Escape from Big Mother: Free Speech of UK in Decay

This essay series is dedicated to Kalvin Chapman. He followed my Twitter for a long while and when the United Kingdom stuff started happening, me and him got along quite well. Kalvin was looking forward to me releasing this. It breaks my heart that he took his life. I hope wherever he is now, he’s finally at peace.

Hi. Long time no see. That’s because my Twitter account, @nickmon1112, got suspended for no given reason. At the time of my removal I was working on a very important story. This one. Right here. If you need to know how to contact me, ask @TheArtAnon on Twitter for directions.

On May 6th Tommy Robinson’s Day for Freedom March is happening. I’ll be there too. In spirit. I figured the best contribution I could make is by writing something. So. Here we are.

In the case of Tim Burton, I found corruption within the Crown Prosecution Service. I recommend looking at that page first if you’re in a hurry.

Every page here has something to see. I don’t even have to talk much because I have an introduction already. So that’s nice. If you like my work, here’s my PayPal. Your donations allow me to continue to pursue the stories like this.

1.) Introduction

2.) Fiyaz Mughal

3.) Tommy Robinson

4.) With Friends Like These

5.) Tim Burton

6.) PREVENT or: Why the United Kingdom Never Acknowledges Anti-fa

7.) Conclusion

8.) Bonus: The Three Stooges

— I had two extra pages about Theresa May/Amber Rudd/Sadiq Kahn, and a timeline of the decline of freedom of speech in the UK planned. But for the sake of wanting to get this done before 2019 I decided to go on without them for now.

Introduction

We have reached the pinnacle of communication in our civilization and this is where it got us. From when I started in March, to when I finished here on May 4th, so much has happened since.

A fascinating display of how low in regard free speech in the UK has become has to be the case of CountDankulaTV. It’s a guarantee that 99% of you reading this know what I’m referring to already, and there’s no need for me to explain the start of that fiasco. Guy decides to play a practical joke on girlfriend by teaching her beloved pug dog a nasty trick. One where the animal reacts to “gas the Jews” on command. Everyone with a bloody ounce of common sense found the humor in the situation when Dankula uploaded the video to YouTube. Everyone but the Scotland police who arrested him.

The Dankula story itself is a spectacle. But the nail in the coffin of dignity came into play for me when I found out Hitler’s Germany was more lenient when dealing with a similar situation back in World War II.  Some guy named Tor Borg had a Finnish dog that raised their paw and barked in a similar fashion akin to Adolf Hitler. The German authorities caught wind of this, according to a BBC article about the situation from January 2011. Nazis attempted to sabotage the guy’s business. The Foreign Office spent three months in consideration of trying to bring the case to trial for insulting Hitler. But it never came to pass. The man living in WWII Germany with a dog who did Hitler impressions was not punished.

Consider the following bit from that piece:

“But in March 1941, the Chancellory decided that “considering that the circumstances could not be solved completely, it is not necessary to press charges”. It was unclear whether Adolf Hitler had been involved in the saga himself.”

Couple that with the fact that Dankula went through two years of court proceedings. That’s twenty-four months with the threat of jail-time taking up space in Dankula’s mind. The minds of his girlfriend and family, too.

So to say the Scottish (and UK by extension) government is “worse than Hitler” wouldn’t be hyperbole, here.

And that’s fucking terrifying. If the point of this piece was to make a “things have gone too far” statement, I could stop here. It doesn’t get more cut-and-dry than this, in that regard.

This photo is technically impossible in the United Kingdom right now. That’s because the United Kingdom government has decided that those two lovely girls in the center of the picture there are terrorists or something.

The way things are at in the United Kingdom? We’re going straight down the road of eventually not being allowed to question why people are detained anymore. People are getting kicked out for not being cohesive to British values. Reader, I want you to take a moment and try to define what that is. British values. Go on. Ponder it.

Yeah. We’ve fucked up. At the core of everything in this mess, there’s three phrases.

• Extremism: At the beginning of May 2016, it was revealed David Cameron’s countering terrorism strategy was stymied on a fundamental level. What exactly they would define as extremism. The challenge was making something not too broad or else it would be immediately flogged in the courts. As it turns out, simply saying “vocal or active opposition to fundamental British values” is too vague of a phrase in the realms of freedom of speech. Keep this in mind when you’re reading throughout this entire essay. It casts a shadow over a majority of everything.
• Islamophobia: In December 2016 while giving oral evidence to the Home Affairs Committee about hate crime and its violent consequences, Fiyaz admits (at the bottom of page 8) that there’s no universal definition of Islamophobia or what constitutes anti-Muslim hatred. As of April 24th, 2018, the UK government is still trying to figure this one out. The implications of having no official definition, and the breakdown of the de facto ones floating around out there, is explored in this paper from the ICLA.
• Hate Crime: This comes from the 140-page long Hate Crime Operational Guidance from the College of Policing. In 2014 the UK injected identity politics into their police system. It boils down to “any criminal offence which is perceived, by the victim or any other person, to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race/religion/sexual orientation/disability/transgender status or perceived race/religion/sexual orientation/disability/transgender status.” Yup. You don’t even need to be a minority. Anyone can be a victim of a hate crime. “Telling a victim that a crime is not a hate crime could be deeply offensive to them,” the document says.

The lack of objective boundaries is what makes stories like “Woman guilty of ‘racist’ Snap Dogg rap lyric Instagram post” possible.

“A teenager who posted rap lyrics which included racist language on Instagram has been found guilty of sending a grossly offensive message.”

Let that sink in.

I’m writing about this topic of free speech and the state of affairs within the United Kingdom for another reason. A personal one. Three of my dear friends: Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, and Martin Sellner were detained by UK border authorities on outrageously baseless claims.

I never trusted Europe beforehand, in terms of possible dangers and overall stability. I let Brit know that too. Before the UK incident, I felt like an over-exaggerating worrywart. It’s one hell of a moment to have the absurd fears I had harbored actually come to pass. It’s one of those times where I wanted to be wrong.  Then came March 10th 2018. Doomsday nightmare apocalypse.

I still can recall the feeling of how stressed and worried I was when I first found out. The emotional reaction leaves an impression in one’s memory on such occasions. Nobody under any circumstances whatsoever should be in a position where they ask “will I ever see my friend again?” and not know the answer. Definitely not like this.

The call signal miraculously held, most of the time. The volume from her end of the line was extremely quiet though. Had to find a quiet place without noise in my house to compensate. It carried us through the day. For like, two hours of conversations altogether. I served as one of the relays that helped bring information about Brit and Martin’s detention situation to the outside world. Their lives depended on it for all I knew. The spotlight of the public eye has a tendency to cause authorities to behave. Drawing attention to what was going on, worked as a short-term life insurance policy for the both of them.  Brittany and I made contingency plans in case things turned out bad. Then backup plans in case that fell through. Then back-ups for the backup plans.

I still remember the last of these calls from the Detention Center quite well. Brit told me she’d call when the guards were planning to transfer back out of Colnbrook to take her back to the airport for her flight back to Vienna. Given the time zone differences involved,  this happened to be at 4 AM. We managed to get in touch one last time before the crack of dawn. It may seem trivial to anyone reading this, but back then when this was all happening? Totally and most definitely worth being tired in Church for. When I wasn’t nodding off to sleep in my pew, I prayed like crazy Brit and Martin would make it back to Austria in one piece.

You don’t know how relieved I was to see the video of their return. It was the moment they were officially free from this nightmare. At least, that’s what I thought.

Little did I know, the people going after my friends were just getting started.

Between that moment back in March up until right now, has been a journey of me trying to make heads or tails of the United Kingdom’s political power system. Nearly two months on. Even looking at the finishing touches of my work makes me think this will still go on for a very long time.

Waking up the next morning to discover a similar nastiness from the UK authorities had happened to Lauren Southern (I helped her do stuff with her South Africa documentary) helped solidify my decision to undertake such an ambitious subject matter. It gave weight to the argument this was all more than mere coincidence.

I spent the final few weeks of March rallying people on Twitter to sign a petition on this whole situation. It passed the 10,000 signature threshold to make it warrant an official UK government response.

Here’s what the Home Office said:

“Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, and equal rights define us as a society. The Government is committed to upholding free speech, and legislation is already in place to protect these fundamental rights. However, this freedom cannot be an excuse to cause harm or spread hatred. UK legislation values free speech and enables people who wish to engage in debate to do so – regardless of whether others agree with the views which are being expressed. Everyone has a right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). This is a qualified right however, which means that it can be restricted for certain purposes to the extent necessary in a democratic society. 

The Home Office is unable to comment on individual cases. On the whole the Government takes a robust stance against individuals whose presence in this country might not be conducive to the public good. Any individual whose presence in the UK is deemed not conducive to the public good will be refused entry, on a case-by-case basis.”

I have to admit my shock could come from the fact that I’m an American citizen. I came into this unfamiliar with the barbaric violations of personal liberties practiced by the UK authorities across the pond. However, given recent headlines indicating a societal descent into A Clockwork Orange ultra-violence going on in Sadiq Kahn’s London? I have to thank Amber Rudd for saving the lives of my friends, lest they walk into such a chaotic circus.

Let’s look at what an actual terror plotter looks like, and not what the Home Office paints my friends to be. In December 2015, a crazy individual named Mark Colborne was detained indefinitely as a result of his activities. These included possessing books and notes about making lethal poisons (police found ingredients for making cyanide in his house), and writings where Colborne fantasized about assassinating Prince Charles. Mark is a disgruntled white male who hated “non-Aryans” and admired extremists like Anders Breivik. Mark’s writings disclosed his aims to carry out a “mass terrorist attack.” So yes. Right-wing extremists exist. You’d hear more about them if the media wasn’t obsessed with giving exclusivity of that label to Tommy Robinson.

The contrast between Mark Colborne’s case to Martin Sellner reveals the mile-long world of difference here. Why is the UK government using this broad of a brush in what they consider extreme? It’s a detriment to their own cause of pushing “community cohesion” on the public.  Moreover, I’d have no reason to explore the subject in the first place if it weren’t for this incident. My general intent for this piece is exploring what went wrong with the United Kingdom, as to have caused the fiasco that happened to my pals. A deep dive of personal curiosity. I carry no hatred or animosity towards any particular party mentioned. 

In addition to that, I want to state outright that I acknowledge right-wing extremism exists. This isn’t an essay of denial in that regard. I hate the Nazis of the world too. The actual ones. Yet when people mob up against people like Martin Sellner online and accuse him of that, that’s another story. I highly disagree. But that’s the side-effect of the leftists in today’s society sucking all meaning from the English language. Yes. Words have meaning and power. They can also lose that power when used too generously in order to describe political viewpoints that people dislike.

The fact that I’m an American citizen actually puts me at a noticeable advantage, when taking into account the latest Reporters Without Borders assessment. They say the United Kingdom is one of the worst for freedom of the press, among all of Western Europe. Their evaluation of the UK is a damning one, indicating a “climate of hostility towards journalists threatening media’s ability to hold powerful institutions to account.”

The United Kingdom is punishing itself enough as it is. On the one hand (and when it comes to the treatment of the press in particular), UK media outlets have to worry about backlash from politicians and the police. What for? Their headlines. Word it the wrong way like this newspaper did, and you’re vilified as someone who “causes community tension.” Uttering the phrase grooming gang can get you branded Islamophobic. The air of obsession over cultural sensitivity couldn’t be thicker. The Daily Mail published a political cartoon and people got outraged because it looked similar to another one. The fact that their 2015 picture had similar styling to an “anti-Semitic” one from 1939, was enough to have the social media mobs lash out at the Daily Mail for “racial hatred.”

This contrast of priorities is best demonstrated by those at the top. Like the Mayor of London, Sadiq Kahn. It’s concerning that British leadership is willing to sacrifice people’s safety in the name of adhering to political correctness. Is too little, too late to turn things around?

Sadiq could’ve acted sooner if he wasn’t too preoccupied bemoaning how mean the internet is. But I have to say I’m glad he realized it’s impossible for the people of London to enjoy that oh-so–glorious cultural enrichment if they’re all dead.

“Political correctness has directly led to @SadiqKhan’s mess in London. Bring back stop and search,” said Nigel Farage on April 5th, 2018 via Twitter.

Yet nonetheless, I cannot lay the whole blame of the stop-and-search matter on Sadiq Khan’s shoulders. No matter how easy he makes such an opportunity seem. Indeed, if I look upward on the giant pedestals the UK political elites place themselves on, Theresa May sits amidst the clouds of delusion. As Home Secretary back in 2015, May’s bloody fingerprints are all over the reductions to stop-and-search.

Therein lies a part of the UK question. Following along the trails of the people in power. Retracing their administrative steps in order to find the mistakes. But generally speaking, there’s another layer of problems going on overall in terms of the country’s reputation. When an aspiring candidate decides to run for London Mayor jokingly at first, yet still manages to inspire hope from the public anyway? Mistakes were made.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BRITISH?

Everyone has a different answer to that. But it’s precisely that answer that defines what makes a person “radical.” To have ideas that go against the grain of “British values.”

This idea of what the UK government considers necessary and proportionate is at the center of everything. The government could be a 100% perfect Utopian ideal. But if the people don’t trust them, that perfection means nothing.

“Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change.” —George Lakoff

By treating the internet the same as physical reality, the UK government has trapped itself in a limitless landscape that drains their resources.

It was at some point after that I came across TellMAMA for the first time. I still remember my bewilderment. I was looking at George Orwell’s nightmare. I didn’t even to ponder the TellMAMA Twitter account for long. It was like I instinctively understood I just came face to face with a leviathan. The most sinister thing about it was we allowed it to come to life without even noticing.

We can establish what happened to Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, and Martin Sellner wasn’t an accident based on the procedures and guidelines the UK has in place. At the center of that red tape nightmare is a man named Fiyaz Mughal. He’s the founder of Faith Matters in 2006 and TellMAMA in 2012. The rise of his “civil society” organizations focusing on Interfaith and anti-Muslim hate incidents are synonymous with the encroachment of the modern dystopian culture nightmare the people of the UK are trapped in. Knowingly or unknowingly. Fiyaz Mughal’s part to play in this decline is the catalyst. He spearheaded pushing for the broadest possible expanse possible when it comes to what’s considered a hate crime. Something that allows for people’s feelings and perceptions to be a deciding factor, even if their accusations aren’t backed up by facts and evidence. Mughal’s crackdown on the online world and social media is representative of that agenda.

Fiyaz Mughal runs organizations that primarily focus on Muslim victims, yet all the meanwhile his narrative is that Muslims are oppressed. Look at how that turns out.

This is who the UK government sees as a representative role model and leader of the Muslim community. With that in mind is it any surprise that the authorities act divisive policies that regurgitate this animosity cycle?

Fiyaz Mughal

The Roman stoic philosopher Seneca once said: “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” The goal here being not to eliminate the emotions entirely, but properly attaching our judgments to them because that’s something in our own control.

Fiyaz Mughal is the founder of Faith Matters and TellMAMA. The former being an interfaith organization that focuses on making things cozy between different religions, while the latter is an anti-Muslim incident reporting organization that collects information submitted from the public.  While TellMAMA formally began back in February 2012, it was in November of that year Nick Clegg christened it seaworthy (for further reading: the issue of prejudice against Muslims was a huge part of his platform). He granted £214,000 of further funding to the project, making a big announcement at a town hall shindig alongside Minister for Faith and Communities Baroness Warsi and Communities Minister Don Foster. Back then, TellMAMA had been collecting data on anti-Muslim incidents to give insights to the police and government on how to address hate crime. The dataset provided by Fiyaz Mughal’s organization would be used to inform the cross-government Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group’s research into the issue. Also going on at the time was the emergence of the English Defense League. Police cracked down hard that year on their demonstrations. Based on the articles back then, you can see the reactionary dynamic Fiyaz Mughal was forming opposite the EDL here. He used them to justify and kickstart TellMAMA as an organization.

But Fiyaz Mughal’s political views add a whole other layer to how the two organizations and their functions play themselves out in a practical sense.  

I wanted to see what my followers on Twitter thought the current political climate as presented by TellMAMA in one of their latest yearly reports. This was done in order to establish a general sense of what people in my corner of the internet thought about it all (and shouldn’t be used to represent views of the UK on a national level or anything like that).

This is what they said.

One of the most popular answers was being afraid to give their honest opinion, out of concern that Twitter would suspend them. When it comes to the mention of Muslim Britons becoming second-class citizens in a two-tier society, people thought Shahid was painting a too-broad brush and lacking clarity. What group is Shahid talking about when it comes to needing to change the way they dress? On one hand, there are Muslim women who take their hijab off in order to blend into crowds more. Native British women who read that didn’t appreciate the blanket insinuation that “racists” are demanding that of Muslims. People understand this is something Sharia demands Muslim women to do. But on the other hand, many people saw that line and thought about the English, Swedish, German, and other European women and girls who fall victim to Muslim immigrants perpetrating sexual violence. Such as the grooming gangs. On the grounds that Islamic culture finds the way Western women dress lacking “modesty” and that they’re raped by dressing how they do.

It’s on a thin fine line.

According to some responses, the whole statement by Shahid felt like a contradiction on itself. Ambiguous doublethink. If you look closer (like this reply did) you’re able to see the careful choice of words used. The first paragraph goes “anti-Muslim,” “our British,” and “Muslim Britons” in separate sentences. Your mind doesn’t catch that, that way. But in the last part of the last sentence, this is brought back into play more directly. By going “British values,” “British freedoms,” and “our way of life,” it makes the Muslim assimilation into Britain messaging that Shahid was going for come into focus for the reader. It forces the reader to take an us vs. them side. TellMAMA claims to abhor such strategies, but here they are using it. Not between Muslim or British groups, mind you. Instead, it provokes an accepting Muslim culture or rejecting Muslim culture division. Some were aware of this manipulation and twisting of words. To make sense of this, we have to account for the “while there are Muslims in Britain, but there is no such thing as British Muslims” perspective. Muslim women being forced to wear face coverings is antithetical to the freedoms enjoyed by those with British values. Many replies acknowledged the reality of this culture clash. The British native public is waking up and defending their cultural heritage. Against those who label mourning the execution of Lee Rigby as “bigotry.” People who lived there for generations having a brand new for the first time influx of economic migrants dumped into their society. The West’s altruism being used against them, with the system being rigged to subvert itself by that dynamic. An incompatibility between British values and Islam. The blunt bottom line that British freedoms, like speech, are being censored to protect the Muslim minority group. People see a lack of equality under the law within Britain.

“I’m sick of being made out to be a racist because I’m concerned with the criminal actions of some migrants (who happen to be Muslim). And being guilted into tolerating an ideology which refuses to tolerate me and my beliefs,” one reply said. It states the upfront approach to what people who disagree with what’s going on are thinking.

Here’s another one, from a person who wished to remain anonymous. They live in the UK and tell me about the changes in daily life around them.

