamas. An organization labeled as terrorists by several countries.

I want to solidify the idea that the UK government system is exploitable and Shahid Malik further took advantage of this. In January 2012 the Sunday Times published an article detailing a loophole several former politicians were taking advantage of.

Imagine you’re a UK politician. For one reason or another, you leave office. But you want to make use of the career connections you made during your time there. So you set up a consultancy business. That’s what was going on in the United Kingdom. Former politicians and civil servants set up private consultancies and sold their services to the same organizations and entities they interacted with while in public office. Now the rule normally was that “former ministers and civil servants have to seek approval from the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) for any jobs that they take up within two years of leaving office,” according to the Sunday Times piece.

Here are a few examples of the loophole in action to help illustrate.

• “The independent consultancy of James Purnell, the former work and pensions secretary, advises on “strategy and governance”.”
• “The consultancy of Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary, offers advice on the public sector and central government.”
• “Jonathan Shaw, a former work and pensions minister, is now a consultant and offers advice to the very department for which he once worked.”

So. Along comes Shahid Malik. Since he served in the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), he wanted approval as a “development and governance” consultant. None of his clients appear on Acoba’s website. We just happen to know he hung out around Hamas, Lutfur Rahman, and was in business with Fiyaz Mughal under their SCIENTIA COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED company.

Just to reiterate. Back then you had to declare that you were a private consultant. But there was nothing saying you had to declare your clients in that line of work. According to the article, the House of Lords picked up on this and was making a motion to close the loophole.

Make of that what you will.

Here you can see Shahid Malik addressing the second of TellMAMAUK’s “#No2h8 awards.” One of the nominees for this prize is toxic and controversial enough that when their actions are considered, it casts doubt on TellMAMA’s authenticity entirely.

Roanna Carleton-Taylor

Roanna Carleton-Taylor runs a group called Resisting Hate. On their website, Roanna has an article titled “D0xing Fascists Is Necessary.” The practice of doxing is a tactic used to target an individual by having their personal information like home addresses and family collected together and listed for easy access by parties intending to do harm.

I find it odd that Fiyaz Mughal, a person who believes that online abuse is as nasty as offline abuse, would ally himself with the likes of Roanna Carleton-Taylor.

If you wanted to familiarize yourself with Roanna’s political stances, I recommend checking out their Huffington Post UK catalog of articles. In one, she says she advocates free speech but not when it turns into “hate speech.” When you look at her list of restrictions about what kind of behaviors aren’t allowed, Roanna backs free speech into a corner and puts a muzzle on it. Some of her limitations presented are widely open to interpretation individually. In particular the “you do not have the right to tell lies” contradicts the Islamic concept of taqiyya (we talk about that more in the Tim Burton section). But to get a full understanding of Roanna’s free speech views, there are multiple other pieces to turn to.

She’s not Muslim herself. Roanna just defends the notion that Islam doesn’t need to conform to Western values. That somehow we’ll all get along just fine regardless. I was confused by where Roanna’s views came from after reading that.

Then I found out Roanna Carleton-Taylor was a pagan. She discloses this in an article where she goes adamantly on the defense of this against the far right. Roanna was afraid they’d “co-opt” the religion.

“Preach your hate if you must far right extremists – but you do not preach your hate in the name of my Gods,” she writes.

Looking into it I discovered Roanna is part of a group called Witch Path Forward. In fact, according to this video about how to do witchcraft on a budget, she says she’s the founder of it.  I further confirmed this via her website, where she goes by the name Rose. It seems she has been involved in this stuff for a long time. Here’s someone asking her about goat skulls.

(Skip to 7:15 to hear her mention the uses for dead animals. Skip to 14:54 for blood. At the 19 minute mark Roanna talks about a spell she’s working on involving a heart.)

When it comes to the Resisting Hate website and social media in itself, there are a few things we can directly glean. For example, Facebook-wise, they’ve really only been around since 2016 in this official capacity. If you were to scroll around that page you’d find Roanna making pictures that have quotes from her own articles. In the same mix of content, Resisting Hate posts quotes of actual famous figures like Mark Twain. Besides posting news articles on the regular in an effort to stay trendy on political correctness issues,  there are the memes too. Gotta have those to stay cool. It’s worth pointing out that Resisting Hate makes their affiliation to Antifa known. We explain the issues with all that later on in this series. Here, in this case, it serves to add motivations behind some of the Resisting Hate Facebook page’s remarks. On topics like Tommy Robinson and the upcoming Day for Freedom march. Something in which Roanna is more than willing to spread the word of the Antifa counterprotest for.

All in all, you would think nothing of Resisting Hate at a glance. In the front facing sense, the biggest controversy they had was someone making a “derogatory” comment about Velcro shoes. In this sense, the Resisting Hate website and Facebook blend into the blob of leftist organization groups out there. Generally speaking, it’s too easy to lose the ability to tell them apart. They lack enough personal identity in of themselves that it seems doubtful you’d know the difference if two of these kinds of groups switched names.

It’s very easy to roll your eyes, overlook them, and think nothing of them.

That was their intention.

It’s funny for Resisting Hate to say they “don’t take sides” and all the meanwhile have articles about just a particular set of people. The exact same ones that happen to rub Fiyaz Mughal and the Muslim Lobby of the United Kingdom the wrong way.  It develops to the point where it’s clear their targeting is based on being critical of Islam. Slowly it became clear to me why they’d go after political figures like Anne–Marie Waters, Gerard Batten,  and David Coburn.

Time to peel back this wallpaper a bit. On Resisting Hate’s website, they have four categories of articles they write. Upon closer inspection, you’ll see a common theme form where they target people. Obviously, Tommy Robinson gets articles nearly the most often, because of the overwhelming hate-erection the Left have for him in the United Kingdom. Resisting Hate targeted Tommy’s employer Ezra Levant, and co-worker Caolan Robertson.  They’ve gone after Britain First as well and stewed in their triggered emotions when they dared to be seen together with Tommy Robinson and Caolan. Pamela Gellar and Robert Spencer, Ann Coulter, Jack Buckby and Liberty GB, Big Philip Campion and the Football Lads Alliance.

Richard Spencer gets less screen time than you might expect. Which is strange given the parade of articles doled out against Katie Hopkins. The crusade against her really coalesces the overall thing Resisting Hate has going on for them.

This is the hit list Resisting Hate currently have on their website. Not to be confused with their old list of individual tweets to target (actually they had two lists) or Roanna’s trophy room of slain Twitter accounts.

Resisting Hate has a mailing list that sends out tweets to target and take down. As I mentioned before, this is how Tommy Robinson got removed from Twitter. Yet at the same time Resisting Hate explains to their members how to get back on Twitter after being suspended. To put it more straightforward, this group goes after content it deems hateful while simultaneously engaging in hateful activity and getting their own accounts taken down by the site.

How do I know about this? An article from Fahrenheit211 by a guest author named Jacob. He’s the one who really was the first to uncover this dark side to Resisting Hate.

There’s no possible way I can do this story within a story the full justice it deserves. The events and people impacted by Resisting Hate’s gang of online attack dogs is immeasurable. In Joker’s situation alone I compiled this long of a list of accounts that he used. Somehow despite Twitter’s best efforts to stop this sort of behavior from happening, he’s found a way around the system altogether.