“Hi I wanted to respond to your tell mama tweet quoting its chair Shahid Malik but I didn’t want to do it publicly. I’ve found the opposite of what he talks about to be true, it is British women that have to modify our behaviour & our dress. I moved back to an area I used to live in, it’s by a really busy street that is full of restaurants & used to have lots of pubs, now it’s coffee shops & dessert shops. There is one owned by a convicted grooming gang member, it’s always packed. You used to be able to walk about on it safely until late as it was always busy but now gangs of middle eastern men intimidate western women. I’m in my 40s & I’ve been called a white b***h & wh**e on several occasions, mainly you just get intimidating stares. I can’t sit on my balcony in shorts & a T-shirt for example without having women in burqas stand underneath it starring until I give up & go inside. These are just mild examples about how life is changing for the worst, I could give you many more about how it’s indigenous Britons who are already second class citizens due to insane laws & a culture of placating muslim sensibilities at all levels of power in the UK. I volunteer in the local community & tell mama leaflets are appearing everywhere, I’m really scared as already we can be abused, threatened & nothing happens but if they claim racism we get police & council round in a flash. We are already expected to take anything they throw at us & if we complain they immediately say we said something racist & then we have to defend ourselves against the accusation & their behaviour even if witnessed by officials is dismissed.”

Some people thought he was referring to native Brits in that mention of modifying their looks. In such interpretation, calling Muslim Brits the second-class ones sounded “the wrong way around.” It was pointed out that a characteristic of “two-tier societies” by rule of nature have either population think of the other as second-class. Specifically in cases where the native population feels like they’re being replaced. A few saw this second-class concept as being enforced by Islamic culture instead. A prominent response by many said Shahid Malik was playing the victim card on behalf of the Muslim community in order to dodge criticism. Deflection from the crimes Muslims commits against non-Muslims, heightened by the mass immigration into the country. It’s a two-fold approach to being an aggressor while at the same time claiming to be the victim. “In my opinion, he’s crying out in pain as he strikes you,” one reply said. People say they’re sick of that tactic. On top of getting tired of being called racist just for existing.

This is the sort of battlefield of thought going on in the United Kingdom. Examples like the one above are the point of contention for the public on both sides. Three simple paragraphs from TellMAMA can be interpreted in so many different degrees, and the reality of it is they know that.

I realized the responses I got were probably going to be seen as the “far right wing” detractors. So I compromised.

I put out questions to the Muslim community as well. Unfortunately, there wasn’t as much of a response. It was a shame that was the case. But I wanted to get some sort of answers on their platform here, in a reflection of the public at large.

It was here I ended up being super lucky.

“Who Speaks for British Muslims?” I asked myself. It just so happens there was a Channel 4 documentary with that exact title (watch it here), that aired back on March 26th of this year. That’s when I discovered MEND. A pro-Muslim organization that ended up on the bad end of a smear campaign. One that had TellMAMA’s influence lurking within the background.

When it comes to the contents of the documentary itself, the best way I can break it down is by comparing it to TellMAMA. This way you can get an all-around understanding of them too.

In the interests of disclosure, I have to mention the bias I have in regards to this Channel 4 documentary. The team behind it is Hardcash Productions. As you can see here, they’re the same folks who made an ITV documentary about the “new far right” When it aired, Brittany Pettibone and I watched it when it aired back in November. Martin Sellner and Generation Identity were subjected to undercover reporting that amounted to nothing more than a few out of context statements in his case. Yet his situation was lumped together in this narrative of extremism that didn’t do a fair shake at covering the nuances between the different right-wing groups.

That makes this situation have a tasty layer of irony. Here, Generation Identity (critical of Islamic mass migration and the erosion of Western culture) is put into the same corner as MEND (a grassroots Muslim advocacy organization that pushes to give their people greater political power). I can say with confidence Generation Identity can relate to MEND’s tweets talking about how Hardcash Productions “first decided we were linked extremist and then went hunting for ‘evidence’ to ‘prove’ their theory.” Both MEND and Generation Identity were indeed subjected to the same social media mining for curated examples that justify the documentary’s presented allegations.

(At some point, later on, I would love to explore this particular aspect at greater length in the future. But we’re here to talk about TellMAMA so let’s get back to that.)

On March 26th, when this documentary was being broadcasted, MEND took to Twitter to reply on points throughout. At one point they laid out their platform:

• “This is what MEND is about: We call for Section 40 to be implemented immediately so that we can have a proper print media regulator”
• “We call for a change to the incitement to religious hatred legislation to make it easier to prosecute people who perpetrate anti-Muslim hatred”
• “We call for Prevent to be repealed an independent academic review into its effectiveness #Dispatches”
• “Action to end discrimination against Muslims in the workplace – e.g. by introducing name blind CVs since research by BBC has shown you are x3 more likely to get an interview if you have a Muslim sounding name”
• “We want the Government to invest in educational resources to teach Islamophobia alongside racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of prejudice and hatred in schools”

In a very general sense, the spirit behind MEND’s goals is also seen in TellMAMA’s work. Both MEND’s founder Sufyan Ismail and TellMAMA’s founder Fiyaz Mughal pride themselves on looking sleek and smooth as leaders. Both groups seek to make Britain a more inclusive, tolerant, and socially cohesive place for Muslims. To that effect, they both sought to make a foothold for themselves in the public sector.

However, the mutual aims get dwarfed in a fog of alleged scandals brought up. “Do these people really know who they’re working with?” the documentary imposes about MEND. “THERE’S NO SUGGESTION THAT MEND SUPPORTS TERRORISM. BUT…” is said at one point.

Many of the negative things insinuated and imposed about MEND as an organization are factors that play into TellMAMA as well. For example, at one point the documentary digs up old tweets from people involved with MEND. They point the finger of alleging antisemitism at it. However as you’ll see later on when we talk about Alison Chabloz, Fiyaz Mughal’s hands aren’t exactly clean in this regard either. A lot of a later page in this essay is dedicated to exploring the links to extremist activities that Mr. Mughal and his allies have. The Channel 4 documentary spins things on this “bad behaviors” axis against MEND, to make it appear as if the relationships MEND has with UK police is a bad thing. That it’s a shocker that the authorities would dare to be seen with MEND at all.

When this essay is finished discussing Fiyaz Mughal, you’ll be asking yourself the same thing about TellMAMA.

Next, the documentary talks about the backlash Sara Khan faced after Theresa May put her as the head of the new Commission for Countering Extremism she was putting together. Lady Warsi spoke out against the move, decrying Sara as a “mouthpiece” for the Home Office. Other detractors pointed out Sara Khan’s history of supporting the PREVENT program, which in 2016 was called “inherently flawed” by the UN Human Rights Council. There was a lot of flack. You would think Baroness Warsi wouldn’t be as harsh in her condemnation of Sara Kahn’s appointment. As seen in her speech to Bradford University, Sara definitely shares the same goals and desires with regards to extremism. Her viewpoint is that the idea of being a British Islam is a perceptual thing that came about as a generational shift.

The documentary says a MEND senior member commented that Sara Khan was an Oreo. Defined here as “brown on the outside but white on the inside.”

Fiyaz Mughal is given thirty or so seconds of screen time. It’s the only point in the whole documentary where his TellMAMA and Faith Matters organizations are mentioned at all, here. It’s enough of an opportunity for Mughal to impose that MEND “seems racist in their outlook” in regards to the comment made by the MEND senior member. Make a mental note of this because it shows the massive amount of weight Fiyaz puts on what he thinks are mean words.

You can see by the reporting style in this documentary MEND is pushed into that corner of having to condemn acts of terrorism. Of course, they do! Any sane organization looking to maintain their public image would. By slamming that question onto MEND it paints this perception that they’re dubious enough to make such questions necessary.

I should point out that the documentary makes mention of Sufyan Ismail’s donations to CAGE. They’re a similar interest group in the same neck of the woods as TellMAMA and MEND. Yes, MEND states their support for CAGE. But the particulars of why are vital. I have to admit when it comes to CAGE there’s more of a leg for this documentary to stand on. Snafus like CAGE involvement in handling Isis’s chief executioner Jihadi John and CAGE director Dr. Adnan Siddiqui reportedly saying suicide bombings were “a price worth paying” in some cases is unavoidably a bad look for the group to have. But you can still disagree with CAGE on that and not write MEND off entirely. Sufyan Ismail clarifies he donates to CAGE to support the group’s progressive work. You’ll be able to see what that is exactly when we talk about the UK government’s PREVENT policy.

This channel 4 documentary opened up with a story about how MEND activists lobbied for a school to remove their hijab ban imposed on 3 to 7-year-olds. The documentary accused MEND of being misleading by making it a debate about religious freedom after being told the school’s reasons for it were safety-related (MEND in response said their efforts were “in line with the views of the parents who felt the hijab and fasting ban was a breach of their religious freedom”).

In the end, the narrator thinks he’s making a big ol’ point when he says only one person ended up wearing a hijab after the school lifted the ban on it. Yet TellMAMA was involved in a similar case involving one person’s right to wear a hijab. In July 2015 a teenage waitress accused her employer The Savoy of discrimination, alleging they sent her home for refusing to remove her hijab. While working a wedding reception she claims Savoy staff questioned her twice about her headscarf. In response, the hotel made it clear that staff members are permitted to wear their hijab and there was no preventative policy in place for that. TellMAMA and Fiyaz Mughal stepped in to confront hotel management on the situation anyway.

There’s so much to take away about TellMAMA from this documentary about MEND, though. All centering around the idea of who has control of defining Islam in Britain. Fiyaz Mughal was generous enough to make a statement in light of the Channel 4 documentary’s release. It’s here we see him describe the direction of his organization.

“The programme explains how some groups play on a divisive approach targeted at British Muslim communities. But this agenda of tackling anti-Muslim hate and protecting social cohesion is too important to be left to those who would divide the community and ignore intolerance. This is why we chose to speak out and take part in the Dispatches documentary.

We will continue to fight for an inclusive approach to Islam, based on pluralism and where dissent is part of the cornerstone of healthy communities. We also know that colleagues in other programmes of work that we have set up, will continue to diligently tackle anti-Muslim hatred as they have done for over 6 years now. This means that we will continue to speak up where we see this approach being abused.”

The main idea is that Fiyaz Mughal’s approach to his Muslim advocacy work is a pluralism where the identity of Islam in itself makes some sacrifices for the sake of the politically correct Utopian ideal. But it’s important to understand that when he says “we challenge intolerance within our own communities,” this is what he means. Getting involved in a documentary to smear a similar group to his own with an aim to dominate the UK cultural and social conversation.

“We think we speak best for British Muslims,” says TellMAMA (essentially).

MEND too had an official statement after the documentary. It manages to explain the other side of this feud of theirs perfectly.

“MEND works tirelessly to ensure a future society where minority communities have the tools and the confidence to actively participate in political and civic life, and in which they are free from discrimination and marginalisation on the basis of religion, gender, ethnicity, race or sexuality.

We remain dedicated in our efforts to tackle Islamophobia in the UK and we will continue to unapologetically work towards empowering our communities within political and media spaces.”

MEND emphasizes they never claimed to represent British Muslims, but they have been advocates for the British Muslim community issues. That’s the distinction here. If you read over Fiyaz Mughal’s statement again you’ll notice that he never touches on empowering Muslim communities to have the tools themselves to address issues. Rather, Mughal’s focus is a system of total interdependence and connectivity with other arms of society.

“Muslims speak for themselves,” says MEND. 

It wasn’t the first time MEND and TellMAMA clashed either. In fact, what transpired between the two organizations back in December 2016 demonstrates the friction at play in the Channel 4 documentary. I’m not just making a “reading between the lines” assumption. As seen in this official complaint to UK parliament, MEND thought Fiyaz Mughal abused parliamentary privileges to make libelous allegations against them. It’s worth reading in full to understand what went down. But the key thing theme throughout the whole document is that MEND rejects the accusations of anti-Semitism brought forward by Fiyaz in his remarks. Mughal name-dropped both MEND and CAGE as somehow guilty of that “conspiracy” in their organizations. He goes as far as saying MEND was guilty of attacking him for his organization “being too Jew-friendly” and having a Jewish person in the company’s leadership chair. MEND replied those statements were baseless and ludicrous.

But the incident serves to prove a point. That it’s possible for Fiyaz Mughal to use his pluralism politics as an attack vector against his opponents. 

This was the only thing people saw, though. “Twitter fails to deal with far-right abuse, anti-hate crime group tells MPs,” says the Guardian article’s headline.

Which, to nitpick for a moment, presents the other part of Fiyaz Mughal’s body of work (including the flaws within it). Now consider that in August 2016, Twitter was proud to share an update on their efforts to combat violent extremism. To cut to the chase, the social media website said they suspended 360,000 accounts for promoting terrorism within the span of a little over a year. But months later here on December 13th, we’d come to find out that Fiyaz Mughal of TellMAMA thought places like Twitter weren’t doing enough to combat “far-right abuse.” That’s what he was telling UK parliament in the same occasion he made wild claims about MEND being antisemitic. He alleged people were opening up websites to name and identify Muslim community members for the purpose of targeting their speaking activities.

“It’s a significant and ongoing problem and it affects many parts of our country and our communities. We’ve had to do the police work. We’ve had to put the networks together, explain what they are, give names, identities that are open source, to Twitter to say here is the evidence and we’ve reported through their channels. And those accounts are still open.”

TellMAMA researcher Bharath Ganesh made a note of the international level of interactions going on between right-wing groups.

In years past, Fiyaz Mughal has complained that Facebook and Twitter are allowing Islamophobia to go unchecked on their websites. Commentators chose to prop them up as the leading force against “anti-Muslim prejudice,” and use the broadest scope for that definition by applying “everyday abuse” (mean words) and “criminal assaults” (actual physical crime) under one big umbrella. That led us here. These days Mughal is saying things like “We Must Close Down The Social Space For Those Who Seek To Harm Our Citizens.”

Harm now meaning dissent. But why is that? Let’s look deeper into TellMAMA’s reports to find out.

To describe the core of what TellMAMA does, I’ll refer to their own wording. By looking at the 2016 TellMAMA Annual Report we can get a sufficient breakdown. As far as it can go from their own words, anyway. They describe themselves as an independent and confidential third-party hate crime reporting service for anyone who experiences an anti-Muslim hate crime or incident. The public reports these things to TellMAMA staff via their website directly (the ‘Submit a Report’ page), free phone helpline, by email, their apps on Apple/Android, via WhatsApp, and on social media. TellMAMA positions itself in a way they describe as unique. If people aren’t comfortable reporting things to the police, they can come to them. They frame their program heavily on the involvement of one-on-one trust between TellMAMA and the victim. Furthermore, they explain their relationship with police, and the information sharing agreement they have between themselves and the authorities. When your average ordinary everyday citizen contacts TellMAMA as a witness or victim, they collect details about the incident. This means the perpetrator and victims themselves, too. They claim to verify that the story itself is valid and took place in the UK. But later on in the Tim Burton section of this essay series, I caught TellMAMA slipping up in that regard. It was a news story, but TellMAMA makes of the fact they look at those situations too.

The tail-end of page 27 (of the PDF, which is also labeled as page 25 in the report itself) mentions this:

“Our recommendations and figures inform and shape the political debate on this issue, and our training programmes have been welcomed by law enforcement, improving their understanding about the evolving nature of anti-Muslim hate crime, and how society is best equipped to respond and protect its Muslim communities.”

The scope of implications in that one paragraph alone lay the groundwork for the multiple pages of this essay. I need to emphasize the fact that TellMAMA said this themselves and make that particular distinction of what the reality is here. I ain’t going full tinfoil with talking about all this. “Shaping political debate” is the broadest possible expanse when it comes to subject matter.

I’m thankful for Fiyaz Mughal and TellMAMA giving me such an opening. There’s a ton of angles this can be taken to and explored. We’ll try and hit them all here.

“Everything the light touches is our kingdom.”

Towards the bottom of page 28 it says this:

“Within our analysis, we rely heavily on the testimony of victims or witnesses for information on anti-Muslim incidents. All eyewitness testimony is based on the perspective of the person reporting to our service. Therefore, it is natural to expect some gaps in the data. Our focus, however, is about supporting our service users, giving them a voice and using first-hand accounts of their experiences to show how low-level prejudice and racism affects their daily lives. Subjectivity can be observed in how we classify incidents and reports. With the information provided to our caseworkers, we can determine the location and incident category of offences. Subjectivity also relates to the characterisation of perpetrators. For example, there are tests applied to a perpetrator to see if their views, statements or clothing suggest any far-right tendencies.”

What about Muslim on Muslim incidents? What happens then? It’s certainly not out of the question that can happen, either. Let me show you examples of what I mean. First off in April 2016 it was reported that “Kill Ahmadis'” leaflets were distributed by an ex-head of Khatme Nabuwwat and on display at Stockwell Green mosque.

For context: “Khatme Nabuwwat believes Ahmadis are apostates. Those who refuse to convert to mainstream Islam within three days should face a “capital sentence” – or death penalty, according to the leaflets.”

A trustee of the mosque denied the legitimate existence or validity of these fliers (he thought the whole thing was some big hoax).  This is in spite of the Khatme group listing the Stockwell Green mosque as an “overseas office” of theirs. That’s only the surface level of it. The news report talking about all this goes much deeper into the internal Muslim community friction.

There was another one of these sorts of incidents later on that year. An imam named Jalal Uddin was murdered in August 2016 by two Islamic State supporters. The suspects followed Uddin around and surveilled his day-to-day routine. They became offended when discovering the imam practiced Ruqya healing (something involving amulets). ISIS considers that black magic punishable by death.

Thus I arrive at one of my main criticisms of TellMAMA’s most recently available year-end report. There’s an overwhelming focus on the “us” (referring to the Muslim community generally) vs. “them” (referring to outsiders that aren’t Muslim who come and attack the religion of Islam).  To be clear, this doesn’t imply that there isn’t an overall focus by TellMAMA to address internal community problems. It’s just that what I see in this report is a theme that avoids devoting an area of attention to Muslim on Muslim matters.

In Fiyaz Mughal’s biography on the official TellMAMA website, my reasoning gets some backing to it. In reference to TellMAMA itself, the description reads “it has fast become a well-recognised brand in the field of hate crime work and has been a project that tackles far-right extremism and has actively disrupted far-right anti-Muslim networks.”

It becomes clear to me based on what I’ve seen so far that I need to just analyze Mughal’s words and actions on my own accord. I don’t have much confidence that Fiyaz Mughal/TellMAMA will be entirely reliable when it comes to self-reflection.

The most revealing quote from Fiyaz Mughal is his rant on social media companies from May 2017.

He says (with bold emphasis being mine):

“Yet, having notified Google in January 2017 of the need to delink to such sites, their response was that because I was a ‘public person’ they could not delink their search facility from such sites. In other words, because I founded a national hate crime campaign countering racism, intolerance and prejudice, I should put up with it.“

This indicates that Mughal desires special privileges and advantages. Preferential treatment. If one wanted a clear answer to some of Fiyaz Mughal’s personal agenda, the example there substantiates it.

Then there’s the fact that Fiyaz Mughal is misleading in how he represents his strategic relationships. In June 2017, Facebook launched a “counterspeech initiative” over in Europe. The aim of it was to go after online extremism and hate speech, bring experts together to develop the best sort of strategies possible. Now over in the UK, this included benefits for NGOs. Things like training, marketing, and financial support for academic research were made available to them.

Fiyaz Mughal was one of the four recipients of this generous program by Facebook.

But if you read a piece written by him in March 2018 you wouldn’t know any better. This article by Mughal in HuffPost was about the banning of Britain First from Facebook. Did he applaud the company for taking action? No. Fiyaz whined that Facebook didn’t act soon enough to his liking.

In his own words:

“Over a short period of time, Britain First amassed over two million followers, larger than many political parties in the UK and Europe. They used it to raise money and to keep their anti-Muslim rhetoric alive and funded. All of this, right under the noses of Facebook’s young fashionista staff and public relations executives who turned up in Parliament to explain how great they were at removing content, without mentioning the fact that the platform was allowing far right and Islamist extremist groups to operate and generate funding for their hate.”

What he does say is that TellMAMA lobbied against Britain First for quite some time. Thus demonstrating the organization’s deplatforming agenda. Throughout the entire body of this piece that’s made abundantly clear. As he throws Facebook to the wolves and accuses them of being against “the safety and security” of the public and “the social fabric and cohesion” of the United Kingdom. It ends up being ironic when he says people have “paid the price of hate” from these California types. As he’s getting paid by those exact same people he described as “hate profiteers.”

In pages 71 and 72 (going by the PDF’s numbers), the TellMAMA report zeroes in on what they call “ideologically-driven accounts” that “sustain narrow echo chambers which selectively seek out news content, from mainstream and non-mainstream news sources that posit Muslims as collectively responsible for crimes and acts of terrorism.”

This is the exact portion of the report where TellMAMA attacks people’s right to criticize Islam. Right there. What you are about to read is the angle of attack on free speech the organization goes for.

“This dehumanisation serves a secondary function as it attacks the fundamental identity of Muslims in Britain while demonstrated a disproportionate interest in halal meat and the inner workings of Islamic institutions. This cultivation of content may allow flagrant falsehoods to pass as accepted truths, or the normalisation of graphically racialised cartoons. In one example, a horrific cartoon depicting the rape of a white woman (or child) on the so-called ‘altar of multiculturalism’ by Muslim men was reported by our team to Twitter, who did not consider it a breach of its conduct. The Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry cited Twitter’s failure to remove this very cartoon in their final report. It also outlined how Twitter did not remove a user with the name @gasmuslims despite our initial report. Furthermore, it took the efforts of the committee to remove the anti-Muslim @Fahrenheit211 account. In earlier evidence, we added that this Twitter account often deployed hateful, racialised, and dehumanising language about Muslims – including the use of the terms ‘Muzzies’ and ‘Paedo Prophet’. When challenged in his evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee, Nick Pickles, Twitter’s UK head of policy, cited positive examples of counter speech within two prominent anti-Muslim hashtags. Subsequent analysis from the BBC drew similar conclusions when analysing the #KillAllMuslims hashtag after the Paris terror attacks in January 2015.”

Just to summarize. Yes. UK government officials and TellMAMA got together, sat down, and talked about mean tweets. Just to walk you through the above quote in itself, we can see TellMAMA reported a cartoon to Twitter as a violation of terms and conditions. Afterward, the Home Affairs Select  Committee of the United Kingdom complained about that. They also moaned about the failure to immediately remove a user by the name of @gasmuslims on the basis of the account’s name alone (TellMama’s report doesn’t specify that but the initial source of the claim. Lastly, the report says “it took the efforts of the committee” (meaning the UK government lobbied for the removal) to take down the “anti-Muslim” @Fahrenheit211 account.

Their source on this one is an article from The Times. “Google rejected pleas to silence racist campaign” was behind a paywall, but given the public importance of this I signed up an account so I could access it. Here you go.

It cites something called the “Pakemon” campaign as the damning evidence against Fahrenheit211. What The Times defines as “smears against Muslims” in the eyes of the article’s author, is interpreted as freedom of artistic expression in the eyes of Fahrenheit211. They also talk about taqiyya and Tim Burton’s trial, which we’ll cover on a later page. But what’s relevant to mention here is Fiyaz Mughal’s efforts to erase the website from existence for the act of reporting on the events of the trial between him and Tim.

Google thought that was nonsense.

“Our conclusion is that your role in public life, and the public interest, justifies the continued inclusion of the URLs in question in Google’s search results.”

What the most important thing to take away from this is that TellMAMA’s approach to social media “hate” erases the nuances away from each of their individual examples. In the case of @gasmuslims, we have an account that had in terms of interactions a grand total of six tweets from two people. They were a nobody account. Moreover, there’s no screenshot evidence provided at any point showing @gasmuslims committed wrongdoing. The UK government simply takes TellMAMA at their word, by the looks of it. Later on, we’ll examine the legitimacy of that trust between the two of them.

Here are the three examples, but now with context. Do all three of these situations deserve to have the same label put on it? An account intended for political statements (source on page 8 of this PDF), an account with little to no interaction history (type it into Twitter search to see) that was condemned on the basis of its name alone, and a parody of Pokemon from a blog website.

That cartoon on the top left? Yeah. About that. A week prior to that tweet being posted, a Polish magazine had a cover depicting a real-life European woman experiencing migrant rape.

What this report tries to argue in the paragraphs that follow is the phenomena of online “hate speech” is married to the extremist actions done by neo-Nazi groups. Generally speaking, we shouldn’t be equating words online to the same caliber as street violence.  That’s what the UK has done.

Instead of framing online words as equally terrible to offline action, the focus should have been to maintain the distinction between one and the other.  TellMAMAUK takes advantage of the nuances in the English language to distort and shape reality in their preferred style. You can see it by looking at the exact of what got Tommy Robinson banned from Twitter, and contrast that to the interpretation TellMAMAUK describes those facts as.

It’s called bullshitting. The thing is Tommy Robinson and Fiyaz Mughal have been at odds with each other for years. You can see the two debating back in mid-2013 over on LBC Radio to get a proper sense of the friction going on between them both. While either party knows how to act polite, it’s a game of political chess. It was at this time the media was starting to claim that schools had a responsibility towards stopping people from joining the EDL. The government’s chief inspector of schools Sir Michael Wilshaw coupled the EDL as being populated by “jobless and unskilled” groups. This notion that a student’s failure in the education system would lead to a life of extremism was perpetuated.

Later on, in October 2013, TELLMAMA is much more to the point in his thoughts about Tommy. When speaking on Tommy’s parting of ways with the EDL, Mughal paints him as a hatemonger who was a burden to police resources. This is coming from the mouth of the same man who spent four years of his life going after a guy by the name of Tim Burton because of some tweets.

Times were turbulent back then. The 2013 year rounded out with Fiyaz Mughal telling David Cameron that there’d be an upsurge of violence if he went through on his latest counter-extremism crackdown. The courts would have new civil powers to ban extremist preaching, meaning Islamist radicals could easily be expelled from Mosques and other Muslim community areas. “There has to be parity and not a feeling that Muslims are being singled out,” Mughal said. He continued this shaping of policy implementation that punished the far-right for the problems the Muslim community was creating. There was also a distinction being formed between Islamist extremism and what Cameron defined as the traditional religious practices. The extremists he said were a “distorted interpretation of Islam, which betrays Islam’s peaceful principles”.

Let me reiterate here. At the end of December 2013, Fiyaz Mughal was vocally against extremism crackdowns in the Muslim community. He called for an even playing field and no special treatment being given to either side. Here in June 2014 he’d turn around and demand in a Huffington Post article that “Anti-Muslim hate must not be an afterthought.” He more or less provides a counterexample as to why the crackdown on extremism shouldn’t have been applied so heavy handed to the far-right in the first place.

“We within Tell MAMA will be releasing an analysis of our 2013/2014 data, received from victims, (and which has been independently analysed by Teesside University), within the next three weeks. It will show, once again, that whilst the number of Far Right activists implicated in anti-Muslim hate incidents reported to us has dropped, a small number of Far Right activists are causing a disproportionate impact in terms of anti-Muslim hate incidents.”

That disproportionate impact was being created by Fiyaz himself in terms of his area of reporting focus and targeting. What’s worse is that people in the government believed Mughal on it.

That’s why Tommy Robinson would get tossed around England’s prison system as if he was a salad.

Tommy Robinson

The UK government’s boogeyman. That’s Tommy Robinson in a nutshell. Allow me to show you proof of that in action. In the first half of March 2018, Lord Pearson of Rannoch sat down with Tommy Robinson to talk about the difficult subject of Islam. Or more rather, talking about the hurdles surrounding talking about Islam. The aim was to have a constructive dialogue. On the 15th of that month, in a meeting of the House of Lords, Baroness Warsi called out Lord Pearson for “hosting the likes of Tommy Robinson” within their immediate vicinity.  This was at a time where there was a “Punish a Muslim Day” controversy going on, and Warsi thought it wouldn’t be conducive to the eradication of “hate speech” to be doing things like this.

For further reading: “The way to build British values is to bring people together – not to isolate, ban, and silence them,” by Baroness Warsi. May 14th, 2015. To cut to the chase? Yes. She’s a hypocrite.

Baroness Williams of Trafford spoke after, piling on Pearson.

“As legislators for this country, we have got a strong leadership role to take and it does dismay me when I see that certain quite extreme people are actually being invited into the Palace of Westminster to propagate some of their hate.”

It’s fascinating to see people like Warsi and Williams act like they have a leg to stand on when their government allows the likes of Diane Abbott. Her racist remarks would’ve been treated more severely if she wasn’t the first black woman MP in the House of Commons. If “the likes of” Warsi and Williams had a genuine concern towards “eradicating hate,” they would’ve cleaned their own political houses first. But I digress.

The point being is Tommy Robinson’s reputation proceeds him. For better or worse. 

Tommy Robinson left the EDL. I mean of course, he founded it in the first place. But everybody leads off with that. In the order of importance, it’s much more relevant to say Robinson left the EDL, rather than first mentioning the fact he led it. What people tend to forget as well is that there were aspirations by Tommy back in 2012 to make the EDL a formal political party. There were plans for a future. Robinson had believed they were evolving beyond a reactionary protest force.

It was on October 9th, 2013 that Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll quit the EDL. Reportedly the organization got too extreme and ineffective, saying Islam needs to be challenged with “not with violence but with better, democratic ideas”. Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation seemed annoyed that Tommy did not “reject his previous disgusting attacks on Islam and Muslims or apologise to the British people for the millions wasted policing their protests.” Matthew Feldman of Teesside University applauded the move. Plus, Quilliam Foundation co-founder Maajid Nawaz stated: “We have been able to show that Britain stands together against extremism regardless of political views and hope to continue supporting Tommy and Kevin in their journey to counter Islamism and neo-Nazi extremism.”

Believe it or not, Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation actually got blazed by the media for daring to step up to the plate and helping facilitate Tommy Robinson’s situation. They accused the organization of doing it for free publicity, leaked out information from alleged sources who say Quillam’s government ties were straining in the background.

This part just shows how shallow the entire “civil society” sphere is:

“In 2010, when it began to look like Islamist extremism was slightly on the wane and there was an interest in far-right extremism, some people were slightly cynical that the Quilliam Foundation had originally said they were the specialists in Islamism but suddenly started to want to do work on far-right extremism as well. Some people feel that was a cynical land-grab to keep them in the media. But they are a thinktank that has to raise money and has to be visible.”

Tommy said he was sorry for causing fear to Muslims in the end, back there on October 11th, 2013. I’m pointing this out in particular because it seems to have gotten lost in the ether of internet time.

People on the Left make it seem like he never even stepped away from his post.

Tommy Robinson is the reason for existence among the English anti-fa/leftist “politically correct” crowds. Fiyaz Mughal and TellMAMAUK wouldn’t be able to justify themselves as strongly, without Tommy Robinson being there to serve as the antagonist. The Roadrunner for the Coyote. Keep in mind in that Looney Tunes program that there never really was an end point to that series. Of course, they stopped production of episodes at some point. But when it comes to the plot of this endless pursuit the Coyote was vying for, it never arrived.

There’s a lot to unpack when it comes to Tommy Robinson, and he’ll pop up throughout this essay. But when it comes to understanding the fundamental core of his story, there are two must-see pieces of content. His Oxford speech and the interview Brittany Pettibone did with him. Like peanut butter and jelly, these two videos mesh perfectly together to give the full picture. In the former, Tommy Robinson talks about his political motivations and background. The latter, we see how the UK government and police responded to his activism against Islam.

Tommy was warned not to say certain things in his Oxford speech. EDL was born in Luton. When Robinson was born in 1982 there was only one mosque. By the time he was giving this Oxford speech in 2014, there were 30 mosques.  Early on he is mindful of making it clear to the audience he’s not saying “all Muslims are bad.” He’s not tarring the entire community. This point is stressed by him throughout.

Tommy’s cousin’s cousin Janette was roped into a grooming situation after the men involved lured her into a heroin dependency. When she went missing for two to three days, the police had written her case off as a drug addict sort of thing. Then one night she was running from the park semi-naked when people spotted her and her family could recover her. These religious lines between Muslim and non-Muslim were drawn long before Tommy Robinson started the EDL. He dealt with these divisions back in his school days. When he was 12, two of Tommy’s friends were broken up by their respective sets of parents over this basis. These girls weren’t allowed to speak to each other. Around this time Tommy himself was attacked by a Pakistani gang on his way home from the swimming pool. His attackers called him a white pig. Then there was Tommy’s friend Jamie who got attacked over falling in love with an Asian girl. Since they went to a sixth form college they couldn’t even acknowledge they knew each other.

When September 11th came, Tommy was at the airport that day. He got a call from a friend in Luton, saying that the Muslims were cheering and celebrating. Magnificent 19 posters were hung up around town glorifying these attackers. That’s when Tommy first came to know Al-Muhajiroun. Al-Muhajiroun is on the same levels as ISIS that we know today. The two men involved in the May 2013 murder of Lee Rigby were a part of it. The June 2017 London Bridge attacker Khuram Shazad Butt was also a member of Al-Muhajiroun.

His first anti-terror rally he was involved in happened in September 2004, when Tommy was 21. Here stood Robinson, speaking out against Islamic extremism even before the 7/7 bombings. The four terrorists collected their bombs in Luton on that fateful day. Another Luton-based al-Qaeda conspirator involved in the attack named “Q” had additional links with a 2003-2004 fertilizer bomb plot.

The United People of Luton was a counter-protest response to the protests organized by Muslim extremist group Al Muhajiroun. In March 2009 they rioted against the Afghan war by shouting at the Royal Anglian Regiment as they marched through town. Almost immediately there were concerns of “far-right extremism” coming from the media. But essentially this soldier’s homecoming parade was a catalyst for the EDL. Tommy knew people that served and lost their limbs or lives fighting for England. So Robinson was surprised to see these groups of Muslim extremists amidst a large police presence when he went to go pay his respects that day. Tommy says as these soldiers marched past, these hateful Muslim protesters called them “baby killers,” “murders,” and “rapists” among other derogatory terms. He says he saw one of them spit in the face of a soldier’s mother. 360 Muslims were arrested that morning with 70% of their births in countries outside the UK.

“What we saw was an attack on our armed forces. I want to ask you. What would you have done?” Tommy tells the audience at Oxford.

Tommy took the time to contact the local council about his concerns. He set up a website. He explained to them that in the past Jews remembering the Holocaust had to barricade in the town hall because Muslim fanatics tried to attack. The Muslims attacked the multi-faith march every year. Tommy demanded an antisocial behavior order (ASBO) be placed on these groups by the local council. He saw what the public was seeing. Luton was an epicenter of the disorder. When BBC presenter Stacey Dooley returned to this, her hometown, she was subjected to the blunt force of Islamic extremism.

Tommy sets up United People of Luton. Set up on the grounds that the English people were allowed to celebrate their identity and culture. In April 2009 he organized a St. George’s Day march to the war memorial. Police prevented them from doing so. Tommy thought it was strange that his people were made to line up against the wall and give their information to police when just a few weeks earlier there were Muslim extremists spitting at soldiers. Cameras in faces. Hands in pockets. Shoes are taken off.

Tommy Robinson says this is when he saw first-hand the two-tier police system where the cops tip-toed around the Islamic community on certain issues. Authorities allege the difference in these two cases was the Muslim anti-war protesters applied for permission, whereas Tommy’s did not.

After that first UPL protest, the cops came to 14 of their houses. They were arrested and given bail conditions that they couldn’t enter the town square for the next three months. With the dawn of the second demonstration, Tommy bought balaclavas. This is where things progressed to the point where the EDL was formed. He says people’s ability to express their feelings of anger was being suppressed.

The impetus behind the next demonstration began as a response to an 11-year-old boy named Sean at Birmingham city center being converted to Islam by the radical preacher Anjem Choudary. The boy’s parents weren’t with him. Tommy Robinson says he sat and waited for the police to respond. Nothing happened. Tommy and some guys went to Birmingham with placards reading “What about Sean’s rights” and “Muslim: No problem. Extremist Muslim: Big problem.” That one demonstration had no media response. They go back a second time. Tommy’s people were locked in a pub for four hours, get put on coaches and escorted out. They later find out Pakistani Muslim youths had rioted, smashed up the place. Riled up by a local politician and told by a local imam to rise up and confront them.

It’s important to note Tommy’s people were only against Anjem Choudary’s group at this stage. Now they were being attacked by other parties.

Tommy’s EDL was keen on rooting out extremists. In the case of the first Birmingham demo, five Nazis showed up. Later on, when one was giving the Nazi salute, EDL beat the guy up. The leadership of a Nazi organization from abroad called Tommy and told him to hand over control of the EDL. Robinson told him to sod off.

EDL burns the Nazi flag. “The Racial Volunteer Force of London” burn the EDL flag. It’s logical to conclude EDL hates Nazis and vice versa.

At the Oxford speech, Tommy shows a few cases where the media’s perception of an incident Robinson was involved in, didn’t quite match the reality.

On June 29th, 2013 Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll were assaulted during a Woolwich charity walk and then arrested. Compare the Channel 4 footage Tommy shows at 39:10 of his speech to the full video footage. Despite having the full video demonstrating the incident, Channel 4 says Kevin only alleges he punched and depicts the both of them as thuggish rabble-rousers.

Tommy points out he gets judged on headlines. Particularly in this negative light. To that effect, here’s a slideshow of these sorts of articles. Feel free to peruse at your leisure. 

But it’s worth keeping in mind the susceptibility to falsehoods (mistakenly or intentional) mainstream outlets have. On January 23rd, 2018, the Independent reported on the Darren Osborne trial. Among the proceedings, it came up that there were screengrabs of emails sent by Tommy from The Rebel website. On multiple occasions (here, here, here, and here), this was misrepresented to make it appear as if Robinson was in direct contact with Osborne himself. Instead of just the recipient of a mass-emailing list. Tommy ended up lodging an official complaint on the matter, as you can see here in this video where he takes viewers through this misrepresentation of him. 

On Armistice Day November 2010, there were Muslim protesters chanting “British troops burn in hell” while burning remembrance poppies. BBC didn’t report on that aspect. But they did report that Tommy Robinson was arrested for assaulting a police officer, based on this footage shown of the encounter. You can see Tommy jumping in to grab an ISIS flag in that video. But the media headline was “EDL leader in court on assault charge.” Robinson was once again, the super-devil. While those particular charges were dropped, eight weeks later he was arrested again for causing “alarm and distress” to Muslims in that situation. He was fined seven times worse than the poppy burners.