Jacob begins by letting us know that a connection between Fiyaz Mughal and Roanna Carleton-Taylor/Resisting Hate exists (evidence to that effect is mentioned later). He tells us that the leader of an organization that’s dedicated to fighting hate collaborates with a lady in charge of a hateful one. Given the recent #No2H8 awards that happened recently, Jacob points out Roanna being nominated for Community Volunteer Upstander. There’s evidence that the two definitely know each other. Back in February 2017 Roanna and Mughal did an interview together. Jacob says Roanna has gone through a fair share of Twitter handles. A history dating back to at least 2016 when TellMAMA shared one of her articles, with the handle @bored_rose attached. Other aliases Roanna went by were @MrsVeryCross and @Witchy.

(For further reading: After looking into the matter between Fiyaz Mughal and Roanna Carleton-Taylor further, I’ve managed to establish a fuller extent of their relationship between October 2015 until October 2016.  A full accounting of this can be found here. But it’s worth establishing the basics. Roanna’s role was bringing things to TellMAMA’s attention. In return they were recognized as supportive. They went after randoms, Tommy Robinson, and Katie Hopkins together. But the most important part is that TellMAMA had Roanna’s help in reporting Twitter accounts. They used them to attack people’s views on social media, as it played into Mughal’s larger agenda of suppressing views on social media. With that in mind Fiyaz also used Roanna to collect hate crime data. Mughal knew Joker existed. When New Bluehand made a website, TellMAMA was happy giving them a running start at getting off the ground. The site would eventually become what we know as Resisting Hate today. Here’s a separate list showing the relationship between Resisting Hate admin @oldwolf1887 and TellMAMA.)

“Thank you – always keeping going. Never stop the campaign against hate HK” – TellMAMA to HalalKitty5, December 3rd 2017.

Fiyaz Mughal used Resisting Hate as his personal hit squad to take down targets on social media, like Britain First and Liberty GB. Here’s a list of tweets establishing the relationship between TellMAMA and Roanna’s Resisting Hate organization. Fiyaz propped Roanna’s work up, yet all the meanwhile misleadingly claiming the group’s growth was organic. The truth of the matter is Resisting Hate worked as a lovely front for someone else to get their hands dirty online. The two parties had mutual political goals, so the arrangement worked out nicely for the both of them. As you can see, TellMAMA was super thankful for all the work Resisting Hate did.

Then Jacob’s story goes to crazy town. Roanna’s two friends that hang around with her online are Joker and Cheeky Monkey. The pair had a habit of doxing people online. They’d seek out someone’s real-life identity and take a massive shit all over the internet with that. Using the info as a platform for a smear campaign with the goal of making the target’s life an absolute hell. How so? Joker and Monkey were both fond of sending people’s information over to ISIS or sending a gang of Muslims to a target’s house and give them a beating.  Sometimes it was stuff like getting people fired. Casually they’d bring up hiring a hit-man. The Monkey character did things like taking the piss out of an underaged rape victim. According to them? That person wasn’t violated. Nah. The girl just “sucked brown cock for cider and fags.” Joker and Cheeky carpet bombed folks with the worst explicit language you can imagine. It’s how they spent their free time in-between doxing people.

Did Fiyaz Mughal and TellMAMA know Joker existed? Yes. Yes they did.

Jacob tells us about the time the duo attacked a fragile chap named Frank Jennings. When he overdosed, Joker and the Monkey mocked his situation nonstop. They went as far making an account with Frank’s face on it. Joker and Monkey were laughing all the way until his death, and then laughing more after.

Jacob says:

“Roanna engages with people who mock all of the qualities that the patrons of Faith Matters and TellMama stand up for and yet TellMama engage with Roanna, tweet out her articles and allow themselves to be interviewed by her. This is running counter to standing up to hatred and saying no to bullying. Engaging with Roanna and Resisting Hate is sanctioning the promotion of racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamic terrorism, bullying and mocking the mentally impaired and the physically disabled as a means to intimidate and mock others.”

Jacob writes that Joker claims to work as a pharmacist, flashing around an NHS card on occasion. He says Joker can access people’s private information via the NHS system. That he abuses his position for personal pleasure and power. That Joker does things like switch around medication. He took pictures with drugs too.

He elaborates on this part:

“The tale is that Joker is Pakistani apparently and as a pharmacist he tweets out that he likes to ‘fuck with white people’s medication and he posts pictures of people’s health charts after they’ve had an operation (ILLEGAL). Roanna does nothing about this and yet she claims to stand up against hatred. If Roanna releases Joker’s name he is facing at least a 6 year jail stretch. Will she release his name? He’s abusing his NHS privileges after all, and if she’s fighting hatred, one would imagine that she would target him, but instead she befriends him and protects him even more.”

Besides the bad language, Jacob says there’s evidence indicating Roanna knows Joker fairly well and keeps his identity to herself. She approves of their tactics despite the fact that entails threatening to behead people, throw gays off buildings, or cut them up.

“Joker is a good friend and I support him completely,” said Roanna Carleton-Taylor. This is made clear more than once.

Jacob says Roanna talks to bullies, promotes bullying, and engage in bullying activities themselves on the regular. Jacob alludes to a case where someone was barraged with attacks after the Resisting Hate crew found their private info and pictures of their kids. A guy almost shot himself it got that bad. Roanna’s gang harass workplaces to try and get them fired or dry up their income as much as they can.

Roanna doesn’t mind Joker using slurs, she carries on like it’s nothing. Someone tried to start a dialogue with them about it and ended up getting suspended. One time Roanna and the Resisting Hate gang attacked a trans person over LGBT topics because the person in question didn’t follow the standard political beliefs that entail. This is the same Resisting Hate organization that apologized for an incident involving Velcro. Roanna’s hypocrisy on that front was hard to miss.

As the Fahrenheit211 article demonstrates, there are countless tales surrounding these individuals.

Some of them don’t even require words to describe.

What you’re looking at is a bloody hand print. This is the moment I knew something very wrong was going on here. With all this. This was one of the people that Resisting Hate’s gang tormented. He gave a bloody high-five on his computer screen. You can see Cheeky Monkey’s online profile page in the background. It gets worse, though. In these very gory images (WARNING) we can see the amount of self-harm inflicted because of the abuse this person went through.

I was able to talk to a close friend of Felyn69 and get an understanding of what Joker and Monkey put this person through. (Note: Monkey has argued that they tried to tell Felyn69 to get help, as seen in the screenshot itself. The stories offered on the situation between either side differ.)

“I first came on them, I really don’t remember what the conversation was about. I think religion. They were tag team trolling me and I had more than one system open so was able to keep up mostly. I noticed [Felyn69] there, but not there. He was part of the group but seemed out of place. I started talking to him alone and quickly realized something was up. was he thought he was an “underling” of Joker and Monkey. They rarely spoke directly to him but would talk to him through a third party. If they ever spoke directly to him he would feel “blessed” and awestruck. He called them the gatekeepers. They had apparently tasked him with getting news. And back then he was obsessed with the Fukushima thing. They knew this and used it. God this is hard to explain. You had to have been there.

I had decided to get him away from them. They figured that out pretty quickly and began trying to smear me. They would tell him I was nuts and obsessed and dangerous. They said all the usual shit that trolls do. Anything to get him to distrust me. They thought I was a girl and in love with him because that is what I had to do. I figured out that was the only way to keep his attention. And they used that against me saying I was fucked in the head because I didn’t get pissed when he spoke about being with women, which I don’t know if he was, he may have hired a cheap hooker. I think once or twice he found someone online and they went over, but it always ended in disaster. Anyway, that was one thing they used. And just anything, I can’t think of everything. They told him I was nuts, you know just whatever. And as I upped my game, they upped theirs. They were going to keep him at all costs. Just for fun. They messed with him more, encouraged him to drink more. He would cut himself and post pictures and that just fueled their lust. It was fucking weird.

And the entire time they were doing this they were constantly hunting people. The weaker, the better. It never stopped. They were on like clockwork, it never ended. I watched them prey on people constantly, changing accounts back and forth and tag teaming people to make the group seem bigger. Other people would come and go in the group. Many pulled in the same way [Felyn69] was but stronger people who left on their own.

Alright. There was a point early in the game where they instructed him to carve ‘LAZ’ into his body. It was to keep some kind of curse off him. Of course, he did. In his inner leg. It is still there, will be forever. That is another thing. They had him believing they could curse him. And that they were some kind of omnipresent beings who controlled their part of the internet. He felt like they always knew what he was doing. Made it hard to speak frankly with him.

He cut his arms open and his throat. Posted pics and disappeared. I went to them asking and they said yeah, they saw the pics. And that was pretty much it. They didn’t seem to care. I managed to get his full name and location and made the calls. Took me a while because I kept getting the wrong side of town. They eventually found him and took him to hospital. I spoke with the nurse. Talked to some healthcare people after that to see if they would do anything. They don’t force you onto meds in the UK. The rest is history. He’s doing good now. That night sucked. They still tried to keep hold of him after but their spell was broken and after he stopped drinking and drugging it cleared his head. We have been good friends ever since.”

Cheeky Monkey later came to me and said there’s an alternative side to this story that I needed to shed light on. They said this person was lying.

They provided the screenshots you see above.

“The people that read your t/l are the ones that always automatically assume I am the bad guy. I’m the ‘horrible evil monkey’ that everyone hates remember? The guy in question was mentally unwell & I tried to protect him from everybody. I can show you all kinds of crazy about the account that said we trolled that guy to self harm. This is an outright lie. He was my friend. The woman that told you these lies is insane, always pretending she’d been raped or taken an overdose. She was obsessed with the guy. You can see from the ss you posted I’m trying to help him. We even tried to humour her, to make her leave [Felyn69] alone. She was out to destroy his mind completely. I fell out with a lot of people trying to help him. [Felyn69] was really messed up & he said some terrible things to people. He was schizophrenic & an alcoholic. But he was a good guy & he had a good heart. He’d been self harming for years. Nobody was ever kind to him because he was so nasty at times. I saw through all that bullshit & tried to be his friend. It’s hard when talking about [Felyn69] because he had 2 personalities. When he was ‘ok’ he was caring & kind. I helped him stop drinking & he helped me stop smoking. He offered me a place to stay when I had issues with my partner (fortunately I never needed to) this guy had nothing no money & yet he would’ve given me what he had if I’d needed it. I just know he was a good guy. [She] threw herself at him, she became obsessed. Pretending she was going to kill her self every 5 minutes to get him to respond to her.”

In light of these allegations, the original person I had spoken with had this to say.

“They thought I was a girl and in love with him because that is what I had to do. I figured out that was the only way to keep his attention. And they used that against me saying I was fucked in the head because I didnt get pissed when he spoke about being with women, which I dont know if he was, he my have hired a cheap hooker. I think once or twice he found someone online and they went over, but it always ended in disaster. Anyway that was one thing they used. And just anything, I can’t think of everything. They told him I was nuts, you know just whatever. I had decided to get him away from them. They figured that out pretty quickly and began trying to smear me. They would tell him I was nuts and obsessed and dangerous. They said all the usual shit that trolls do. Anything to get him to distrust me. This went on for months and months. They would get me suspended and I would have to start over and keep trying. At one point they had him convinced, because I did keep trying, that i was obsessed and dangerous and he started blocking me.”

This second story comes from @itwasme762 via Twitter. He has shown me proof of ID to corroborate his claims. For the sake of privacy, I blocked out and blurred names and faces of the people Joker targeted on social media.

“RH and their trolls found me over a year ago as my bio displayed that I was the son of an original sas war hero. My daughter followed me under her real name and referred to me as dad. All I did was tweet about my dislike at what blair did. RH and it’s trolls constantly attacked me. They went through my media and found my daughter. They harassed her so much she closed her Instagram account. Since then they have found her on Twitter and posted her pics. Most of when she was 16. They have threatened to kill me and gang rape my daughter. They have also found and harassed my son on Facebook too. They regularly post pictures of my war hero father with ROT IN HELL among other evil things written on it. I have an ongoing police investigation as they have posted my work details and regularly ring and send threatening text messages. The loony left / antifa will shout abuse at those who fought real nazis too and make their families lives a living hell all for a difference of political opinion.”

After hearing stories like that, you’ll look at posts like this one from Resisting Hate and find a hell of a lot of irony. An organization that claims to avoid drama tends to find themselves knee deep in the stuff.

Thus the underlying hypocrisy of Roanna Carleton-Taylor reveals itself. I didn’t have to go too far to find enough evidence to confirm this one. Instead, Roanna and Resisting Hate came to me.

Let me walk you through what happens when you highlight the abusive behaviors of Roanna Carleton-Taylor’s Resisting Hate organization. It all began on the 21st of March. Roanna wrote a piece on HuffPost titled “Get These Far Right Extremists Off Their Online Platforms.” She made reference to the head of Counter Terrorism Mark Rowley’s speech mentioning Tommy Robinson, using that as an opportunity to push her deplatforming strategy.

Regarding Tommy, she said:

“We have reported him encouraging his followers to commit acts of violence. We have reported him for racism. We have reported him for inciting hate against an entire religion We have reported him for supporting death threats from his followers.”

Roanna would eventually get what she wanted, later.

But in the meantime, I thought it was maximum levels of hypocrisy on display here. For Roanna to author something like “D0xing Fascists Is Necessary” on her own website, but be two-faced when it comes to the message preached in HuffPost. Then I mentioned Joker. “Joker is a good friend and I support him completely,” Roanna Carleton-Taylor of Resisting Hate said in a screenshot I posted. Also present in that exact same screenshot were several examples of Joker doxing people and threatening others.

It just seemed odd to me that Roanna was condemning Tommy Robinson, while all the meanwhile her Joker friend was making threats to Tommy’s pal Caolan Robertson.

“I know where you live. I know the shitty wine bar you faggot yourself in. WATCH,” – Roanna’s friend Joker tweeted to Caolan.

I asked the editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK if she supported toxic behavior like that. In terms of proving Joker existed? The guy showed up online, skulking about and around Tommy’s tweet about Roanna’s article.

Jenna Sharpe, a victim of Joker’s attacks and harassment online, also questioned the editor-in-chief of HuffPost UK. She says Roanna assisted Joker and others in doxing an address of hers, putting it on an online jihadi forum.

Again, Joker was helpful in giving me proof of his behavior. “I will also ruin Jenna’s acting career because of your insolence Nick,” he told me. “And her address and info is going up everywhere,” Joker added.