Tommy Robinson told Theresa May to her face about the concerns he had surrounding Islamic extremists in Luton. She brushed him off.

Tommy refers to a Channel 4 documentary called Proud and Prejudiced that was done back in February 2012. It portrayed the Imam Qadeer Baksh as the “moderate” kind, from Luton. But on his website, Qadeer condones the execution of homosexuals, and there’s a 12-page explainer on why women should be lashed for adultery. To that effect, Tommy plays a conversation clip between him and Qadeer from The JVS Show, BBC Three Counties Radio, Wednesday, October 9th, 2013. Qadeer said in an ideal society there would be punishments for homosexual people. In response, Tommy expressed his concerns about Baksh’s ideological viewpoints.

“From the things that people fear is what keep society in order,” Qadeer replied. Baksh described Sharia rules as “deterrents.”  He dodged answering the question.

Let’s fast forward to 2018. Now we understand the cause of the Tommy Robinson equation, let’s examine the effect. With police response.

On March 14th, 2018 Brittany Pettibone published the interview with Tommy Robinson that she was intending to do on her trip to the U.K. Her plans were brought to a halt when the border authorities detained her and her boyfriend, Martin Sellner.

https://twitter.com/brittpettibone/status/973309206940942337?lang=en

They mentioned Tommy Robinson specifically in their reasoning for banning Brittany from the United Kingdom. The relevant part being as follows:

“To: Brittany Alicia Merced Pettibone

You have asked for leave to enter the United Kingdom as a visitor for 5 day [sic] but as you stated in your interview, I have reasons to believe that you are seeking admission to the United Kingdom to interview Tommy Robinson – a far right leader whose materials and speeches incite racial hatred.

The eve upon their return to the UK, Tommy Robinson flew to Vienna, Austria in order to meet Martin and Brittany upon their return arrival. He took the opportunity to interview the both of them (twice), and in return Brittany got the chance to chat with Tommy about his treatment by the UK police.”

Right off the bat, Tommy said he was “gobsmacked” at the racial hatred allegation because he only speaks about an ideology. Islam.

As mentioned previously, in 2009 the EDL was formed as the byproduct from a reactionary organization in Luton by Tommy Robinson. It was established as a response to the disrespect from Muslim protesters towards Luton’s returning soldiers coming home from war. It was during this time that Tommy first experienced the bias of the UK police system. They stopped him at the airport and ended up arresting him. At the police station, Robinson was told the cops were raiding properties linked to his name. His house where his children were, and elsewhere at the place Tommy’s parents were at, was ransacked. The authorities marched on in with machine guns, according to him. The reason why Tommy was taken in by police in the first place was for a frivolous £30 criminal damage charge done to a hotel door in Sheffield. He fit the description of the alleged perpetrator. Tommy’s bail conditions, in this case, were he couldn’t contact the EDL (i.e. send things like emails) for three weeks. It was more than coincidental the terms of this agreement lined up exactly with the date Tommy was scheduled to give a speech in Yorkshire on the topic of grooming gangs. EDL helped bring the issue to the public forefront. Whereas UK police were still aiming to keep it under wraps for as long as possible.

Tommy points out the reason the UK police do this is to send a message. That’s the motivation behind what they did to him throughout the past decade. That’s the purpose behind what they did to Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner in March 2018.

To that effect, Tommy says this was politically motivated. Robinson put in a complaint through the IPCC (independent police complaints commission). He asked how they got warrants, how they got the go-ahead for everything. It took him two years but he finally got results. They accepted that it was politically motivated, they accepted they sent police officers on training courses, they accepted the police should have never raided Tommy’s house.

Three months after this, on the same property, the door comes in again, six o clock in the morning. That time they came for Tommy’s wife too (six months pregnant at the time). They arrested the both of them on tax irregularities and were bailed on charges of money laundering and tax evasion. they had to answer bail every six weeks for three years. Tommy’s wife was interviewed for eight hours, four times.

“She’d come out each time like a broken woman,” Tommy said.

Tommy says all of this was the start of a case against him. On November 28th, 2012, Tommy was charged with mortgage fraud. They went through every single member of Tommy’s family and went back ten years. The authorities got court summons behind their backs. Access to all accounts and statements surrounding business, money, and finances. Tommy’s parents and his wife were targeted, as well as his him. Their aim, in the end, was to get at Robinson, who’d end up standing trial for tax evasion from this predicament. While Tommy himself could move through the litigation process with relative ease, this was about the UK police targeting Robinson’s family to get them to crack from the pressures of this stressful situation. The authorities put up a financial restraining order freezing Tommy’s assets and companies (he had seven properties and two successful businesses when he started EDL). Laws the Labour government enacted to go after terrorists were being employed against Tommy here. All for exposing the rot within the Islamic community. On top of everything, they put him on an order that he was only allowed to spend 250 pounds (less than USD 350) a week. Otherwise, he’d be held in contempt of court and carted off to prison.

In taking away these things, they gave Tommy nothing to lose in his political fight. But it put his family at risk too. Right after Tommy’s court deliberations, they gave his wife notice to stand trial within two weeks of his not guilty plea here.

“You’re in court in two weeks. They’re trying you for tax,” he told her.

Tommy explains to Brittany he has lived a separate life from his wife and kids, for their safety. It gave Tommy’s family a shroud of privacy protection up until now. Against the far-left groups, Muslim groups, journalists, and the media. The same ones that would be there at Tommy’s wife’s court case.

Tommy goes to court again eventually to face the mortgage fraud trial. He tells us that the courts had no direct evidence against personally. But Tommy’s brother-in-law had a mortgage. One where Tommy lent him a deposit for his first house, leading to a lie about how much was earned on his mortgage form. Tommy was given an offer by the court. If he pleaded guilty? They’d drop the charges against Tommy’s wife his friend, and cousin. But doing so meant facing five years in prison. He didn’t accept the deal initially. Instead, Tommy decided to take it to trial. But the court system had another go at offering Tommy a way out. Lesser charges of fraud with a two-year sentence tops. It meant at least 9 months in jail.

Tommy’s wife broke down when hearing this because she knew her husband was innocent. “I can take a punch in the nose, yeah? Every day. More so than the destruction and the mental problems from what they have done to my family,” Tommy told Brittany.

Tommy was ready to face push-back from the Muslim communities for his activism, but not for the full weight of the state bearing down on him. Tommy took the deal. Everything was dropped against Tommy’s wife. By January 23rd, 2014, Robinson pleaded guilty to fraud. He was sent to HM Prison Woodhill.

But while dealing with the mortgage fraud situation, Tommy Robinson had another situation on his plate.

Tommy illegally entered the United States in September 2012. He tried entering in 2011 but he was held at JFK and deported. The authorities said the British told them not to let him in. Tommy wanted to give his respects to September 11th and warn America about what the UK was doing. He used a friend’s passport to get in the second time.  Tommy went straight out of the airport and he gave a speech. On January 7th, 2013, Tommy Robinson was arrested by the British for entering the United States with someone else’s passport. Sentenced to ten months in jail for 2 days in New York. Much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. Although the authorities reportedly subjected Tommy Robinson to solitude for unnaturally long periods of time, at the end of it all he was still alive.

Anyway, let’s jump back to Woodhill.

He was a higher profile bloke at this time and didn’t have the luxury of being locked away on his own. Let’s point out here that Tommy Robinson pleaded guilty for simply filling out something wrong on his brother-in-law’s mortgage form. In theory for a crime like that he should’ve gone to a category D prison. Something where he’d be allowed to go home on weekends, and be allowed family visits. But no. Instead, Tommy Robinson was sent to the maximum security HM Prison Woodhill.

Further reading:

• “HMP Woodhill ‘barely fit for purpose’, IMB report says” via BBC.
• “Why do so many inmates die at Woodhill prison?” via The Guardian.
• “HMP Woodhill: What can be done to cut prison suicides?” via BBC.

There was a knock on Tommy’s cell door. “When they come to get you, do not leave this cell. Your life depends on it,” a prison officer said to him. That guy comes back with two other prison staff and told Tommy they were taking him to B-wing. Robinson refused. The prison officer told Tommy he’d arrest him if he didn’t go (thus giving him a way out of going to B-wing). They arrested Tommy and took him to a punishment block. That officer followed up with Tommy later, letting him know they were taking him to B-wing where there were five Muslims. These five Muslims had a past with Tommy due to the fact six months prior they were caught in a car with IEDs, guns, bombs, and suicide notes explaining they were on their way to kill Tommy Robinson. The group was sentenced to 30 years in prison for that. Tommy watched as they were sentenced. Now the prison system was trying to feed Robinson to these hostile characters.

He had to see the governor before being allowed anywhere else. Whereas in theory prison governors have a duty of care for the inmates, this one seemed to have it out for Tommy Robinson. So he calls in his solicitor (attorney).

On February 5th, 2014, reports surfaced that Tommy was beaten by three Muslim prisoners inside Woodhill prison. Robinson had a legal visit with his solicitor. They met, and Tommy got sent to an isolated meeting room afterward. He walks in and sees beards. Then the door locks behind him, trapping Tommy inside with three attackers. There’s a fight and Tommy ends up losing his teeth. In his interview with Brittany, he remarks the Muslims seemed surprised to see him. Tommy asked prison staff afterward why they involved themselves with these orchestrated prisoner situations. He’s told that many Muslims in this prison were serving lengthy sentences. They’d never be seeing daylight again. So these prisoners would have no problem with hurting a prison guard if they didn’t comply with their demands.

Soon after this encounter, Tommy Robinson got a transfer to HMP Winchester. There he made friends with the Muslim inmates and had an all-around more positive experience there. By June 2014 he was released. Under the condition that nobody from the EDL was allowed to contact him for the next 12 months (the rest of his original sentence).

Two months before the end of the prison sentence, Tommy Robinson had a visit from two men working with the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Bureau. The Metropolitan Police is the police force for London. These men told Tommy they could help him if he worked with them to unite the right and control the opposition. If there was a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom, MiB would have the capacity to control the response to that. The men offered Tommy money in this deal. But Robinson had no interest in talking about Islam at this point, after all the stressful events he and his family went through thus far. In fact, when Tommy came out of prison he said he needed a break. Distanced himself from the world so he could get his life back on track.

Later on, in the months after his release, Tommy was brought in for suspicion of burglary. In this case, it was somewhat unusual as the police transported him four hours away to northern England. For a drug test and interview. He ends up being released on bail for six weeks. Tommy arrives back home to hear his wife say Winchester prison was just on the phone. But again in unusual circumstances, the number they called from was a 0207 line, meaning it came from central London. Tommy calls back and it’s the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Bureau. They blackmailed Tommy’s reputation over the burglary allegation, alluding to the consequences of what would happen if the media got a hold of the story.

Also around this time, a loophole in the guilty plea that Tommy Robinson signed was used against him. The wording in his plea said “at this time it does not bring in a criminal confiscation order,” meaning he’d be free of the government taking his property and money. So it was a surprise to Tommy that he and his family suddenly faced roadblocks when trying to access bank services. His solicitor receives a letter saying Tommy had to pay £365,000 or face five years in jail. The cause of all this stems back to the “at this time” portion of his guilty plea. The inclusion of that means there was an opening for the authorities to take advantage of it later. Tommy says the Metropolitan Police Intelligence Bureau was the force that set this in motion. They called Robinson and said they could make this problem go away. Tommy elects to fight this in court and gets the amount reduced to £125,000. In this situation, there’s an all-around acknowledgment by the prosecution and the courts that what happened here to Tommy was illegal. But it didn’t matter because his window of opportunity to appeal ran out.

Tommy mentioned to the authorities that he was safe in Winchester prison when it came to Muslims. If they had a duty of care in mind, the cops would’ve taken that into consideration. But instead, Tommy was sent to HM Prison Bedford where there were some of the worst Muslim criminals around. Upon arrival, Robinson made friends with one of the prison guard staff. His new pal helped him assess the prison layout and inmate situation. They discerned Tommy would be safer in A Wing, as a majority of the Muslims were situated in the B Wing. Tommy’s ally tried to negotiate on his behalf to get him into A Wing but fell short of winning over the prison administrator. Even after Tommy Robinson wrote a six-page compilation laying out the threats against his life, they weren’t swayed.

“I am in no doubt that strings are being pulled. To give an opportunity for me to be killed,” Tommy tells Brittany.

Upon arrival to B Wing, the inmates cheered like hyenas seeing Tommy Robinson. Knowing full well his life was at risk, Tommy took the initiative to get into a fight as soon as lunchtime came around. While this preemptive self-defense move got him punished, the punishment was the safety of solitary confinement. Where they’d end up holding Tommy for 28 days.

“You think you’ve stopped it?” Tommy told his probation officer after he got out. “You’ve just added another five minutes on my speech.”

In a response back to this, the authorities dictated to Tommy that he wasn’t allowed to talk about the police, Quran, Mohammed, or Islam. If he did, he’d go back to jail. Tommy still gave his speech. He told them all the honest truth that he wasn’t allowed to give the speech he intended.

Eight days left on Tommy’s license, he paid £100,000 out of the £125,000 to the police. Everything goes smoothly from here on out, right? Wrong. He gets arrested again. As you can see by this July 15th, 2015 article that reported on the incident, there wasn’t much in terms of details as to why the police were doing this. A Met Police officer told Tommy “we can make it easy for you.” They wanted him as an informant.

Robinson declined the deal, leading him to be sent to HMP Peterborough. Legally they could only hold Tommy for eight days in this fashion. They’d end up holding him for nine because he was due to speak at the House of Lords on the eighth and the authorities wanted to disrupt those plans. While in the induction wing on his second day, Tommy receives a warning from another inmate about a hit placed on him. In exchange for a cell phone, an ounce of Spice (not the kind you’re thinking of – here it’s the name of a drug), and 500, someone was going to throw a sugar and boiling water mix on him. A teenage murderer and a Somalian man were pointed out as the candidates who took on the hit. Tommy says he was in the same wing as Mohammed Hussain (aged 22), Javed (21) and Rubel (19) Miah, and Fahim Khan (20). They were found guilty of the murder of rapper Isaac Stone, as well as cutting off the nose of one of Isaac’s friends. One of the four guys was apparently involved in this prison bounty on Tommy Robinson here. But Tommy didn’t wait for it to come. He embraced confrontation for the sake of self-defense and went on the offensive against his would-be attacker.

This ordeal would come back into Tommy’s life a few months later. The Daily Star reported on September 6th, 2015 that Tommy Robinson was arrested on suspicion of racially aggravated common assault over the dispute he had in jail.

You can get an inside (albeit biased) documentary-style view of this particular case here. Channel 4’s 24 Hours In Police Custody show did an episode featuring Tommy Robinson’s situation. It’s titled “Love Thy Neighbour” as the overall theme of the different cases featured has extremism involved. If you wanted an idea of what you’re in for: One cop has this monologue saying Tommy Robinson tars the whole Muslim community and is manipulating people.

This televised case against Tommy Robinson ends up getting dismissed by the court (as you can see in the end credits of the videos).

Tommy’s mum had to remortgage the house to pay the rest of the fine. He struggled in his first few years with the EDL. Robinson went through a phase of drinking a lot to try and cope with his circumstances. Tommy has just accepted death at this point. He’s not scared of it anymore.

He tried his hand at working for a media publication previously. Tommy Robinson joined Rebel Media in April 2017 (although he could’ve joined up as far back as February), to “fill a void” in British media. While working for The Rebel Media, Tommy Robinson went to Canterbury Crown Court to cover the events of a trial of an alleged Muslim rape gang. That was May 8th. On the morning of May 10th, Tommy Robinson was arrested (and then released on bail) for being in contempt of court. A later report indicates police and court staff had previously warned him about contempt of court laws. The judge ended up sparing jail time in this instance.

Now, they’re building up to remove Tommy from social media altogether. It began in November 2017 when Twitter did a wave of deverification in the midst of “overhauling” that feature of their site. Tommy Robinson’s blue checkmark next to his Twitter profile was taken away. The next action against Tommy Robinson’s Twitter arrived at the end of February 2018. He was suspended from the website for one week after stating a statistical fact about grooming gang members in the UK being 90% Muslim.

All of this provides the relevant context to explain why Tommy Robinson’s Speaker’s Corner speech matters.

In spite of everything he went through with the police, Tommy Robinson still took the risk of going to Speaker’s Corner and delivering Martin Sellner’s speech. The public opinion on Tommy’s odds for success here was against him. A majority of folks didn’t expect that the UK authorities would allow Tommy to do this. Especially since the cops had booted Robinson out of Speaker’s Corner when he visited three days earlier. Tommy didn’t even agree with some of Martin Sellner’s political views expressed in his speech. But Robinson, and thousands of people gathered at Speaker’s Corner on March 18th to celebrate and defend the principle of having the individual right to express one’s views of the world.

When Tommy Robinson started the EDL it was a reactionary movement based on what he saw going on in his immediate neighborhood. He did not know what could possibly happen as a result of his activism. But here at Speaker’s Corner, Tommy Robinson knowingly went back to face the known dangers of his opposition in order to stand up for the values of the Western world. In light of the erosion to them inflicted by the government of the United Kingdom.

Finally, Tommy Robinson got axed permanently from Twitter at the end of March 2018, as the result of an argument with a left-wing activist. “People who are poor are still alive. Islam promotes killing people,” Tommy tweeted.

The May 6th march was inevitable.

But you deserve to understand the situation going on here. Tommy Robinson was targeted by an online group known as Resisting Hate, led by one Roanna Carleton-Taylor. In the week before Tommy’s ban, Roanna used her website’s mailing list system to initiate a mass-flagging call-out to her followers. I was forwarded the email in question by someone subscribed to the group.

It’s through Resisting Hate that I caught wind of Fiyaz Mughal for the first time. Fiyaz is the founder of Faith Matters, an interfaith organization in the UK and abroad. He’s also the founder of a group called TellMAMAUK. Their purpose is to serve as an intermediary and data collection service for “Muslim hate incidents.”

But I’ll let TellMAMA’s website description speak for itself:

“TELL MAMA supports victims of anti-Muslim hate and is a public service which also measures and monitors anti-Muslim incidents. It is not meant to be a replacement for the Police Service.”

The wording of that is important as there’s a very wide scope of interpretation involved on TellMAMA’s part here.

Around the same time that Roanna Carleton-Taylor of Resisting Hate was targeting Tommy Robinson, Britain First’s Facebook page was removed. Fiyaz Mughal took to the Huffington Post to make remarks on the matter. This includes disclosing TellMAMA’s involvement in lobbying Facebook to have them take the page down. Click here to see him talk about that in this HuffPost article. This demonstrates the core of Fiyaz Mughal’s methodology. To stop what he sees as “hate” he aims to remove the ability for right-wing groups to speak at all. As you can see here, Fiyaz Mughal values “social fabric and cohesion” over freedom of expression.

Under what authority does Fiyaz Mughal have to vicariously take offended on the behalf of the Muslim community? Moreover, what authority does he have to dictate what’s acceptable and not acceptable when it comes to political speech?