There was a wealth of this worth sharing with the HuffPost UK editor-in-chief. I showed them that time Roanna’s other friends, Lazarus and Cheeky Monkey, were hunting down someone’s address and encouraging people to commit suicide via DM.

Joker didn’t like my Twitter thread about him. To one of Resisting Hate’s twitter accounts, he said he was going to come after me next. They replied with the usual “I’m just gonna look the other way tee-hee” response.

Joker wanted me to post “fail doxes” about him for some reason. He wanted me to get down and dirty. Stoop to his level. I told him there was no way that was going to happen. I was willing to chat with him. But Joker refused to even go through and clarify which of the screenshots posted about him were real or fake, as he was alleging some were. He threw in an accusation that I was a pedophile, and friends of pedophiles, for good measure.

Roanna was watching this all unfold on the sidelines. The gang of “friends” that she surrounds herself with swear they aren’t working for her in an official capacity. All the meanwhile, they’re attacking and targeting individuals who speak out against the Resisting Hate website. Imagine if there was a bank robbery. There’s the bank robber robbing the bank. But there are other people there too, shoving money into duffel bags. The same applies to this group of hangers-on that lurk online with Roanna Carleton-Taylor.

“I’m not with the bank robber, but I’m a huge fan of money and this seems like a great opportunity,” the other people say.

One of the screenshots has a picture of an email on it. I’m told the account that tweeted it was one of the dozens used by Roanna’s crew. The screenshot is a bit blurry so I’ll type it out here.

Email from Roanna Carleton-Taylor, on August 23rd, 2016.

“Subject: Mutual friend of Joker. Email passed to me in confidence.

Dear Mr. [REDACTED] My name is Roanna Carleton-Taylor and I run an anti-hate group on Twitter. I have been appraised of your extremely difficult situation by a mutual friend who uses the pseudonym Joker. The abuse you and your innocent family are receiving is extremely serious and entirely unacceptable. Members of my group and beyond have tried to calm the situation and explain that you are not the individual they believe you to be (although it would be equally unacceptable had they managed to target the right person) but the situation is escalating and showing no signs of coming to an end. I do understand that is tempting to hope this will all blow over and that it daunting to seek out the help of people you do not know but I promise you the contacts I have listed below are very good people who will help and support you.

[Illegible] with the police and calm this situation down. If I can personally be of any help or support my phone numer is [REDACTED]. I am the only openly non anonymous member of our group (due to security concerns) and I am more than willing to put my real name to the police or relevant third parties to back up the fact that you have been unjustly harassed and victimised.

Sincere regards to you and your family,

Roanna.”

I redacted the names and phone number of Roanna from the screenshot personally, as I don’t believe it to be appropriate to use the same methods as her. But when it comes to the recipient in question? This situation boils down to Roanna trying to play the hero to the same person that her own friends threw under the bus by creating a mess online.

How did the HuffPost Editor in Chief respond? By playing willfully ignorant. And for what? Tommy retweeting my inquiry about whether or not Polly condoned the abusive behaviors facilitated by one of her contributors? Or was it when Tommy mentioned that Resisting Hate threatened to murder his children? Because that was a thing too.

“Hey, those people threatened to kill my family.” “Oh no! Muh mentions!” I hold Polly Curtis does not treat her staff at HuffPost, in the same manner, she responds to people online.

My bad for naively believing Polly Curtis would be sensible and look at what was in front of her here. Instead, she chose to turn a blind eye. I was left to fend for myself against the wolves of Resisting Hate, who decided to pick apart my online profile now that I was perceived as a new opponent to them. It took six hours from first mentioning them until Resisting Hate’s unofficial gang of fanatics proved my point about Roanna’s methods of running her organization.

They’re the group that coordinated to take down Tommy Robinson’s Twitter account. Around the same time I made that thread petitioning HuffPost to reconsider allowing Roanna to write for them, I had someone on the inside of Roanna’s circles feeding me information. Her personal account ended up getting suspended. She came back incognito, getting in touch with people one-by-one in order to rebuild her follower base. One of those people happened to be my spy.  I figured one could follow this pattern of behavior to suss out the list of Resisting Hate members. By blocking all of Roanna’s sock account’s followers, it could serve as a workaround of protection against her organizations mass-flagging. So I wasn’t exactly surprised to see Joker’s account and other accounts from Resisting Hate members that took jabs at me earlier in the day.

But what I didn’t expect was one of them being TellMAMA. The TellMAMA official account was following Roanna’s sock account for whatever reason. Let me be clear. I’m not saying that’s damning evidence. That’d be silly. I just found it rather amusing.

Despite the deliberate efforts at obfuscating her connections, Roanna Carleton-Taylor eventually revealed her working connection with Fiyaz Mughal.

Before we get to that. Let’s be frank here. The fact that Fiyaz Mughal openly associates with Roanna Carleton-Taylor on a level beyond simply acquaintances makes his knowledge of her activities feasible. He couldn’t be completely ignorant of Roanna’s method of doing things on social media. Given the community cohesion and unity Fiyaz Mughal claims to stand for, one would think he’d abhor the tactics deployed by Roanna.

But no. Instead, Roanna gets nominated for a “Community Volunteer Upstander Award” in his No2H8 show.

This next case reveals that same sort of dynamic is something Fiyaz Mughal used in his TellMAMA activities in the past.

Alison Chabloz

One of the people that Roanna went after was Alison Chabloz.

I have to be very particular about how I talk about Alison Chabloz because she has threatened to have me arrested multiple times for contempt of court over the course of these past few months. This is in regards to an ongoing court case she’s in with someone currently. I’m an American so I could probably get away with speaking how I want. But given the whole freedom of speech theme at the center of this essay, I’ll respect Alison’s very assertive wishes here.

She made this video you see above. Alison sings a song in it that’s about a controversial subject matter that’s often met with backlash within today’s society. The thing is – the police say they have no evidence that Fiyaz Mughal and Alison Chabloz know each other. But I’m pretty sure I do. 

“Blogger in court for UK’s first anti-Jewish racism private prosecution,” says RT in a December 2016 article on their website. I claim no responsibility for what other websites title their posts.

These are the other articles about Alison Chabloz which one can access via Google News to learn more about her situation. I claim no responsibility for Google’s algorithm, this is just what comes up when you type her name in.

• December 23rd 2016: “Woman in court over posting ‘anti-semitic’ song on YouTube” (ITV News)
• March 3rd 2017: “Canadian Jewish groups troubled by UK blogger’s visit” (BBC News)
• January 10th 2018: “Blogger who described Auschwitz as a ‘theme park’ on trial” (The Jewish Chronicle)
• March 7th 2018: “Blogger claims “no proof” gas chambers killed Jewish people” (BBC News)

The reason why I’m showing you those media articles about Alison is so you have an understanding of where Chabloz’s situation in life stands currently. It’s a set of circumstances that are unfavorable in the eyes of Fiyaz Mughal. Based on his stated beliefs in regards to the Jewish community and hate speech, it is doubtful Mr. Mughal would agree with Alison Chabloz on certain subjects.

I’m able to discuss this Alison Chabloz person in the first place is because she came up in a conversation (1, 2, 3) between Resisting Hate’s Twitter account and another individual. In doing so, the working relationship between Roanna Carleton-Taylor and Fiyaz Mughal is confirmed.

This is a focal point for understanding this situation. I also want to take the time to thank Roanna Carleton-Taylor for making my job easier by openly tweeting this. It was nearly impossible to prove TellMAMA’s connections with Resisting Hate otherwise. But here she is, just tweeting this out.

A detail to keep in mind here is the particularity of word choice that Roanna has. She tends to be literal in her interpretations and usage. In the above screenshot between has and had. It’s also present in the tweets below, where they state “as I understand it they knew each other, but that does not mean she worked for TM.”

She means that in the same sense that Roanna doesn’t have Joker and Lazarus as employees. They just hover around her on social media and attack people who speak out against Roanna or her Resisting Hate organization. It’s ironic that Roanna warns Suzanne to stay away from Alison’s blog, because “she lies a lot.” If you were to look at Resisting Hate’s entry on Alison Chabloz, you’d find no mention of Roanna’s reasoning for being interested in targeting her. That it was, at least in part, to help Fiyaz Mughal.

In fact, Roanna says the exact opposite. She flat-out lies about it. 

“Our fully independent anti hate group have written this simply because your views and your behaviour are a disgrace to humanity.”

That relationship dynamic that Roanna keeps with Joker and Lazarus is akin to the strategy employed by Fiyaz Mughal and Alison Chabloz. That is to say, Chabloz acted as Fiyaz Mughal’s personal Joker online.

So these Resisting Hate tweets give me the opportunity to speak about Alison Chabloz’s association with Fiyaz Mughal in years past. For the bluntest of these examples, I compiled a straight-up list of tweets from the TellMAMA Twitter account that mentioned and interacted with Chabloz’s aliases (I got them from the Resisting Hate entry on Alison). In the second stroke of luck, I managed to find a means of accessing the deleted tweets from Alison Chabloz’s banned accounts. This shouldn’t be possible normally, as Twitter erases tweets immediately upon removal. But Storify saves a copy of these on their website, circumventing that erasure.

This is Alison Chabloz’s Storify account (which is verified by the fact she links to her YouTube at one point.)  It’s where our story continues. Let’s explore the context behind what exactly Alison Chabloz did years ago, therein fleshing out Fiyaz Mughal’s connections to her.

Enter Ambrosine Shitrit, stage left. According to her biography page on The Times of Israel:

“Ambrosine spent 15 years in the UK media and music industry working with British pop acts such as Mel & Kim, covering International promotions. Spent the last ten years as a voice over. In 2013 Ambrosine set up Yad B’yad-UK to monitor and help people who have been victims of racial abuse and anti-Semitism through social media platforms.”

The important bit there is she set up an organization that had the same overall purpose as TellMAMA. Ambrosine’s Yad B’yad-UK had the goal of monitoring and helping people who were victims of religious and racial abuse.

On June 14th, 2013 a report came out that TellMAMA was going to sue Ambrosine Shitrit. Fiyaz Mughal accused her of defaming him on Twitter and was going to take her to court over libel. Furthermore, Fiyaz accused Ambrosine of siding with the English Defense League.  The tweets at the center of the dilemma were sent in September 2012 and February 2013. Ambrosine allegedly compared TellMAMA to the Stasi, claimed they were “trying to close down pro-Israel accounts” on Twitter, and implying TellMAMA encouraged antisemitism (according to Mughal’s lawyer Dr. Farooq Bajwa). Ambrosine’s lawyer Mark Lewis categorically denied all of these claims. Furthermore, Mark says Fiyaz Mughal sent a letter demanding an apology and compensation for damages was sent to Ambrosine’s house, leading them to report Fiyaz to the cops.

Mughal’s quote in the report makes it clear his priorities are all about image.

“It has nothing to do with people’s views on Israel. It has nothing to do with people’s views on Islamic radicalism. It’s a question of defending our reputation in relation to what she has said.”

That same day, Fiyaz Mughal made a blog post about the subject on his website. Take a moment to fully understand the provided evidence that he alleges as wrongdoing. Two of these tweets being retweets and another one being an automated tweet showing that Ambrosine liked a YouTube video.

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I can’t even dress this up neutrally. This is simply Fiyaz trying to smear Ambrosine in order to try and justify his litigation.

“We could go on for some time on these matters but here is a Facebook posting by Mrs Ambrosine Shitrit – Prejudicial? Well you make your own mind up. So, in earnest, Mrs Shitrit – does what you say stand up? We think not!”

Those are Fiyaz’s words when introducing this screenshot. Despite what he says, this looks like it came from Twitter.

If that is enough to condemn a person of wrongdoing, prison systems around the world would’ve reached max capacity by now.

Chabloz’s Storify account fills in the blanks about what went down. Given the importance it has here, I made a backup of it for posterity. Unfortunately, because of Alison threatening litigation against me, I’m limited to speaking only about the elements related most directly to TellMAMA and Fiyaz Mughal here.

Basically, Alison Chabloz cataloged this feud with Ambrosine Shitrit and her Yad organization via Storify. Eleven of these stories mention Ambrosine in the title alone. What did they fight over? The usual. One side thinking the other is a bunch of liars, frauds, or harassers. Pepper in some religion and politics as a motivating factor on top of that. Alison manages to take down Ambrosine’s Twitter accounts eventually. In one Storify we see Chabloz get reported for Twitter abuse by Ambrosine for making comments toward her about Palestine. At one point Alison identifies the other co-founder of Shitrit’s Yad organization. A lass by the name of Sheryl. She too was caught up in the months of drama between Chabloz and Ambrosine. If you wanted to read her take on events, she made a Tumblr post summarizing events. Rather than taking you through a play-by-play of the social media bickering between either side here, Sheryl was thoughtful enough to have a folder of screenshots all about it.

Fiyaz Mughal and TellMAMA participate in the online dogpiling of Sheryl too. Directly. Take note of the other account mentioned there besides Chabloz’s. YapPYapUK. The name in itself is a riff on Ambrosine’s @YadBYadUK. Now, normally parody accounts are harmless fun.  But @YapPYapUK treated things on a more serious note. In one of Alison’s Storify collection of tweets, we see YapPYapUK has published Ambrosine’s personal address. Chabloz explains what exactly was done behind the scenes:

“@YadbYadUK is not an official organisation. In order to be able to collect data, the organisation needs to be registered with the ICO. A complaint about this was made and the ICO contacted the owner of @YadbYadUK website, @mrsshitrit.

However, on receipt of the letter, MrsShitrit and her handbag carrier, Sheryl, decided to spin the story to suit them, claiming that the letter from the ICO is somehow proof that her own data protection had been breached. As owner of the website, her name and address are both in the public domain”

Whatever reasoning @YapPYapUK had for doing this, it caused great distress towards both Shitrit and Sheryl.

On January 3rd, 2014, Fiyaz Mughal digs his own grave when it comes to the Alison Chabloz situation. He writes a blog demanding “trolling & abuse” not happen in the organization’s name.

“We wanted to highlight an area that is sometimes troubling and which we must speak out about. We believe that harassment and trolling is not acceptable, even in the cause of countering hate. This is why we have stated this clearly on the front of our web-site. This means that continuously entering into dialogue with, intimidation and threats, be they through Twitter, SMS or other forms of communication should be condemned and in the strongest possible manner. This is irrespective of whether the actions taken are to counter any account that is promoting hate or anti-Muslim prejudice. We believe that there are simply no ‘ifs and buts’ on this matter.”