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.

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.

---

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

Tim Burton

Imagine if there was a loophole in the ten commandments. The eighth is “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” What if there was an asterisk added on to the end of that? Down in the footnotes of the ten commandments. Imagine seeing an exception to the rules about lying.

“It’s ok to lie if you do it to advance the causes of Christianity and Jesus.”

While this isn’t the case for the Western world, it’s deemed perfectly acceptable according to the religion of Islam.

According to Qur’an 3:28:

“Let not believers take disbelievers as allies rather than believers. And whoever [of you] does that has nothing with Allah, except when taking precaution against them in prudence. And Allah warns you of Himself, and to Allah is the [final] destination.“

“Whoever disbelieves in Allah after his belief… except for one who is forced [to renounce his religion] while his heart is secure in faith. But those who [willingly] open their breasts to disbelief, upon them is wrath from Allah, and for them is a great punishment”

These two verses provide the framework for Muslims to use deceit in order to advance Islam at the expense of the “non-believers.” The Holy Bible people swear in on when giving testimony to the court within the West is foolproof. But Muslims don’t swear in on a Christian book when they go. They swear on their holy book. The Qur’an. It raises the question of whether they have a permission slip to lie to the courts.

It’s something called taqiyya, and it plays a central role in the story of Tim Burton – whom I had the pleasure of interviewing for the sake of this story. Direct comments from his point of view come up throughout.

Before we begin on this page, keep in mind that Fiyaz Mughal served on the Crown Prosecution Service’s Scrutiny and Involvement Panel. The Crown Prosecution Service is a body set up by the British Government in 1986 to conduct criminal prosecutions in the name of the Crown and to consider “the public interest” in pursuing or dropping criminal prosecutions. The very notion of all this is a breach of common law and a move toward Napoleonic (EU-wide) civil law, in which the state dispenses justice. It covers England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland have separate, but equally corrupt, arrangements for “public” (i.e. state) criminal prosecutions. The separation of powers and an apolitical court process are a thing of the past across the UK. Only jury nullification stands in the way of utter despotism in Britain now — as seen in the cases of deep state whistleblowers Clive Ponting and Katharine Gün (the latter had her case dropped before it even got before a jury because they could see nullification was on the cards).

In my interview with Tim, he pointed out to me that Fiyaz Mughal’s OBE (Order of the British Empire) title indicates his place in the British establishment. Being a part of that elite allows someone to get away with more than the average person in UK society. Thus providing an explanation as to why Fiyaz avoided any sort of lasting punishments as a result of a very-revealing expose.

The Tim Burton saga began with Andrew Gilligan’s June 1st 2013 piece on Fiyaz Mughal. Andrew Gilligan was the senior BBC investigative journalist who was made the fall guy for reporting truthfully in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq War that the British Government’s case for war had been “sexed up”. In 2013, Lee Rigby’s murder and the anti-Muslim backlash that Fiyaz Mughal was discussing were the issue of the moment. Andrew said TellMAMAUK paraded around the number of incidents being at 212.

Just one problem. The distinction between online and offline incidents wasn’t made clear.

“Tell Mama confirmed to The Sunday Telegraph that about 120 of its 212 “anti-Muslim incidents” – 57 per cent – took place only online. They were offensive postings on Twitter or Facebook, or comments on blogs: nasty and undesirable, certainly, but some way from violence or physical harm and often, indeed, legal. Not all the offending tweets and postings, it turns out, even originated in Britain.”

Indeed, the bar was set so slow that Baroness Flather (herself an Indian) saying something like “They are all on benefits [welfare] and all vote Labour” qualified as an anti-Muslim incident. 35 of the 212 incidents weren’t even verified as of Gilligan’s writing. When it came to individuals being physically targeted, the number was down to 17. There were only two serious attacks. One where a mosque was firebombed and other where a man entered an Essex mosque with a knife. TellMAMAUK was certainly the outlier of the bunch when it came to hate crime numbers. ACPO reported 71 anti-Muslim hate crimes whereas their online reporting tool tallied 136 (with a note being made about not all being crimes and some cases of duplicates).

The next day, TellMAMAUK responded to Andrew Gilligan. In the first two sections, TellMAMA states that they were among the first to condemn Lee Rigby’s murder and that they were within the standards of what a third party hate crime reporting project is supposed to do. Indirectly, they go on to admit that Gilligan was correct in pointing out the distinction between incidents.

How so? This is what TELLMAMAUK says in their blog (bold emphasis, mine):

“So the attempt by Gilligan to underplay the impact of the incidents and suggest that many were non-violent, tells us that his initial assumptions are faulty and that he reads incidents as violence incidents.“

This is word-for-word what Fiyaz Mughal said to the Guardian on May 28th 2013 (bold emphasis, mine):

“These things are cumulative and I do not see an end to this cycle of violence.“

All-in-all completely refuting the intention of calling Andrew Gilligan a “reductionist” in the first place.

But instead, TellMAMAUK takes jabs at Gilligan for downplaying the “community impact” and reinforcement of perceptions in Muslim eyes. When it comes to the lack of report verification for 35 cases, TellMAMAUK takes two paragraphs to explain their verification processes — to again, in a roundabout way, say that Gilligan’s statement was correct. They justify their distinction from police data statistics by asserting people in the Muslim community are afraid of reporting to police because of the PREVENT program (an increasingly widely criticized government initiative to supposedly preventing extremism, which makes great use of snoopers in society, including children and schoolteachers, and which pays large sums to the “right” kinds of Muslims).

For further reading: the lack of verification of Fiyaz Mughal on anti-Muslim incidents was proven a few years later. “EARLY MORNING ASSAULT IN BIRMINGHAM LEAVES YOUNG FEMALE FEARFUL,” posted by TellMAMA on December 1st 2015. The following month it was revealed that the Muslim woman lied to police. They spent countless hours going through CCTV footage only to find it proved she made the story up. TellMAMA quietly deleted their blog post (several months later) and brushed the incident under the rug.

TellMAMAUK clarifies what they meant about “no end to the cycle” of anti-Muslim activity, saying they received “4 – 8 cases a day of Islamophobic incidences” on average before Lee Rigby’s murder.

Let’s see what the definition of that is.

TellMAMAUK says their concerns are about “islamophobic incidences” increasing in their baseline frequency after an event like Woolwich. They do assuage concerns about filtering incidents that don’t occur in Britain, however.

TellMAMAUK acknowledges that there’s no standard definition as to what Islamophobia is.

“We therefore took in reports based on perceived prejudice which we then verified and which may not be crimes and others which may have criminally infringed on existing public order offences for example. What we made clear to Gilligan, since he mentioned the work of the CST (Community Security Trust) and its classification of Anti-Semitism, was that we were some way away in setting a definition since the body of work was growing and it was one area where the All Party Parliamentary Group on Islamophobia would also be involved in.”

Remember this part because it’s important. Fiyaz Mughal says he’s setting the definition of what qualifies as Islamophobia. One that’s defined by and based on tweets like the one shown above. This is part of why we have such a problem going on today with everyone being accused of Islamophobia. This is where that began.

TellMAMAUK says London is still one of the safest places in the world. That may have been true back then. But today? Nope. Anyway, Huffington Post covered this feud and gave a slant in TellMAMA’s favor.

Fast forward to June 9th. Fiyaz Mughal and TellMAMAUK lost their government funding. Now there’s an important distinction to be made in regards to how this played out. The Telegraph article discussing this situation makes it clear that Mughal’s funding was denied renewal even before the Rigby incident ever happened. Liberal Democrat MP Don Foster called him into a meeting and broke the news to him.

“Mr Mughal was giving data on attacks to DCLG [the UK Government’s Department of Communities and Local Government] which wasn’t stacking up when it was cross-referenced with other reports by ACPO [the Association of Chief Police Officers],” one source told the Telegraph. “He was questioned by DCLG civil servants and lost his temper. He was subsequently called in by Don Foster and told that he would receive no more money.”

A second source close to the situation confirmed the events to the Telegraph:

“There was a bit of a spat. He was called in and told that Acpo had cast doubt on his figures. He was told that he would be closely monitored for the remaining period of the grant and that there would be no more money.”

The DCLG confirmed that their funding wasn’t going to be renewed, but wrote it off as a non-issue saying that was the plan the whole time. But conversely, it seemed that Mughal was making issues of his own design. Andrew Gilligan revealed a Jewish activist named Ambrosine Chetrit got a threatening letter for tweeting “Tell Mama are sitting on Twitter on the EDL [English Defence League] hashtag, threatening anyone and everyone whose comments they do not like about Islam.” Former race adviser to Labour mayor of London Ken Livingstone, Atma Singh, also received a legal letter from TellMAMAUK after tweeting out they gave “a platform to Islamists.” These letters were written by a solicitor named Farooq Bajwa. He’s famous for acting on behalf of Islamists and their sympathisers like Raed Salah (not to be confused with the Syrian White Helmets boss of the same name) and the Respect Party founder George Galloway (a former MP, originally of the Labour Party).

NOTE: TellMAMA’s funding would eventually return. In a freedom of information act request arranged by Fahrenheit211, it’s discovered that TellMAMA’s government funding grant came back for the 2015/2016 period. To the tune of £182,000. Further, if this response from Baroness Williams is anything to go by, the arrangement continued in the years afterward. But in the end the government funding angle needs to be weighed against the fact both Faith Matters and TellMAMA have personal patrons.

Tim Burton saw everything that unfolded. He was a radio officer and an eventual political candidate for Liberty GB of London. He got in hot water with Fiyaz Mughal on two occasions.

Tim’s awareness of Fiyaz Mughal began back after the May 2013 Lee Rigby murder. The killer recited Qur’an 9:29, a declaration of war. That, coupled with David Cameron saying in his speech on the incident, “There is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act”, infuriated Tim. Then came Andrew Gilligan’s piece, introducing Tim to Fiyaz Mughal and his operation. More to the point, Burton saw TellMAMA’s manipulation of statistics as being criminally fraudulent. So he wasn’t entirely surprised the following week when he saw the news TellMAMA had their government funding cut off.

That’s what led Tim to take to Twitter to write about it. The result was Fiyaz didn’t like that very much, and so Burton got arrested on December 5th 2013. West Midlands Police questioned him for five to six hours, and Tim explained the story and his reasoning for writing what he did. According to another interview Burton did on all this, West Midlands Police were undecided on what to do with Tim after bringing him in. It was only after the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) gave their urging on the matter that the police went through with charging him on racially aggravated harassment.

“I felt entirely justified in expressing a sense of outrage over what I consider to be fraudulent activity,” Tim says.

In a further comment made by Tim Burton to Fahrenheit 211, Tim Burton talked about the suspicious circumstances surrounding his arrest.

“It turns out that this particular mendacious Muslim scumbag taquiyya-artist LIED on his police statement to have me arrested in a way that DIRECTLY and MATERIALLY affected the charge of harassment. Should the case come to court then I advise you to bring some popcorn, as it will be entertaining.”

Liberty GB rang in the New year for 2014 by making the news of Tim Burton’s arrest public.

On January 3rd 2014, TellMAMAUK tweeted that one of Liberty GB’s activists was arrested. Fiyaz seems quite proud of it. By the way TellMAMAUK discusses it, the arrest seems more like a jab at Paul Weston more than worrying about the immediate circumstances themselves.

In a piece of writing Tim Burton did for the New English Review in February 2014, he makes his situational stances pretty clear. Fiyaz Mughal was under a lot of heat from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) for controversy surrounding his misrepresentation of hate crime statistics. This begged the question whether or not Fiyaz would manufacture that out of thin air in order to justify his continued funding from the government. To that end, Burton says the “Mendacious Grievance-Monger-In-Chief” broadened the scope to include anyone who disagreed that Islam was a religion of peace to be a “racist, bigoted, hateful, intolerant Islamophobe” who deserved harsh punishment for questioning his narrative. Burton says Liberty GB was taking heavy fire from TellMAMAUK for “radicalising Islam and Muslims” by talking about female genital mutilation, honour killings, and terrorism. TellMAMAUK says such things aren’t limited by culture and faith. Tim retorts by saying that Lutheran and Presbyterian honor killings and FGM are non-existent. He highlights how TellMAMAUK attempts to distract from the discussions surrounding demographic impact and economic factors of immigration by painting such discourse as pure bigotry and racism. The bottom line was Liberty GB was bold enough to talk about Islam, and TellMAMAUK was taking commentary from the fringe elements of that in order to cast their whole lot as hateful (while ignoring the hate from Muslims on their own side of the political aisle).

The court date was originally scheduled for February 18th 2014. But it was postponed for seven weeks based on the “interests of justice and the complexity of the case.” This gave Liberty GB an opportunity to gather expert witnesses for Tim’s behalf. Liberty GB made note of the circumstances of the case being borderline. Fiyaz’s “partnerships” with the West Midlands Police were enough to convince the authorities to go through with this charade in the first place. They say the bottom line of this battle was between Islamic “blasphemy” laws and freedom of speech.

But let’s take a step back and look at how Fiyaz presents the situation. 

Fiyaz Mughal gave a recounting of the “hate campaign” he was subjected to by Burton. He accuses Tim of targeting him because of his faith and TELL MAMA work.  The conflict was sparked by the Andrew Gilligan article from June 2013, which revealed that Fiyaz Mughal had exaggerated the hate crime statistics he collected.

On June 2nd 2013, Tim Burton under the account name of @catstrangler101 had tweeted:

“@Official_EDL, @tellmamauk: Let’s stick it to that mendacious taquiyya (sic) artist Fiyaz Mughal.”

A point of contention is the definition of “taqiyya.” Fiyaz Mughal says that one tweet is equivalent to the anti-Semitism faced by the Jewish community. From that one tweet alone, Fiyaz said he was “targeted” for his faith.

On the 3rd of June, Fiyaz says @catstrangler101 tweeted:

“@tellmamauk – I wish to report Fiyaz Mughal for being a mendacious, grievance-mongering little Muslim scumbag and I want my £214,000 back.”

Then on June 9th:

“#MyJihad – Thanks to M-CAT, the mendacious little scumbag Fiyaz Mughal @tellmamauk has had his funding withdrawn.”

What’s interesting here is that Fiyaz actually acknowledges the article written by Andrew Gilligan over at the Telegraph. He avoids going into the subject further, only mentioning how he challenged the ordeal and repeating the “sharp rise in anti-Muslim hate incidents and crimes” vague jargon that got him in hot water with the press in the first place.

Tim Burton got arrested because Fiyaz Mughal pushed West Midlands Police to act on the tweets made via @catstrangler101’s account. He was released on the condition that he not contact Fiyaz. Mughal, labeling it as an “assumption,” says that included not tweeting at @tellmamauk on Twitter.

In January 2014, Burton had Sheryl McNaught on his Liberty GB show. What both these people had in common was being targeted by TellMAMAUK.

“Hi Sheryl, it’s interesting that TellMamaUK are monitoring your posts on this site. I’m going to make sure Fiyaz Mughal gets his clock cleaned over his fraudulent and mendacious activities. By the time this trial is over his name is going to be mud throughout the world…………… Of course Liberty GB is in no way racist or Islamophobic, so if you wish to continue posting here then feel free, there’s nothing TellMamaUK can do about it.”

Fiyaz Mughal says Tim Burton violated the no contact order by tweeting this on March 1st 2014.

“Threatening arrests over a tweet – the mendacious grievance-mongering taqqiyya (sic) artists @tellmamauk are at it again.” 

Mughal claims Tim Burton “continued to target and promote anti-Muslim hate” on Twitter, and asserting Burton did it because he’d “know” TellMAMA and Fiyaz would come across it.

Fiyaz alleges this “campaign” went on through until March 2014, being platformed on “a number of Far Right and extremist web-sites that crossed the United States, the UK and Australia.” On the one from Australia, Mughal quotes Burton as saying, “Excellent post Mike, and I shall be reposting it far and wide, a strategy that will no doubt include the hire of an enormous billboard situated right outside Fiyaz Mughal’s office window.”

Fiyaz Mughal mentioned more tweets in his blog. But those tweets in question did not have a direct relation to the dispute between him and Tim Burton. Some WERE from Tim’s account, but they were just general critiques and criticisms of the Islamic culture. They were were mentioned by Mughal in an effort to paint Burton as a “hater.” The rest? From possibly other people. Accounts that Fiyaz “believed” were Tim Burton’s. 

The meme below ridicules West Midlands Police for making hurt Muslim feelings an urgent priority and violent crime a low priority.

As seen in this press release, the showdown between Tim Burton and Fiyaz Mughal happened on April 8th at Birmingham Magistrates’ Court. The charges being racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets Burton said to the TellMAMAUK Twitter account.

That day, Tim Burton was cleared of any “racially aggravated harassment charges.”

Fiyaz Mughal is flabbergasted at this. He was under the impression that linking Burton to far-right critics of Islam would be a feasible enough strategy to get Tim prosecuted. Fiyaz lays the blame on the Crown Prosecution Service for “not making the case” in regards to the taqiyya term.

“CPS and its understanding of language around anti-Muslim hate lags well behind where things are today,” he said.

He says the lesson to be learned from all this is that Fiyaz needed to work harder on teaching “understanding” in regards to anti-Muslim hate.

“I also believe in State institutions and whilst I did not achieve the justice that I wanted, no doubt, change is coming and it is on the horizon.”

Let’s compare what Fiyaz said, to what Tim Burton’s recollection was.

You can read the play-by-play of the proceedings of the April trial in Birmingham. The first problem of the day arose when it came to getting the court’s video-link working. The British Government is pushing hard to make more (or even most) trials Skype trials instead of appear-in-person trials, and it is remarkable how often the video link fails when politically convenient. There were giant TV screens in the room set up to accommodate Fiyaz Mughal giving evidence remotely from an undisclosed remote location. He had previously submitted a letter to the court saying he was too fearful to come to Birmingham due to the “threatening nature” of Burton’s tweets. The CPS lawyer was missing some of his paperwork, which ticked off the judge who made it clear they weren’t going to postpone the case any longer. When Mughal finally gave his evidence, he was sworn in on the Qur’an because he was a Muslim. Burton wanted to object because the holy book of Islam gives the plaintiff the write to lie under oath if it furthers the Islam cause. Fiyaz was asked about the concept of taqiyya. Mughal described it as a purely historical concept used by the Shi’a Muslims to defend themselves from persecutors. This sidestep maneuvre avoids admitting what the four jurisprudential schools of the majority denomination of the religion, namely Sunni Islam, teach about taqiyya. Whereas Tim Burton describes taqiyya as a generally accepted license for Muslims to lie to non-Muslims about Islam, Fiyaz Mughal says taqiyya was a concept raised by “extremist far-right” groups as a defamatory tactic.