Incredibly ironic given the section on Roanna and Resisting Hate from earlier. But in the more immediate sense of Chabloz, Fiyaz Mughal walked himself into an incriminating corner. That’s because back in 2016, Alison Chabloz leaked an email sent to her from the man himself.

Fiyaz Mughal made an offer to lend money to Alison Chabloz. But it further details the capabilities of Fiyaz when it comes to manipulating the press. He talks about the Telegraph by name but also mentions the potential for the Guardian and HuffPost too. But most important of all is that it establishes the deeper level of the relationship had between both parties. To put this another way, it proves that Fiyaz Mughal and Alison Chabloz’s interactions with one another went beyond the casual surface level of social media norms.

He was fully aware what Alison was doing to Ambrosine Shitrit but feigned ignorance because she was his adversary at that time. Chabloz provides evidence of this beyond doubt via this Storify. She adds tweets like this one and that one which contextualizes the circumstances surrounding what brought Mughal to write the post in the first place. It was all in relation to the ongoing social media clashes and conflicts between Alison Chabloz’s side and Ambrosine’s. Fiyaz Mughal was waging a proxy war against Ambrosine by positioning himself as he did.

A little over a month and a half that January 2014 blog post, Fiyaz Mughal gets tangled up in an online argument between Chabloz’s gang of people and a Quilliam supporter named Mehrdad Amanpour. It is worth reading the whole thing as the archive doesn’t show the full page. It starts off with the usual getting into it. But then Mehrdad tags TellMAMA into the Twitter feud. The finale that makes this all worthwhile is TellMAMA and Fiyaz actively avoid giving an answer to someone who asked him to denounce Alison Chabloz.

Bottom line being Fiyaz Mughal lied to the public in that blog post. In the picture above, I lay out the three separate elements out demonstrating this.

• Fiyaz writes a blog denouncing the trolls and harassment happening on social media, and denounces anyone that claims to fight people in their name. Like Alison Chabloz did.
• Fiyaz offers no comment on Alison Chabloz’s actions in the midst of an incident the following month. But this confirms the blog post that was written in the first place is because of Chabloz’s feuds and drama.
• But then years later it comes out that Fiyaz knew Alison fairly intimately well. This is shown directly in the email screenshot, and mentioned on Alison’s personal website. She says Mr. Mughal offered her money after she was fired from her job on a cruise line.

In the “colorful” email exchanges between myself and Alison Chabloz, she directly confirmed the story of Fiyaz offering to help her. Based on the circumstances surrounding the situation back then, Mr. Mughal had reasons and motivations for his temporary alliance with Alison. His intentions were to make it seem like he and his TellMAMA organization were “above” the drama. The truth of it is anything but. Fiyaz had his hand in it. Stirring up trouble online, and then taking that animosity out into the real world as “problems” to point to. Ones of his own making.

This conclusion is backed up by another tweet from Alison Chabloz made in December 2015.

The above tweet is corroborated by this Storify from Alison Chabloz that took place back on December 28th, 2013. It depicts a Twitter conversation had between Ambrosine and others which was picked up by Chabloz’s people. What they saw as incriminating from Shitrit was the mention that she was legally gagged from talking about Fiyaz Mughal at all.

“@debatingculture: Noted, passed material to our solicitors. Thanks,” TellMAMA tweeted.

Based on the above screenshot and statement along with the entirety of evidence presented here, I strongly believe Fiyaz Mughal is a fraud. Specifically in the sense that his statements regarding people’s online interactions. His outward spoken attitude and perception that people’s mental states are fragile and need protection absolutely do not match his practices of participating in these internet wars of attrition. In comparison, the allegations Fiyaz waged against Ambrosine are nothing compared to the psychological mind games he played on her via social media over the course of several months.

Peter Tatchell

Imagine researching Fiyaz Mughal and TellMAMA to find these two stories.

• March 12th 2014: Peter Tatchell – Sex Brought ‘Great Joy’. To 9 Year Olds
• March 18th 2014: Human Rights Global Campaigner, Peter Tatchell, Joins the Work of TELL MAMA as a Patron 

To any rational human, your curiosity would be piqued in regards to wanting an answer as to what on Earth is going on with that. Now I got to be clear about this immediately — Peter Tatchell is not a pedophile, he’s just a huge fan of lowering the age of consent.

But we’ll get to this later on. First, we need to examine everything else besides that aspect about Peter Tatchell. To understand why Fiyaz would want him as a patron in the first place. Now at a glance, it’s commendable to see Peter talking about freedom of speech and having a dialogue. It gives something people to look up to. They need that these days. The point of this exploration on Tatchell is to demonstrate the role he plays in the circle of people surrounding Mughal.

To exercise my freedom of speech on a difficult subject.

Peter has been a political activist his whole life. Peter Tatchell was born in Australia back in 1952, dodging conscription into the Vietnam War in 1971 by escaping to England. It was here he got involved in the Gay Liberation Front movement.  From 1974 – 1977 he studied for a Social Services degree at North London Polytechnic. By 1978 he joined the Labour Party and got elected secretary to his local party over in Bermondsey. Politics went fine until 1983 when he stood in the election for Bermondsey’s Labour Party Parliamentary candidate. He’d end up losing by 10,000 votes.

Then came the founding of OutRage! in 1990. This is where the story of Tatchell’s life gets edgier.

This profile of Peter Tatchell done in 1994 demonstrates the process by which OutRage! operated against the Church of England. In a big arranged public display, Tatchell and OutRage! did a demonstration at Church House in central London. The group had signs saying things like “Gay Bishops are Hypocrites” and “Stop Sacking Gay Clergy.” But the center ring of Peter’s circus was ten poster displays carrying the names of Church of England bishops the OutRage! group thought were gay. This was only the latest in a series of stunts they embarked on against the Church. Tatchell says they had no confirmation these bishops were gay. These outings they were doing now were based only on “strong persistent allegations” of that. Rumors. Peter justified this by rationalizing it as if enough gay people were forcibly outed by them, the Church would be obligated to change their overall position. In the end what mattered to him was that the gay community applauded Peter for the work OutRage! had done. They set their sights on going after politicians next. This was the sort of pattern that would persist in Tatchell’s work for the next few decades. He was known for making his political statements by causing a scene. 

He got attacked by Mugabe’s bodyguards in March 2001. It took place in Brussels, Belgium when Mr. Mugabe came to visit a senior commissioner of the European Union. Tracking him down to the lobby of a Hilton Hotel, Peter managed to slip by several of Mugabe’s bodyguards and demand President Robert Mugabe’s arrest. Tatchell’s reasons were Mugabe violating the 1984 UN Convention against torture. Mugabe’s men kicked the shit out of Peter and beat him. In May 2007 Peter Tatchell was involved at a gay rights demonstration in Moscow, with the objective of petitioning Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov to lift a Gay Pride parade ban. According to the Guardian article on the subject, riot police stood by while “far-right skinheads” descended on Tatchell and the activists. Peter got beat up a lot again. This time the “skinheads” and religious orthodox protesters threw eggs and stones at them, hitting Tatchell in the eye.

There’s enough content in the history of Peter Tatchell’s 66 years on Earth for them to make a documentary narrated by Sir Ian McKellen. He plans to keep going, too. Peter forecasts he’s got at least another thirty years left in him.

On the immediate surface, it’s logical for Mughal to want Tatchell on board. His straightforward confrontational abrasiveness when it comes to political activism fits in perfectly. He’s more than happy to play into the war between Muslims and the Far Right. That means taking swings on Twitter at Islamic extremists too.

“What is illegal on the streets and the workplace should be illegal online,” Tatchell remarked back in February 2018. While the topic was about some election intimidation law, statements like that go to show Peter shares Fiyaz Mughal’s attitude towards internet regulations.

But what’s unusual about Peter Tatchell is that he marches to the beat of his own drum sometimes. For instance, he called out Laurie Penny (a past TellMAMAUK patron) for her misplaced outrage. He points out how quickly she jumps on something like a man putting his hand on a woman’s knee but stays silent on issues like Rotherham and grooming gangs. The way Laurie describes what Peter did makes it seem like he knows how to whip up a crowd.

Peter says he defends the right for people to get married, but thinks poorly of the institution and process of marriage itself. His views don’t fit the standard “one way or another” norms. Instead of the antiquated foundation based on “romantic sexual love,” Peter wants to widen the definition of partnership recognition to “any two people who share a close, deep bond.” Basically, his angle is working around the lovers, romance, and sex aspects involved. Peter’s “civil commitment pact” idea has legal endowments working a la carte, allowing people to pick and choose the sort of arrangement details they want.

Here’s something revealing he says toward the end.

“This point-by-point negotiation would compel partners to examine their relationship more closely and think through in greater detail the implications of entering a partnership agreement. It might lead to wiser decisions and more enduring commitment. With marriage, by contrast, there is no obligation on the couple to discuss the detail of their mutual rights and responsibilities. They simply sign a certificate, without any need to negotiate the particulars.”

Peter says marriage is simply “signing a certificate” while all the meanwhile proposing a system that strips the process down to just that. It sucks any deeper meaning out of it. This is when I began to notice Peter Tatchell’s methods. Master of “making a scene” but now in the online sense. I realized I was looking at a professional feather ruffler.

But I needed to keep looking to understand better.

In October 2016 Tatchell came to the defense of the Christian-run Ashers Bakery in light of the Appeal Court in Belfast ruling it was wrong of them to refuse to decorate a cake with a pro-gay message. Peter’s reasoning behind the stance was by ruling Ashers subject to legal penalization for not helping the promotion of same-sex marriage, the opposite can also be true. “It seems that businesses cannot now lawfully refuse a customer’s request to propagate a message, even if it is a sexist, xenophobic or anti-gay message and even if the business has a conscientious objection to it,” Tatchell wrote.

It turns out that Peter had flip-flopped on this issue. He said so himself back in February 2016. In a big ol’ public display. The same sort of thing he did back in May 2015 when the Belfast court ruled against Ashers Bakery.

The crystallizing moment for me arrived when I discovered Peter Tatchell interrupted a #HumanRightsDay speech by Jeremy Corbyn on December 10th 2016. This is the Labour party leader that Peter (Labour party supporter) is stepping on here. The intent behind the demonstration was to demand action from Labour on ending the Syrian conflict. It’s worth watching the video of this because the look on Corbyn’s face is priceless. It’s got an “oh god damn it Tatchell not this again” feeling about it.  Jeremy reacted to Peter barging in on his speech with real grace, all things considered.

In the end, Tatchell managed to pretty much derail Corbyn altogether. Peter made the discussion about Syria through his stubbornness to make a point.

But on social media, people got pissed at Peter Tatchell’s antics. Some in the media questioned his decision making. A historian named Louise Raw pointed out that Jeremy’s speech was about violence against women and about the Istanbul Convention. In her tweets that followed she was absolutely furious at Peter’s derailment of the topic, as it was apparently difficult to coax politicians into confronting the issues.

At one point Louise says:

“Corbyn CARES about women, is listening to brilliant wmn in the Party. But as a wise friend said,’Int Human Rights Day? No,it’s TATCHELL Day'”

Keep this in mind. We’re going somewhere with this train of thought. That wasn’t the first woman Tatchell had scorned online. There were others. It wasn’t the first time that Peter spoke out against the Left either. The Stop the War coalition had a bone to pick with Tatchell too. The group called him a liar in that his claims of supporting the Stop the War organization were completely untrue. STW state Peter had no meaningful involvement nor did he make any contribution to pushing forward their efforts.

It was following this thread backward that I came across a February 2016 extended interview Peter did with the Guardian. He is old enough that he can reflect on the past British left’s homophobia. Tatchell says they thought back then that being gay was a capitalist “bourgeois perversion” that’d disappear in a socialist utopia.  But there was something else mentioned that made everything click for me. Peter makes a point about his work from 1981 onward until the 2010 decade made him a death threat and hate mail magnet. Which given his history with the OutRage! group doesn’t make it as shocking as usual.

Tatchell says this.

“I’ve had about 50 bricks and bottles through my windows, three arson attempts and a bullet through the letterbox. I’ve been physically beaten up about 300 times in the last 30 years.”

Three hundred times. Nobody sane and wishing to stay in good health gets beat up that much. Not unless they’re a boxer or something. But if you have decades of confrontational political stunts under your belt? It comes with the territory.

That’s when I realized Peter Tatchell likes attention more than anything else in the world. Even on the simplest one-on-one level. Comparing one interview to another shows a similar display of meticulous detail and storytelling on Peter’s part. Now we know why. The dude likes being the center of focus. The spotlight. 

But for a more practical example of Tatchell’s affinity for it, on March 18th, 2018 Peter Tatchell played into the anti-Russia sentiments of the UK. He called for the implementation of the Magnitsky Act to allow the UK assets of Putin regime officials be seized. But further he wanted to go after the families of these people. That meant things like visa and expelling their kids from UK schools. That last part about punishing children pissed people off. The way Peter phrased it made it look like he meant all Russian migrants in the UK and their children. But it was no bother to him. Tatchell just tweeted a clarification several hours later that specified what he meant.

It’s no surprise that even today, Peter Tatchell is out doing protests. The streets are his office. But there’s more to him than that. Given how often he does speaking engagements, we can see Peter is someone who just likes being involved. The official LGBT Pride in London Twitter account simply adores Peter. He’s a regular fixture at their events.

So what’s the issue? I understand that someone feeling strongly about Syria ain’t a crime. But when it comes to the fact he made a contribution to a book about pedophilia, there are problems.

On March 12th, 2014, Matthew Hopkins wrote an extended blog post outlining the connections between Peter Tatchell and the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). This group whose aim is to abolish the age of consent rules in society wrote a book called Betrayal of Youth on their reasons why. It was put together by PIE member Warren Middleton. He got caught by police in July 2011 with indecent images on his computer, landing him a year in jail.

Matthew Hopkins went to great lengths in order to verify Peter Tatchell’s contribution to this book.

“So on the advice of Louise Mensch your humble inquisitor accessed a number of archives including a personal visit to the British Library to be allowed access to the original copy of Tatchell’s book held there. Because the book consists only of text it is neither illegal for the library to possess a copy nor for members of the public to view it.

Fortunately the responsible British Library authorities have ensured that the vile tome is held in the vaults and tied with a security band to prevent it being viewed by accident. Readers are required to view the book under supervised conditions at the restricted desks marked in red.

Having obtained the copy, the author carefully checked the claims against Tatchell. Contrary to his protestations, it seems that Tatchell was indeed a contributor to the book, BOY and the allegations about it are broadly true.”