What’s key to point out here is that Fiyaz Mughal was questioned on his knowledge of what words like “mendacious” or “scumbag” actually mean. He attempted to dodge answering at first, until the judge told him he had to. It turns out Fiyaz didn’t completely understand the definitions of the words that he claimed offended him. Moreover, these terms were routine and pretty mild terms bandied about in court and by police officers to describe chancers and morally loose types, well before mass immigration to British cities. Mughal’s tactic was pushing the “guilt by association” angle, vying to pull in exterior elements as “context” for his defense. But the reality is the court was only focusing on the three tweets that Tim Burton was charged for in the first place. To that end, the intentions of those were explained when Burton’s defense lawyer questioned Tim about them. He stated Islam’s nature is a totalitarian political ideology and not a religion, and he felt obliged to raise awareness of that to people via Twitter. Tim said Fiyaz Mughal was being deceptive when he didn’t mention how Muslims use taqiyya to deceive non-Muslims about Islam in that respect. The long-term threat was being overlooked for the short-term benefits of political correctness. When it was the CPS lawyer’s turn, the dialogue was much more heated. CPS accused Burton’s tweets of being “racist diatribe,” with Tim in reply stating neither Islam or Muslims were a racial group. The same back and forth was had with regards to the assertion Tim “threatened and harassed” Fiyaz, alongside trying to call Burton’s tweets “racist, offensive, and deeply unpleasant” a few more times to see if Tim would change his mind about his answers.

Professor Hans Jansen was called as a witness of expertise when it came to his qualifications on the issue of the concept of taqiyya. In the interview I did with Tim, he says Jansen’s defining of taqiyya is what saved him back in 2014. The judge required their judgement in declaring whether or not Fiyaz Mughal’s interpretation of taqiyya was true or not. Jansen said it wasn’t, basing his argument on Qur’an 3:28 and Qur’an 16:106. This seemed to visibly impress the judge, according to Tim. Not only did he manage to back up Tim Burton’s definitions; the Professor made a point that Fiyaz himself didn’t understand taqiyya because he wasn’t a student of Shari’a law.

When it came to the final arguments, the defense put up Article 10 of the Human Rights Act allowing fair comment in the matters of free speech. Conversely, the CPS pushed the fictional (to English law) concept of “gratuitous racial abuse” as their response. The judge ended up agreeing with the defense. Despite his colorful language, Tim Burton’s tweets stayed in the limits of fair political comment and weren’t criminal harassment. To that effect, using “mendacious,” “lying,” and “Muslim” when describing the concept of taqiyya was also acceptable.

As further detailed by Liberty GB’s remarks on the trial, Fiyaz Mughal was well versed in far-left jargon. At this point, however, that knack didn’t turn out to be useful when it came to making convincing and legally sound arguments. Meanwhile, Fiyaz Mughal ended up submitting a 127-page Press Complaints Commission complaint against Andrew Gilligan. One that he withdrew and reactivated several months later. Around the same time as Burton’s first trial culminated, the Telegraph won against Fiyaz on that front as well. The PCC ruled Gilligan’s reporting was “not inaccurate” in regards to saying Mughal exaggerated the prevalence of anti-Muslim attacks, that DCLG officials were concerned about Mughal’s methods, and that his funding wasn’t going to be renewed.

This was on top of Mughal suing for a separate piece by Charles Moore, also of the Telegraph. The author wrote about David Cameron’s inaction against Islamist terrorism in the wake of the Lee Rigby incident, coupled with the attempt to shift the narrative done by TellMAMAUK.

Charles Moore pointed out the absurdity that was taking place, with TellMAMAUK trying to make the EDL equivalent to al-Qaeda in terms of their motivations.

“…you frequently find that Muslim groups like Tell Mama get taxpayers’ money (though, in its case, this is now coming to an end). You discover that leading figures of respectable officialdom share conference platforms with dubious groups. You learn that Muslim charities with blatantly political aims and Islamist links have been let off lightly by the Charity Commission. And you notice that many bigwigs in Muslim groups are decorated with public honours. Fiyaz Mughal, for example, who runs Tell Mama, has an OBE. Obviously it would be half-laughable, half-disgusting, if activists of the EDL were indulged in this way; yet they are, in fact, less extreme than some of those Muslims who are.”

Fiyaz Mughal took it to court, claiming it to be defamatory against his character. Mr Justice Tugendhat disagreed and ruled in favor of The Telegraph. This ruling happened around the same time Mughal lost against Andrew Gilligan and Tim Burton both.

Despite the triple losses, Fiyaz Mughal continued to push his narrative as usual. By only emphasizing on the worst-of-the-worst he’s able to slide in the lukewarm online cases like the example given by TellMAMAUK earlier on here.

Fiyaz would come back to get his revenge against Tim in 2016 and 2017.

On March 22nd 2016, TellMAMAUK posted a job opening for a caseworker. The main responsibilities included things like assisting callers, listening to what they had to say, and communicate with them further support resources as necessary. 12 months prior experience in a similar role was preferred, having an understanding of empathy and sensitivity, along with basic IT skills and proficiency with social media.

The opportunity was open to anyone. It didn’t exclude Tim Burton from emailing, and that’s what he ended up doing.

Email Number 1. Sent by Tim to TellMAMA on April 4th 2016.

To whom it may concern,

I see that I have just missed the deadline of 31 March for my application to be considered for the post recently advertised on your website.

http://tellmamauk.org/vacancy-caseworker-role-within-tell-mama/

However, it’s probably just as well, as those who know me consider [me] to be honest and trustworthy, and as such, I would most likely NOT fit in with a cowboy outfit like yours, run as it is by the Mendacious Grievance-Mongering Taqiyya-Artist-in-Chief, “Fizzy Bollocks” Mughal.

It’s a real shame, because otherwise I am qualified – nay – some might say over-qualified, to [fulfil] all the requirements of this position, together with the ability to dispense some much-needed honesty and integrity which appears to be sadly missing from your organisation on every level.

Fortunately, my current gainful employment will undoubtedly sustain me for the foreseeable future, so please don’t worry about parachuting me into the position over the heads of your less-qualified applicants who have managed to submit their application forms by the due date.

Just as a reminder of what you are missing, I herewith attach a link to the write-up of my recent court case, as published in the New English Review.

http://www.newenglishreview.org/Tim_Burton/Showdown_in_Birmingham/

Yours faithfully,

Timothy M Burton

TellMAMA’s response to that email. April 4th 2016.

Your communication has been passed onto the MET. Cease and desist in sending us any further communication. You have been notified.

Best Wishes,

TELL MAMA TEAM

Email Number 2. From Tim Burton to TellMAMA on April 4th 2016.

To whom it may concern,

Well, that’s not very Christian of you. However, my email and your reply will no doubt prove a great topic of conversation on our radio shows in the UK, Canada, Australia  and the USA. So thank you very much for that!

Yours faithfully,

Timothy M Burton

Email Number 3. From Tim Burton to TellMAMA on April 5th 2016.

To whom it may concern,

I forgot to thank you for passing my communication on to the Middle East Transgender organisation. I [think] that it’s wonderful that you have such an enlightened group that supports persecuted minorities in this way.

It’s such a welcome change from the backward, misogynistic seventh century attitudes that we have come to expect from the followers of your ideology.

On a separate note, I do hope that you will be able to support the forthcoming “Reform, Renounce, Or Get The Hell Out Of My Country” petition recently initiated by Jeppe Juhl. He refers in this article mainly to Denmark, but obviously we all have the same problems with this fascist, totalitarian political ideology wherever we happen to be in the Western world, as I am sure you will agree.

http://gatesofvienna.net/2016/03/jeppe-juhls-solutions-reform-renounce-or-repatriate/

Yours faithfully,

Timothy M Burton

Email Number 4. From Tim Burton to TellMAMA on April 6th 2016.

To whom it may concern,

I just thought you’d like to see this article –

http://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/04/05/its-humour-time-poking-some-po-faced-poltroons-who-really-deserve-it/

You guys sure are the epitome of sore losers. Right now the world and his dog are laughing their socks off at Fizzy Bollocks and the rest of his motley crew.

Oh, and by the way – Is there any more news on my job application? 

I know that I must be the obvious front-runner with my qualifications and experience, but I should warn you that once I am hired, I will set about the place with a new broom, cleaning out the Augean stables of taqiyya-laden manure, casting sunlight into the darkest recesses, spreading the disinfectant of truth [and] generally keeping you on your toes.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,

Timothy M Burton”

TellMAMA’s response to emails 2, 3, and 4, of April 6th 2016:

You have been expressly notified not to contact us. You have failed to heed this. All of the material is being sent to the police and solicitors. Any subsequent material will also be passed on for action and rest assured we will push for action against you.

 Best Wishes,

TELL MAMA TEAM

Email Number 5. Tim Burton to TellMAMA on April 6th 2016.

To whom it may concern,

Well there you go. Not only do I try and solve your employment problem, I try to point out how you are perceived in the media and around the world, and what thanks do I get? 

Some empty threats without even the courtesy of a “Good morning” or a “Good afternoon” or even a “Thank you for your enquiry, your email is important to us.” 

Not even a snifter of a “Best regards” or a “Yours faithfully” or even “Your humble servant, Fiyaz Mughal.”

It just goes to show how polite manners have deteriorated in the wonderful multicultural society that has developed in the last forty years or so. The “cultural enrichment” that we [have experienced] has resulted in a feral, snarling response to the even the most polite of enquiries.

I tell you what, Fizzy Bollocks old chap. If you really don’t want to receive any more communications from me, just go to your email settings and select “Block Sender” – this will result in my emails being ignominiously consigned to the Junk folder and you will no longer be troubled by my eloquent, well-thought-out missives.

Other than that, you will just have to put up with me exercising my right to Free Speech. Remember that concept?

Terribly inconvenient, I know, but for some things you just have to get off your lardy posterior and do it yourself. It’s too important to leave to your underlings, even the expensively acquired caseworker that you seem determined to hire over my obviously superior job application.

I normally charge a minimum of £500 for technical advice of this nature, but as I am feeling [particularly] benevolent at the moment, I will waive my usual fee.

Best Regards,

Timothy M Burton

Email Number 6. From Tim Burton to TellMAMA on April 26th 2016.

For the attention of Fizzy Bollocks – a.k.a. Fiyaz Mughal

Good morning Fizzy old chap,

I just thought I would enquire as to how that new “caseworker” is working out for you. Not very well by the sound of it – I detect a certain amount of desperation from within your organisation as you stoop to lower and lower depths of depravity to try and pin charges of “racism”, “bigotry” and “Islamophobia” onto people who have done little more than express a healthy contempt for a medieval belief system that teaches hatred and violence towards non-believers and which is completely incompatible with a free, tolerant and democratic society such as ours.

(You should have taken up my offer to come and work for you – it’s difficult to see how I would have done more harm to the public image of your organisation than you guys are doing unaided.)

I refer of course to your unwarranted persecution of one Cllr Dr Teck Khong, [a local councillor with a large Twitter following who writes about Islam and its incompatibility with English common law] which has been brought to my attention courtesy of Fahrenheit 211, a prolific blogger and counter-jihad activist who has been tirelessly and diligently working to highlight the many ways that Muslims exploit the tolerance and goodwill of us non-Muslims in order to promote the cause of a barbaric, totalitarian political ideology which contributes absolutely nothing to the advancement of peace and harmony.

Here is Fahrenheit 211’s take on the disgraceful activities of Tell Mama – I have to say that I agree entirely with the sentiments expressed in the article – and the sooner that the bottom-feeding rock-dwellers of your organisation wake up to the fact that such activities merely deepen the entirely justified suspicion and dislike that most normal people have for the followers of the religion of the Perpetually Offended, the better.

http://www.fahrenheit211.net/2016/04/25/from-elsewhere-someone-needs-to-remind-these-mountebanks-that-we-are-still-free-to-mock-or-express-our-dislike-of-the-ideology-of-islam/

By the way, this month we at Liberty GB celebrated the two-year anniversary of your ignominious defeat (at Birmingham Magistrates Court on 08 April 2014, in case you had forgotten.) We raised a glass in your honour, and toasted you with a bacon sandwich.

Regards,

Timothy M Burton

PS – I thought that you might have blocked my email address earlier this month, but it turns out that I merely made a spelling mistake when typing your email address, which meant that my email was bounced back to me. It just goes to show that even the best of us are not infallible. 

Of course, the fact that you yourself haven’t as yet blocked my email address demonstrates that you want – and indeed need – emails from people like me to justify your enormous and undeserved public grant. For that reason alone, if any more reasons were needed, the breath-taking hypocrisy of you and your organisation is thereby exposed for the world to see.

According to Burton, he was writing as if speaking to anyone within the TellMAMAUK organization (when it came to the “To whom it may concern” ones, anyway). Tim was mindful in tone to consider that no person with common sense would feel anything other than mildly annoyed. There was no intent to cause fear or distress, nor be threatening and aggressive in any way. Tim Burton argues that anyone who would take a significant gravity of offense to his emails has too thin of a skin. To that effect, it’s in Burton’s opinion Mughal’s motivations to pursue this case within the court system were to make an example out of Tim. Given Fiyaz’s large degree of influence over the Crown Prosecution Service, Mughal saw opportunity to show those who oppose Islam what happens to political detractors. Tim Burton makes it clear that he was NOT motivated by race or religious hostility, but to challenge the political views of Fiyaz Mughal’s organization that was pursuing an effort to silence free speech as a sacrifice to the altar of political correctness.

To understand how fast the ball started moving with this, Burton says he was first interviewed by West Midlands Police on June 2nd, 2016. It happened without warning. That is to say, he had no clue what their interests were about until the interview itself began.

It would take until September 2016 for Tim Burton to get a court summons saying Fiyaz Mughal was charging him with racially aggravated harassment. Again. Liberty GB revealed this to the public on September 18th, and Tim himself spoke about it in an interview that happened on the 24th.

This was the same CPS that refused to press charges against a gang of Muslims that assaulted Tim back in 2015 when he was campaigning. The perpetrators were ID’ed by police but CPS didn’t prosecute them because it wouldn’t “be in the public interest” to do so.

Within a Westminster Magistrates Court hearing (magistrates’ courts have no juries sitting in them, another common trick of the British establishment in recent decades) on October 6th 2016, they charged Tim with racially/religiously aggravated harassment. He was set for another pre-trial hearing the next month. A second interview Burton did shortly beforehand revealed that Fiyaz Mughal was still in reception of the public’s money and he expanded his connections within the government in the years following his fraud controversy.

The charges were amended on November 3rd 2016 during the pre-trial preparatory hearings. A copy of which was made public here:

INDICTMENT

IN THE CROWN COURT AT SOUTHWARK

REGINA v TIMOTHY BURTON

TIMOTHY MARTIN BURTON is charged as follows:

STATEMENT OF OFFENCE

RELIGIOUSLY AGGRAVATED HARASSMENT, contrary to section 32(1)(a) of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998

PARTICULARS OF OFFENCE

TIMOTHY MARTIN BURTON between the 3rd day of April 2016 and the 20th day of April 2016 pursued a course of conduct which amounted to the harassment of Fiyaz Mughal and which he knew or ought to have known amounted to the harassment of him, by sending Fiyaz Mughal a number of unsolicited emails containing Islamophobic and other offensive material and the offence was wholly or partly motivated by hostility towards members of a religious group, namely Muslims and Fiyaz Mughal’s membership of that group.

(Note: I asked Tim in my interview with him about date discrepancies in official documents like this. Apparently the UK court system is allowed to adjust for that sort of thing as they go along.)

The showdown this time was going to be at Southwark Crown Court (a proper court with a jury) on January 30th 2017. Tim Burton did the proper build-up he could this time around: from securing a barrister (attorney) from the Kings Bench Walk Chambers in London, to gathering expert witnesses to speak on Burton’s behalf. The court (before the jury was called) rejected allowing Robert Spencer, Usama Dakdok, and Dr Bill Warner from giving testimony. They finally allowed Professor Sami Aldeeb to be the expert witness on Islam and taqiyya for the trial. In the end it didn’t even matter because Tim’s barrister never decided to utilize this person and call them in.

The stakes were set higher this time around, as Tim Burton’s trial held implications for the legal status of Islam within the UK. As explained by Liberty GB:

• “to the best of our knowledge and belief, there has never been a ruling on the legal status of Islam as a religion in the UK”;

• “there are characteristics of Islam that conflict with Article 9 of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) and consequently Islam should not — indeed, must not — be legally considered as a religion under UK law, as UK law is currently subordinated to the ECHR in this respect”.

To put it bluntly, “the legal status of mosques, the validity of Muslim marriages, the legality of halal slaughter” would all be brought into question if the court ruled against Fiyaz.

Burton says many things went wrong with the 2017 trial. His biggest regret was handing over control of his defense to someone who wasn’t educated on the nuances involved with this situation. Tim assumed his barrister would’ve done all due diligence necessary in order to prepare and act in Burton’s best interests. He said that was a mistake because it became apparent to him as the proceedings went on she wasn’t up to snuff.

Tim didn’t have any experience in dealing with the Crown Court before. His solicitor (pre-trial lawyer) warned him of that weakness. That there was a world of difference between the 2014 Magistrates’ Court and the then upcoming Crown one. Now, Burton would be up against the rhetorical brilliance and learning of prosecuting barristers and would have to hire defense barristers. Tim’s solicitor was able to get him an experienced barrister from a decent set of legal chambers in London.

The solicitor laid it out to Tim that they needed to find someone they could trust to perform to their best of abilities here. Burton’s first assigned barrister sounded like he was definitely on Tim’s side and knew what he was talking about. Unfortunately, this first barrister had to recuse themselves a few weeks in. Other commitments needed to be tended to and he didn’t have the necessary free time available in order to work on Tim’s case. Tim Burton was referred to a second barrister, and the same set of circumstances that happened with the first barrister happened again. Tim Burton said his third barrister was “as much use as a chocolate teapot.” But because he wasn’t familiar with the Crown Court process, he didn’t realize how useless this lady was until it was too late — a common occurrence among British defendants.

Tim had difficulties in the vote of confidence department as far as his barrister choices went. And this was all before the trial even started.

The day(s) of the trial came. Fahrenheit 211 sent a correspondent to the courtroom to make a record of events:

“In evidence given to the court by video link, the chief prosecution witness, Fiyaz Mughal, said that he had opened emails sent to the Tell Mama business email account and that they had distressed him. One of the emails he said appeared ‘psychologically designed to give him a bad day’.”

Before going into court on the trial’s first day, Tim asked the barrister if she had a copy of all Burton’s notes handy. She told him she hadn’t even bothered reading it. That is to say, Tim Burton’s barrister didn’t bother to read the document written by him explaining his point of view and arguments.

Then came the composition of the trial jury. There were people within that jury who quite visibly self-identified as Muslims. Tim Burton asked his solicitor if he could challenge that in any way, and they replied such a challenge was allowed. But the prosecution was allowed to do that too, so all in all there was risks to going down that route. But Muslim jurors were a problem here because they automatically, by default, have to take the side of the Muslim party in this sort of instance. They couldn’t side with a non-believer in Islam. When Tim Burton questioned his barrister as to why she didn’t challenge the jury because of these reasons, she told him, “It’s not as important as you might think.”

Tim Burton has provided me with the paperwork outlining the complaints he had regarding the situation to Southwark Crown Court. Going on the timing when this process was started, the authorities have had more than ample time to reply to Tim Burton. They have not. They have not said “yes.” Yet on the other hand, they have not said “no.” Given the severity of the allegation, it’s reasonable to conclude that the Court of Appeal would have taken the time to provide a rebuttal to Mr. Burton if they had nothing to be ashamed of.

If Tim Burton’s case were ever to be overturned by the Court of Appeals, all of the other cases in which Dr Matthew Wilkinson was involved (after the time in January 2015 when Ms. Baljit Ubhey became his patron) would then come into question. And we can’t be having that, can we?

This would include the potential declaration of mistrials in high-profile cases involving terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, and any retrials might bring out more than the public is meant to know about state collusion with Islamists.

After realizing Southwark Crown Court weren’t going to acknowledge this at all, Burton asked around about further action he could take. He was pointed to the Queen’s Bench Division at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Same thing: no reply (although QBD specifically exists to ensure British citizens’ speedy access to justice). The Court of Appeal was the next stop. No response from them, either..

What you’re looking at here is the central cog in the London court system’s machine that made the incredibly broad and open-ended interpretation of hate crime in the United Kingdom (in this case, the jurisdiction of England and Wales) possible. This is how Fiyaz Mughal was able to go from being laughed at in June 2013 for his methods, to having Tim Burton prosecuted at the end of March 2017 for religiously aggravated harassment. The CPS make it up as they go along, and they can do so because the British establishment has decided without officially abolishing the evidentiary standards of English common law — to replace it in practise with the Napoleonic model of opportunité des poursuites or prosecutorial discretion (to pursue or to drop charges). This allows tyrannical prosecution but also tyrannical failure to prosecute where politically expeditious. To do so, the establishment has spent a century doing its damndest to all but abolish private prosecutions (which already are nearly impossible in Scotland) and give the state a de-facto monopoly on prosecutions, as in most EU member states. In addition, the police and the CPS end up having the intrinsically contradictory job of collecting both incriminatory and exculpatory evidence on the same suspects, supposedly without fear or favor!

The court system of the United Kingdom is a sham. As seen in this paper by Tim’s friend Graham Senior-Milne, there’s grounds to question Islam’s grounds on being recognized as a religion in UK law altogether.

PREVENT or: Why the United Kingdom Never Acknowledges Anti-fa

You can prove that the United Kingdom government ignores the problems created by Anti-fa by looking at the PREVENT policy.

But to fully understand the extent of the hypocrisy at play here, it helps if you take the time to understand the intricacies laid out for the PREVENT policy in the first place. By looking at how much work, time, and energy went into developing this whole convoluted thing.

As a side-note let me make it clear it says on TellMAMA’s website that they aren’t a project under the umbrella of PREVENT. But if you recall the TellMAMA report mentioned a few pages back, there was a point where an account by the name of @gasmuslims came into the organization’s cross-hairs.

We can use that as an example of the UK government’s human centipede system of policy. Where the civil society NGOs like TellMAMA submit a report (page 6), the UK government includes it in an official paper they release (page 16), and then TellMAMA holds that up as proof of their own legitimacy (page 71/72).

It’s the best way for the government to make it look like its doing something, but without accomplishing anything of significant progress at all. The paperwork equivalent of running in place. More to the point, just because the TellMAMA program isn’t a PREVENT policy, it can still be true that people within TellMAMA have worked or influenced PREVENT policy shaping in some way.

But that’s only a part of the puzzle. The reason this section is being written is because the UK authorities make it obvious they’re intentionally ignoring Anti-fa groups.

This quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should serve to set the stage in terms of what the United Kingdom government is trying to do here.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

The central factor dictating the direction of the United Kingdom is their response to terrorism. The PREVENT policy at the center of it all was a reactionary measure based on the July 7th 2005 bombings. That tragedy helped establish the pattern of changes put in place in response to public incidents of that nature.

So the government wants to stop extremism. The PREVENT policy implies all forms of extremism are the same. In doing so they have a tendency to conflate one side criticizing the extremism of the other side as extremism in itself.  It also implies that everyone was convicted of terrorism is violent, despite the fact the laws are broad enough to arrest people for indirectly encouraging terrorism or possessing information about it.  It’s this obsession on intervening before crimes happen and how it’s necessary to do so that creates this criminalisation territory of thought. This focus on “pre-crime” is in reality an attack on non-criminal activity that gives the government powers to go after perfectly legal religious and political beliefs.

To get a sense of how the focus was at the outset as far as funding is concerned, page 104 of the very lengthy PREVENT document has a chart about it. Out of the £24 million for PREVENT policing in the 2010-2011 period:

But what you can learn from this is the different pieces parts involved. A basic foundation to work off of. It’s all done under the guise of what’s NECESSARY AND PROPORTIONATE according to the government suits pushing PREVENT.

The first iteration of PREVENT that came out between 2007 and 2011 focused on the British Muslim communities exclusively. They used the available demographic data they had for Muslim populations back then as a program funding guide. It didn’t work out too good. There were accusations tossed around about unfair targeting from Muslim communities in response.

This article from the Financial Times back in February 2010 helps us understand what things were like back then:

“Prevent has caused merry hell. Although ministers insist that it is aimed at “violent extremism in all its forms” – from anti-Semitism to militant animal rights – Prevent labours under the fact that violent extremism in one form, Islamic-inspired terrorism, threatens the UK like no other. As a result, the funding is often allocated according to how many Muslims live in an area, targeting that has alienated the very people the government is trying to reach. In the past year, Prevent has been called a spying operation, a state attempt to concoct a new “British Islam”, and a waste of money and/or a source of funds for the kind of extremist groups it should be stamping out. It has been condemned by think-tanks on the left and the right, in newspapers from The Guardian to the Mail on Sunday. “You can’t win either way,” admits Shahid Malik, the minister who runs Prevent programmes at the Department for Communities and Local Government. “You get the critics of Prevent who say it is too soft and it doesn’t really do what it says on the tin. Then you get the people who are the subjects of Prevent in many ways – Muslims – who say it criminalises and stigmatises the whole community.””

This is a good section to point out as it shows the crossroads the PREVENT program was at. A state of indecision that necessitated the changes and overhaul it would receive the following year.

The second iteration of PREVENT that arrived in June 2011 was a huge leap forward from its predecessor. Let’s tie things back to an earlier place in this essay. Remember Shahid Malik? The co-chair for TellMAMA nowadays? He was involved with the first PREVENT during his time in public office, because the DCLG played a part. That wasn’t the case anymore with the arrival of PREVENT 2.0. Control became much more centralized to the Home Office’s Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism.

What’s key here is their “PREVENT will go after all forms of terrorism” mantra. Now that the policy makers had been woke to identity politics, they worked that in the guidelines this time around. The result being a statement declaring they’ll still dedicate their resources and attention to al-Qaeda because they’re the biggest threat to the world right now.

They acknowledge the value of free speech in regards to PREVENT on page 13, paragraph 3.10:

“We remain absolutely committed to protecting freedom of speech in this country. But preventing terrorism will mean challenging extremist (and non-violent) ideas that are also part of a terrorist ideology. Prevent will also mean intervening to stop people moving from extremist groups or from extremism into terrorist-related activity.”

As mentioned earlier on, this demonstrates the general government mentality on the topic. It doesn’t seem restricted to just PREVENT alone.

As seen in this article from the Daily Signal, we can get a basic idea of the referral process when it comes to the school system. A teacher makes a “safeguard lead” aware of a concern, leading to a multi-agency team (made up of social services, law enforcement, health care) reviewing the case and determining the necessary services to provide the student in question. If the case is determined to involve “extremism,” that team refers the incident to the CHANNEL panel (made up of local leaders in government, mental health, policing, probation). That panel determines the person’s “susceptibility to radicalization” and intervenes if its serious enough.

This “all forms of terrorism” slogan leaves the door open to allowing a change to the threats focused on. This opened the door in government policies for the introduction and development of the far-right hysteria you see happening today.

What problem is that? Well for starters if you take a look at the UK government’s Counter-Extremism Strategy on page 10, you’ll find the definition of extremism listed there in black and white.

“Extremism is the vocal or active opposition to our fundamental values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and the mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs. We also regard calls for the death of members of our armed forces as extremist.”

As mentioned in the introduction section, that broad definition allows for wide interpretations that are too open to personal beliefs. David Cameron expressed his worries about the definition of extremism in May 2016. Not because of personal beliefs. But because of the legality implications therein to a definition such as this. It’s this sort of thing that’s got both sides of the political discourse in today’s society thinking the other one are full of criminals. 

Despite the flaws, there’s examples of PREVENT getting the intended results. Such as the case of a 14-year-old West Yorkshire boy who was deprogrammed of “far-right extremism” after he started speaking out against Muslims in school. Reportedly he got his world views from his father, as he had been separated from his mother on the day-to-day. Now, what did the boy say exactly? He alleged “Muslims were taking over the country” and had strong opinions on what Muslims should or shouldn’t wear. The lad was brought into CHANNEL and authorities offered intervention for his political views. It led to him being introduced to a Muslim imam who took him to different Yorkshire mosques to meet Muslims in the community. The youngster even started volunteer work on a multi-faith project with other “diverse” folk.

Agree or disagree with PREVENT, at the end of the day this 14-year-old is at least less bitter at the world. But this sort of thing has *no place whatsoever* being within the same system as one that causes a student to get sent to the office for making an ISIS joke in a video he made with friends (see pg 42 of this July 2017 report). That’s the detriment to the catch-all approach the UK government practices with all this. It’s dangerously irresponsible.

The PREVENT program is going as far as to in some cases having mental health trusts subjecting their patients to radicalization screenings. A 60-page analysis published by Warwick University goes into great detail on how PREVENT is working in the NHS. The definition of “working” in this sense meaning how well (or not well) the government’s policy is functioning in reality. The study gives examples like a patient being referred to PREVENT for simply watching Arabic TV. Another guy came into the hospital with burned hands, didn’t want to explain how or why it happened, and ended up getting referred to police because they thought he was making bombs. It’s an interesting look into what happens when you mandate a country’s healthcare system report signs of radicalization.

In 2015, civil society groups that PREVENT supported ran 130 projects, and reached over 25,000 people with their efforts.

A July 2015 article from the Independent on PREVENT has a quote from CAGE spokesperson Ibrahim Mohamoud, voicing the reason for opposition of this policy in the Muslim community:

“The Prevent strategy has no peer-reviewed evidentiary basis, showing a link between violence and ideology… The Prevent policy has facilitated an atmosphere in which Muslims are incriminated within a pre-crime space for nothing more than holding opinions that run contrary to those take by government. This increases the likelihood of disenfranchisement as opposed to countering it.”

It tears at the bonds of trust communities have with each other, in return for an increased dependency on the government for guidance. The parental guidance and intuition when a child’s individual curiosity strays too far, is replaced with a standardized cold-hard list of blanket indicators of extremism.

By March 2016 folks like Dr Rizwaan Sabir were saying that PREVENT becoming law was leading to a “safeguarding bubble which encompasses universities, colleges, schools and communities.” That legal duty to prevent people from being radicalized that universities had under the Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015 was “leading to disengagement, systematic spreading of fear and the closing down of expression and debate.”

TELLMAMAUK comes into the picture because of the close relationship between third-party “civil society” organizations and UK governmental bodies.

It’s worth explaining Fiyaz Mughal’s stance on PREVENT in particular, as it seems he contradicts himself. This was laid out originally in a blog from 5pillars. The written evidence submitted by Faith Matters to the Home Affairs Select Committee’s Countering Extremism inquiry on March 8th 2016 is a base we can work from. At a glance it hits all the right politically correct notes of arguing the disproportionate focus on the Muslim community the Counter Extremism strategy has.

To be fair I have to say me and Fiyaz are in somewhat of an agreement here:

“The Home Office has a disproportionate power in defining ‘extremism’ and has done so without sufficient consultation of a wide range of actors in the Muslim community. As the implementation of the policy stands today, there is a risk that the current strategy might define key partners as potential ‘extremists’ due to their political stances.”

Interestingly enough Faith Matters even includes a section on The Counter-Extremism Strategy lacks a clear understanding of far-right extremism. Again, on that statement alone we’re in agreement. The dilemma arrives when Faith Matters takes the exact opposite angle from mine when explaining further. And since there’s absolutely zero consideration for Antifa radicals in Faith Matters presented evidence here, I’d wager my argument would trump theirs in terms of understanding the whole political picture.

Speaking of Faith Matters, they authored “Implementing Prevent: from a community-led to a Government-centred approach,” in a consultation report for London Assembly and MOPAC.

Back in February 2015, the Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan did an article pointing out the habitual entryism being practiced by Baroness Warsi as she handed out official posts to people with ties to Islamic groups. This “cross-Government working group on anti-Muslim hatred” these people were involved in had Fiyaz Mughal on board. But he told The Telegraph he jumped ship. “I was deeply concerned about the kinds of groups some of the members had connections with, and some of the groups they were recommending be brought into government,” he said. “It seemed to me to be a form of entryism, by people with no track record in delivering projects.”

5pillars explains that in doing so, Fiyaz was showing his loyalty to PREVENT’s “counter-entryism” stances at work in their counter-extremism strategy.

The 5pillars blog points out Fiyaz Mughal’s statement from a March 3rd 2016 event on Tackling Extremism held by Westminster Briefing.

“Prevent’ is becoming more problematic especially in the Muslim community – they consider it intrusive in their daily lives – particularly with the new Government duty to report. I disagree – the environment is more complex, but I do think Prevent as a brand has become damaged.”

From this we can ascribe the mindset of Fiyaz Mughal and PREVENT. To him it’s not about the values, but the perceptions. I’m going to take this idea presented by 5pillars and add an additional layer of observational evidence to take into account. TellMAMA’s staff and advisory board.

Neil Chakraborti is a Professor of Criminology and the head of that department over at University of Leicester. He serves as an advisory board member of TellMAMA on top of that. If you wanted to get his thoughts at a glance? “Islamophobic reactions intensify the processes of fear, hostility & othering that give rise to acts of hate,” Neil said on Twitter in a retweet of a TELLMAMA post.

It really says it all right there. But I should be fair and provide more context about Neil instead of handpicking quotes willy-nilly. Here’s an assortment of tweets from him that give you a fuller picture. He has rubbed elbows with people like Baroness Warsi, spoke on hate crime and transphobia in a House of Commons inquiry, and all-in-all the most important aspect of this Neil dude is that as a criminologist he’s one of the influencing forces on the UK police when it comes to their hate crime strategies. His research is an example of what the UK government relies on.

An inhabitant of the academia world. His position is what leads him to run into PREVENT officers like Will Baldet on a regular basis. Their part of the world has Will and Neil bouncing ideas off of each other when it comes to the issues of today.

You’re probably like “that’s anti-climatic.” Well in Neil’s case that’s the world of academia. It’s a long-haul process that doesn’t directly cause a change. But by the case of their routine habits over time some influence of thoughts and ideas is bound to rub off on either of them. 

However there’s a good case that uses the exact opposite approach. Bharath Ganesh. You might remember him from the December 2016 MEND incident back on Fiyaz Mughal’s page. From his tweets we can see this is indeed, him. Again I’ll provide my notes as a courtesy. Don’t want to take this dude out of context. He makes infographics for TellMAMA. Bharath also gets mad if you steal them.

Gotta admit. It takes balls of steel to think PREVENT is worth recommending to the Department of Homeland Security.  I mentioned a consultation report for London Assembly about PREVENT authored by Faith Matters. Bharath is the guy that wrote that.

Bottom line is Bharath is a PREVENT critic. At odds with what it is. Much more direct in his extremism discourse with people (look at this banter). But Bharath is more of a civil society circle type of guy and not a full-on academic sort. That means hanging around with George Soros and the Open Society types for insight. Doesn’t mind going for media appearances on behalf of TellMAMA, or jumping in and writing an article with his two cents on things like the far right.

So in the end here we have two very different people, in two different social circles, making contributions to the same government policies. The point in this exercise is two-fold. On one level it’s a display of the influence TellMAMA and Fiyaz Mughal have over PREVENT. 

But on the other hand it shows the intellectual hegemony of Leftists in these fields. Do you think right-wingers get their hands as involved along these sorts of issues? Somewhat, maybe. But at the end of the day you can get an idea of where the political heirarchy for this sort of thing is rooted from.

That’s one way that PREVENT proves that the UK government isn’t dealing with Anti-fa. But there’s more. 

On May 24th 2016 it was reported even the police lead of the government’s PREVENT program thought the authorities were at risk of things a step too far. Britain’s bill would have broadened the legislation against people considered “extremists” even if they didn’t advocate for terrorism. The non-violent folks. “Unless you can define what extremism is very clearly then it’s going to be really challenging to enforce,” Simon Cole said. Many senior police officers opposed the direction the government wanted to go. This counter-extremism bill allowed bans on extremist organizations, gagging individuals, and the ability for local councils to shut down areas they believed were being used to promote hatred. “We don’t want to be the thought police, we absolutely don’t want to be the thought police.” The battle was entering the territory of what people could or could not say.

By July 2016, a year after schools were given a legal duty to prevent students from being drawn into non-violent extremism, it was reported that teachers were making one-third of all referrals to PREVENT. “We have uncovered a number of instances where children have been referred to Prevent for legitimately exercising their right to freedom of expression in situations where they pose no threat to society whatsoever,” said Yasmine Ahmed of Rights Watch (UK).

The absolute best example in demonstrating the opposition to the PREVENT program came around in September 2016. More than 140 experts came together to oppose the UK’s anti-radicalization strategy in an open letter. Their key complaint was the psychological evidence the strategy’s tools deploy at their foundation weren’t properly given the chance to be scrutinized by other scientists and the public. They said it was concerning that this flawed “Extremism Risk Guidance 22+ (ERG22+) framework” used for assessing the “radicalization” of someone was being used by more than 500,000 workers in the public sector. This letter was the byproduct of a deep dive analysis of PREVENT done by CAGE titled “The ‘Science’ of Pre-Crime – The Secret ‘Radicalisation’ Study Underpinning Prevent.” They put forward the argument that a policy as publicly involved as PREVENT shouldn’t be based on scientific studies that are kept confidential.

Two-thirds of cases of the 7631 PREVENT referrals for the 2015-2016 period were in regards to Islamist extremism. On the other hand, only 10% was due to right-wing extremism concerns. 33% of referrals were made by schools and university staff, as spurred on by the legal duties of the 2015 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act. There was a noticeable shift in direction at this point towards “safeguarding” against ideologies in general going on.

Let’s see how PREVENT responded to an event like the Trojan Horse Affair (from page 12/13 of “What the Prevent duty means for schools and colleges in England,” July 2017):

“The so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ affair – prompted two inquiries, by the Department for Education and Birmingham City Council. The DfE’s report, written by ex-Counter-Terrorism Police chief Peter Clarke, concluded that, whilst no evidence of support for violent extremism was found, extremism (by Prevent’s own definition) was being encouraged in some of the schools. This report prompted then Education Secretary Michael Gove to instruct the educational inspectorate, Ofsted, to prioritise Prevent implementation, particularly through the promotion of ‘fundamental British values’, within their revised Common Inspection Framework and in their inspections of maintained schools and colleges.”

Rob Faure Walker (secondary teacher in London since 2005, PhD student at UCL Institute of Education) wrote an essay demonstrating the heart of the problem with PREVENT.