For further reading: Matthew Hopkins provides a PDF link to the relevant portions of the book that involve Peter Tatchell’s contributions to it. 

What do the contents of this book talk about? Hopkins outlines three key points:

• “The first chapter, entitled simply ‘Incest’ equates a child climbing into bed with a parent to be read a story with an 8 year old boy climbing into bed to have his genitals fondled by his mother.”
• “In Tatchell’s own chapter 9, entitled ‘Questioning Ages of Minority and Ages of Consent’ he asks ‘What purpose does it [the age of majority] serve other than reinforcing a set of increasingly quaint, minority moral values left over from the Victorian era?’”
• “The chapter just after Tatchell’s is entitled ‘Ends and Means: How to Make Paedophilia Acceptable….?’ and opens with an account of sexual activity with two 8 year old boys before describing it as ‘all very normal to a libertarian, even to some open-minded parents’.”

Peter Tatchell admits to writing that chapter in Betrayal of Youth, however, he denies having knowledge of the purpose of the book, the other authors involved, or even the title of it. Peter wasn’t a member of PIE. In his direct reply to Matthew Hopkins, Peter says he was first approached about the book back in 1982. An unnamed senior labor politician and other “child experts” were contributing to it as well. Tatchell was under the impression they’d all be writing about various “children’s issues.” He spells out to Hopkins that he does not argue for removing age of consent entirely, only arguing about the set limitations in place and legality surrounding it.

Peter wrote his Betrayal of Youth chapter and nothing happened for four to five years. He clarifies this work wasn’t done for money either. One day a copy of it arrived in the mail, and he was angry to discover what had transpired. But he didn’t do anything about it because the book was already out there. Peter just assumed it wasn’t circulated well enough to matter in the long run.

What doesn’t exactly help Peter Tatchell’s case is he and his OutRage! comrades waving around signs saying “16 IS JUST A START” (in reference to their UK campaign protesting the House of Commons to lower the gay age of consent).

Matthew Hopkins says the Labour Party knew about this since at least the 1990s. They’ve done nothing. When the gay age of consent was lowered to 16 in 2000, it didn’t take too long before Peter started demanding it go even lower to 14. I’m obliged to link to this piece Peter wrote explaining why.  It was to cover youth from being arrested. “I do not support adults having sex with children. I do not advocate teenagers having sex before the age of 16,” Tatchell writes in the opening section.

Tatchell back in August 1997 was fascinated enough with this subject to interview an underaged boy named Lee about it. Let me be clear. Tatchell interviewed a 14-year-old boy about the sexual abuse he experienced at the hands of adult pedophiles and older kids since age 8 (and a half).

This is a letter from Peter Tatchell printed by the Guardian back in 1997. The subject matter is sex with children and the book called Dares to Speak by academics who were exploring this highly controversial territory. For reasons that’ll become clear in a moment, I have attached the follow-up letter Peter sent in soon after. He responds to the backlash from the original letter and clarifies his stance as best as he can.

Peter claims this letter was edited. He says his intention in the first place was to speak out against bids to censor a book. That there’s a full version of it that makes Tatchell’s intentions more clear. Peter has put forward (persistently on Twitter over the course of several years this letter has haunted him for) the implication his “impossible to condone” line in the last paragraph absolves him completely.

But that last paragraph in itself still exists. In of itself, that’s controversial enough to cause concern for many people. However, you gotta remember that Peter contributed to that Betrayal of Youth book on top of that. That’s not the last of this, either.

In March 1998, Peter authored an obituary for Ian Dunn. It did an apt job at summarizing the work Dunn did for gay rights. Especially when it came to Scotland in the 1970s. From launching Britain’s first national gay newspaper in 1972 to convening the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh in 1974. It was missing something, though. Ian Dunn was a co-founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). Did Tatchell know that? Was he involved?

Peter had this to say on the matter:

“Ian Dunn kept his paedophile associations hidden from me and many others. When I knew him, he always had adult partners. I did not know he had any links with PIE or any other paedophile organisation or publication. We were not close friends. I only knew his gay rights work. He may have been exposed prior to my writing his obituary but I never saw it.

I wrote the obituary in good faith, unaware of things we now know.”

Even if one is generous with the leeway they give Peter Tatchell in his explanations, there’s enough to wear things thin. Can one guy surround himself with so many pedophiles and not be aware of it?

However, Hopkins provides an exchange that took place between Louise and Tatchell that solidifies what common truth there is to find.

“Mensch – Although you state that in some of these cases you are just recounting the views of others, you do so in a way that never challenges their viewpoint. You state that paedophile abuse is “sex” and that being abused is “having sex” – that is your own characterization, rather than a reporting of others’ statements. You say in the Guardian letter that your friends “had sex” at nine with adults and say it “gave them great joy”. Why do you not add that you challenged this perspective of abuse survivors? 

Tatchell – If happy, well-adjusted adults say that having sex when they were children was not unwanted, abusive or harmful – and gave them great joy – what right do you or I have to dispute their opinion? [To] deny them their opinion is Orwellian.”

It was at this point I had seen enough from Peter Tatchell for one lifetime. I want to point out the different places Peter has responded to this topic for himself. There’s the reply to Matthew Hopkins, for starters. In some of the responses on Twitter, Peter links to this piece he wrote about schools not educating children on sex abuse.

At the end of the day, I was conflicted about Peter Tatchell.  While it’s admirable that Peter Tatchell is an advocate for free speech, on that front alone he seems to be doing it for personal reasons.

Fiyaz Mughal brought Peter Tatchell on board not (just) because of the LGBT activism work he did. He also wanted someone who knows how to stoke people’s ire. An emotional fire starter. That’s what he got. Look what happens. In this case, for example, the end result is a shut down of dialogue. Peter is a great button pusher. I’d be more than glad to make the argument an activist spirit doesn’t necessarily translate to a position of leadership. But I digress.

The age of consent stuff and concerns about pedophilia surrounding Peter Tatchell are suffocating, though. Let me be clear. This isn’t about whether or not Peter Tatchell is a pedophile. The argument I’m making here is that the possibility of this even being a thing is an issue. In the years before teaming up with TellMAMA, people talked about Peter and the age of consent topic. Hopkins wasn’t the first.

Fiyaz Mughal’s overall goal and responsibility here is ensuring community cohesion. To get things in UK society to a point where it all hums along smoothly. By having an individual who has a past history of working with and around pedophiles it raises concerns. Peter Tatchell can make the argument that he didn’t know better in either case (with the Betrayal of Youth book and Ian Dunn) all he likes.

Fiyaz Mughal’s decision to bring Peter Tatchell onboard raises questions about his judgement. If he somehow didn’t know about this despite Matthew Hopkins publishing a blog six days beforehand? That’s not exactly diligent. On the other hand, if he did know this, why did he agree to take on such a controversial person?

I’ll end Peter’s section on this final note. The picture you see below is of him disrupting the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter sermon in April 1998 (if you’re curious there’s a video of the incident too). He did it to protest the church’s stance on homosexuals. A police officer and stewards ended up dragging Peter and the other OutRage! campaigners down from the pulpit soon after this was taken.

I look forward to when Peter Tatchell does this type of campaigning to a Mosque.

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NEXT: Let’s find out what happens when Fiyaz Mughal abuses his position of power.