“Acceptance of the new meaning from the more recent 2011 Strategy, that radicalisation leads to the support of violence, cuts off the avenues by which peaceful political reform might be achieved. This presents subjects of the strategy with a choice. If they value peace over political change this may result in the suppression of discourse that is in opposition to the Government.”

More recently he wrote a short piece about the usage of the word “radicalisation.” According to him, it’s a booming phrase. And that’s part of the problem. He saw it used as an ever-close explanation as to the Florida shooting. The marriage of “terrorism” to “radicalization” is brought full circle. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the term “radicalization” was naught found much anywhere. Yet that pivotal event in modern history is what brought us to today’s saturation point of the war on “extremism.” By using such a blanket phrase for a heavy extent of description lingo, we’re forcing ourselves into a faux conclusion based on preconceived notions of reality based on that.

“PREVENT is a strategy that reveals an aspiration to a politics of consent. By casting radical or extreme views as pathologically violent, it presumes that its own stance is unassailable,” says Walker.

Today PREVENT it really at a crossroads.

By the end of November 2017, murmurs of “CONTEST 3.0” began to surface. Security minister Ben Wallace gave a speech at the Westminister Counter-terrorism Conference laying out the reality of the modern age. “Nearly 600 investigative leads are ongoing, covering about 3,000 people and approximately another 20,000 people who we have at some stage had concern about. It is not a spike in the threat, but a shift that we are now facing, and that is something we all have to deal with.”

Patrick McGuinness (UK Deputy National Security Adviser) said all terrorists need are the “internet and a mindset” to unleash havoc on the world. Mark Rowley expounded on that thought. “Our ability to prevent dangerous people killing on the streets of the UK or anywhere else in the world will always be critically urgent, but the most important thing we can all focus on to change the picture in the long-term is the preventative agenda, to counter the ideology to stop the next generation of terrorists.”

But in the end there really is a failure to fully launch something that satisfies these communities. Critics of PREVENT ended up going off the beaten path and making their own anti-radicalization alternative. The Muslim Council of Britain teamed up with former senior Muslim police officer Dal Babu and former council head of community safety Mike Howes to get things into motion. Their alternative is called Safe and Secure. It really comes down to a difference in branding, as Safe and Secure basically does the same sort of thing PREVENT was doing. They offered the program to the Home Office but were essentially rejected by them.

Babu’s thoughts on it are very enlightening (bold emphasis added by me):

“We want to make this more about safeguarding than focus just on radicalisation. One of the biggest challenges is if you put ‘toxic brand’ into Google, the first thing that comes up is the government’s Prevent strategy. It’s about how you engage with a community in a way that is much more inclusive. They [the architects of Prevent] didn’t get any buy-in from the community.”

The school of thought behind this strategy is called “pre-crime.”

In August 2017 the police lead for PREVENT, Simon Cole, revealed that the government and police were having talks about making people’s participation in the deradicalization program mandatory. This should not be confused with the legal obligation introduced to the program back in 2015, that made *reporting* PREVENT cases where observed a requirement for public sector employees. Here, rather, the factor of someone’s participation in going through PREVENT process was the focus.

This is what Cole had to say on that.

“It is a healthy and legitimate discussion. At what point do you allow and involve compulsion? If you want to divert someone, you are better doing it with their wholehearted consent. What do you do with returners [from Syria]? Should they automatically have to go on a programme? There might be some categories of people for whom there is some compulsion, and that needs linking into risk. It is a debate that is ongoing, and I don’t think there is an easy answer to it.”

You can see the pro-government bias in how one of PREVENT’s leads writes about it in the Huffington Post. In an article from November 2017, this PREVENT guy mentions how PREVENT referrals (7631) is only a small section of safeguarding overall (621,470). Within such contexts, he’s able to reframe the issue of PREVENT referrals as only being 0.014% of children in UK schools (1.21% in regards to comparisons of total referrals for safeguarding overall). The PREVENT lead takes issue with the “Only 5% of people referred to Prevent extremism scheme get specialist help” tweet he saw a national newspaper send out. And yes, the author of the article has a decent argument to make about the programs successes. But this does not take away from the impact it has on the detriment to speaking freely within the public space without fear of consequences. This is an argument where both good and bad things exist.

“Online terrorist material is completely unacceptable. #UK works hard to ensure content is removed,” tweeted UK Against Daesh.

“Only removing online content not effective, says Gabriella Cseh of @facebook. It must be paired w/credible #counterspeech,” tweeted OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe).

It’s too blurry of a line between what’s considered extremist and what’s considered terrorism. It results in the two distinctly separate areas mixing together and creating an all-encompassing grey area the UK government seeks to tackle all together.

That’s exactly what the authorities are doing today.

That’s what creates the ingredients for the UK police state. Within that speech from the National Lead for Counter Terrorism Policing Mark Rowley, you will notice that far left radical Anti-fa extremism is not mentioned at all. I find it surprising that a man as knowledgeable on Tommy Robinson, Britain First, MEND, and the vast swath of Islamic groups is incapable of acknowledging a sophisticated radicalized entity like Anti-fa. It goes against the spirit of “tackling all kinds of extremism” as the UK government promised. Especially troublesome that such a thing is overlooked by a senior police officer like Mark Rowley.

Moreover, far left radical Anti-fa extremism is overlooked in the counter-extremism policies and guidelines set out by the United Kingdom altogether. 

Let’s fix that.

One of the most problematic discoveries I have made in the past two months is the complete lack of focus UK government policy places on far-left radical Antifa extremism. It’s something that the FBI and Homeland Security made a note of in September 2017, weeks following the aftermath of the clashes at Charlottesville. The federal authorities made it clear that Antifa leftist groups reached confrontational and dangerous limits. Based on the evidence presented,  a strong enough argument was made in the media about Antifa being equal to neo-Nazis. With that level of national recognition, precedent should have been set for the United Kingdom to follow.

Tommy Robinson, Lucy Brown, and George were attacked on March 10th 2018 by Antifa thugs while reporting on their conference that was going on at the time. Police were called. They decided to not take any further action because there was no means of knowing who the Antifa assailants were.

For those of you who scoff at Tommy Robinson and think he was “asking for it” or something, don’t worry there’s plenty more examples of Antifa violence. “AntiFa attacks wheelchair bound veteran,” “ANTIFA Mob Attacks Yaron Brook & Sargon of Akkad,” “Antifa Attack German Women For Protesting Rape,” “ANTIFA Fascists attack police at Georgia Tech riots,” “Antifa attacks right-winger at London protests,” and “Antifa Group Attack Police and Businesses In Hamilton, Ontario,” to name a few.

With the above examples at hand, a pattern of Anti-fa’s militant style of behavior is exhibited. These aren’t one-off isolated situations. Violence is an overall preferred method of action by the Anti-fa group. Also, members actively avoid talking to the police and abhor being photographed. 

If I were a betting man, I’d wager the same tactics will be used by Anti-fa at the May 6th Day for Freedom event.

This is a problem prevalent throughout the four corners of Britain. Here’s a list of Antifa groups within the United Kingdom: Anti Fascist Network (Facebook, Twitter), North London Antifascists (Twitter), London Antifascists (Facebook, Twitter), South London Antifascists (Facebook, Twitter), Brighton Antifascists (Facebook, Twitter), Portsmouth Antifascists (Facebook, Twitter), South Wales Anti Fascists (Facebook, Twitter), Essex Antifascists (Facebook, Twitter), North East Antifascists, Leeds Anti-fascist Network (Facebook, Twitter), Liverpool Antifascists, Sheffield AFN (Facebook, Twitter), Berkshire Antifascists (Facebook, Twitter), 3 Counties Antifascist Alliance, Southampton Antifascists (Facebook), StopMFE.

I would call that adequate enough proof that Antifa within the country are an organized force. (Not many of the WordPress sites are kept up to date, but many of their social media accounts are).

It begs the question of where this Anti-fa organization came from in the first place. There’s a few ways of interpreting this question. But in the case of the United Kingdom? If you wanted a series of events to point to, the answer would have to be the rise of Tommy Robinson and the EDL caused it. In the same sense that the EDL was a reactionary organization in response to Islamist extremism, the establishment of Anti-fa could be attributed as a response to the EDL.

At least when it comes to the United Against Fascism Twitter account, that’s what it was. It popped up in November 2012 and in the next couple of years it was regularly coordinating counter-protests against EDL folks. A response to a response. It just so happens that the response included a strong backing from the Amnesty International UK NGO. Not just back then, either. Kristyan checked back in to see how things were doing more recently, in 2017.

Yup. Sure is a coincidence that the Crisis & Tactical Campaigns Manager for Amnesty International UK is also an Antifa fan.

It’s due to NGO connections like Amnesty that we can begin to understand Antifa’s interests in Generation Identity. The way UK groups like Hope not Hate phrase their description of the 2017 Mediterranean Defend Europe mission is deceptive.

They say (with bold emphasis mine to point out the bullshit):

“In the summer of 2017 leading Identitarians from across Europe came together to launch Defend Europe, a mission to hamper the work of NGOs saving the lives of refugees crossing the Mediterranean.”

No. Generation Identity did not set out to sea in hopes of getting in the way of NGOs “saving lives” in the Mediterranean. Unlike Hope not Hate who self-reference their own spew on this, I’ll actually link you to a tweet showing the Open Arms “rescue boat” one mile off the coast of Libyan waters. As I’m sure Hope not Hate remembers but just conveniently forgot for the sake of their article, Generation Identity made it clear they were concerned about the human trafficking of refugees that was happening on a routine schedule. Like a taxi service.

If you don’t believe me, hear it from the Defend Europe folks themselves. They were transparent as glass when it comes to their intentions.

But nah. Hope not Hate just calling Generation Identity a bunch of refugee killers is so much better. Not.

Let’s continue exploring the distorted reality of Hope not Hate’s description of events (bold emphasis added by me):

“Due to the work of HOPE not hate and others, the mission was dogged by setbacks and mishaps and ultimately failed in terms of its original stated objectives. However, it did serve to raise the profile of Generation Identity which it has subsequently used to expand further across Europe.”

Again, that’s one hell of a stretch when it comes to what happened (the migrant departure numbers between 2016 and 2017 beg to differ). However, yes it’s true that the mission suffered setbacks by Hope not Hate. The case just happened to be they were absolutely terrible at the art of sabotage. They tried blockading the ship from entering Catania. That failed miserably as you can see here in this video from Brittany Pettibone. Then there was the attempt to have authorities arrest/intimidate the crew. That didn’t fly so good (but it didn’t stop Hope not Hate’s Nick Lowles from e-jerking himself off in celebration). The “lobbying” by Hope not Hate to take money away from Lauren Southern wasn’t successful long-term. She just switched to a different site and continued on her merry way, unhindered.

Feels like I’m missing something else though. Hmmm. Oh. Yes. Hope not Hate helped get the C-STAR barred from docking anywhere in the European Union, leaving it adrift on the Mediterranean Ocean. Nick Lowles and Joe Mulhall were aiming for the Defend Europe crew to die out in the middle of the sea. As in actually kill people. Not just in the hysterical sense they themselves were insinuating Defend Europe of in the case of refugees.

Thankfully by some miracle, someone was able to contact the Maltese patriots sympathetic to Generation Identity’s cause and arrange a rescue. That was a good day. The only good that did was open my eyes to the people who were truly the evil ones. You can hear all about it in the analysis video I did with Brittany Pettibone on the subject. I have to thank Hope not Hate for convincing me to sign myself up to the right side of this political fight going on in the world.  Its been fun.

That backstory helps give some context of recent goings-on in the UK. I recommend reading what Hope not Hate says in that section, though. As some excessive stalking of Sellner on their part happened when he came to give a speech.

The Independent’s article on the anti-fa counter-protest of the #120dB (here’s some actual background info for those who’d like to see it) and Generation Identity conference couldn’t even get as far as the title right. It mislabels Generation Identity as “white supremacists,” which conflicts directly with the whole Identitarian aspect of their group. Supremacy would mean Generation Identity advocated for the dominance of the white race. They do not. Identitarianism advocates for maintaining the integrity and distinction of one’s own European heritage. But this article spins that Generation Identity is a “new breed” of white supremacy that knows how to best utilize the internet and social media to recruit young people. Furthermore the article is also inaccurate in saying the 2017 Defend Europe mission was abandoned after Patreon cancelled Martin Sellner’s and Lauren Southern’s accounts. The mission went on as intended in spite of that setback.

Martin Sellner of Generation Identity Austria, and Bódi Ábel‏ of Generation Identity Hungary, got refused entry into the UK for the weekend conference. They did it on the grounds both of them were members of the “extremist far-right group Generation Identity.”

In the interview with the border force authorities, Bódi Ábel‏ outright says to them the location of the conference was kept secret to prevent Antifa problems.

But let’s zero in on something said in Martin’s case.

“You also had in your possession a number of items which indicate your affiliation to extreme far right wing activity.” 

Sellner shares exactly what those items were: The Strange Death of Europe by Douglass Murray, Martin’s speech, a Book about Heidegger, a Phalanx Europa Shirt (a clothing brand that Martin himself owns and runs), and a Weekend Offender shirt. Despite sending Bódi back home immediately, Sellner was detained for two days. From the 13th to the 15th. He was under the impression it wasn’t permanent the first time he got detained with Brittany Pettibone. That confusion was certainly cleared up the second time around.

The irony of it all being Martin’s speech was on the topic of “Is The UK A Totalitarian State?”

On the day I intend to launch this damn essay, even, the UK is detaining people because of their affiliation to Generation Identity. As far as I know, Tore Rasmussen made this one speech and is the guy who makes shirts.

Do replies like “why don’t you go back to where you came from? we don’t want your kind here,” seem tolerant to you?

“GENERATION IDENTITY IS RACIST AND EXTREME,” Hope not Hate says.

Oh? Let’s look Hope not Hate’s own side of the aisle, Anti-fa.

Also the Anti-Fascist Network group that the Independent was propping up as the supposed good guys here were playing “spot-the-fascist bingo” all the meanwhile. Using real people as their targets and inviting the public to dox them. Well. Anti-Fascist Network certainly sound like a group of real saints. Not. I’ll make it clear for the slow people who hold UK government jobs that might be reading this. The Anti-Fascist Network is encouraging acts of violence.

To that effect we’ll go over how the events of the day played out. We’ll get started telling Lucy Brown’s recollection of events from that weekend shortly.

It’ll be right below this picture of an anti-fa thug ripping Lucy’s hair out.

The title of Lucy’s post is “I Don’t Want To Fight You.”

She starts off by telling us an Antifa member attacked her in the car park of M&S in Sevenoaks. this isn’t the first Antifa have attacked her in a car park, either. Lucy says she pities her attacker. They’re someone who made an active effort to harass her online. Something that Brown was able to easily brush off and ignore. But when they do come across one of this Antifa person’s posts, she says it seems reflective of a damaged woman dealing with a “horrible and dark” anger. An extremist who has her unstable tendencies fed by being within this Antifa group and getting a sense of belonging out of it. Before the encounter, Lucy was attempting to separate two girls from opposing sides who were fighting each other. Then, Brown found herself on the receiving side of physical pain after this Antifa member grabbed her hair, pulled her to the ground, and eventually ripping out two sizable chunks of Lucy’s hair. This is very distressing on Lucy. She tells us that she patrolled around the general area afterwards. Screaming at a mom who brought her kid to the event, and then shouting back at children and middle class girls who called Lucy a “traitor to women.”

This physical violence was allowed to happen because Hope not Hate broadcasted the location of the Generation Identity conference. Generation Identity kept it a secret because they are nonviolent and wanted to avoid confrontation.

Here’s video of the event getting attacked by Antifa. In particular, here’s a picture of a guy bleeding because someone attacked him with a glass bottle. Police were called and someone was arrested. Hope not Hate made that happen. If you want another video perspective of the event, just to be sure, here you go.

And that was just Saturday. There was the #120dB event at Speaker’s Corner the next day, too. Lucy says she maintained her optimism on opening a dialogue with Antifa, offering to do so on multiple occasions across the police line that was set up. Antifa responded by shouting mocking Lucy’s looks and obscenities at her. The police had to protect Freya has she gave her speech, as the Antifa presence created a volatile environment.

Laurie Penny, a known patron of TellMAMA, was seen at the event. Halimo Hussein (Co-president Equality and Liberation of the @SOAS Students’ Union) was also there.

Lucy was accused of being a white supremacist, with the proof being “on her website.” Problem with that is Lucy’s website is just her photography. When she mentioned to Antifa about one of their people ripped some of her hair out, they applauded that. There were some good moments though. A few people who didn’t have their faces covered in masks approached Lucy and genuinely asked her questions. A redhead girl from the opposition gave Lucy her speech and other reading material, inviting her to write a rebuttal back at some point. A man mentioned Antifa passing around Lucy’s image on Facebook and making her a target, willing to admit that it was unfair for them to do that on the presumption being entirely based on the fact she’s hanging around Tommy Robinson.

Lucy’s post closes as follows:

“Of course, it goes without saying that no ‘feminist’ outlet or journalist has been in touch with me. Why would they? I’m not a woman, I’m a racist. What good would it be to humanise me? I’m the enemy. I deserve everything I get, because I put myself here. I film the wrong content, I listen to the wrong podcasts, I read the wrong articles and agree with the wrong ideas. I handed over my right to physical safety when I picked up my camera and filmed the LD50 protest. Any attempt on my part to make light of the situation has been met with frenzied vitriol and justification for horrible things to happen to me. I was, and still am, in a lot of pain, so I suppose in this instance Antifa won. Feel free to congratulate yourselves. I wish I had something funny or edgy to end on but I don’t. I just wish this wasn’t the way things are.”

If you don’t think Lucy Brown’s post on her experiences with Antifa don’t demonstrate the radicalization and extremism, you’re blind.

The wonderful advantage to Lucy Brown being a photographer is she provides ample proof she was there.

The political issue at hand in of itself is interpretations of feminism and women’s empowerment. Freya of Generation Identity spoke out against the mass migration flows pouring into Europe, and how they caused an increase of sexual violence against the women native populations of countries. The Anti-Fascist Network actively protested this stance and targeted the group online and offline. “Generation Identity = bunch of rabid anti-feminist white supremacists pretending to give a shit about womens rights,” they said.

Now one of the places that stood out to me when looking into Antifa’s social media posts from that weekend in April, was a place called the Cowley Club. At a glance, you’d think nothing of this place. They’ve got events like vegan roasts, fundraisers to support the vegan food banks, vegan cooking classes, and even music nights. This seems like the place to enjoy vegan pork pies and vegan beer.

I was somewhat surprised to find the same restaurant lauded by the Metro is also an Antifa front.

So then I took a second glance everything. There’s a history to this Cowley Club place. Taking that into consideration, my closer look helped some of the more politicized elements stand out to me. These folks were openly celebrating the history of the Antifa movement. I spotted screening nights for an Anarchist educational series called Trouble. Promos for some kind of Antifascist festival. Even their music nights had a political flair to it, as the proceeds went to to other radical activist organizations. Reading groups surrounding Why Work? as a topic. Advertisements for migrant and asylum seeker “solidarity events.” On it’s own, there’s nothing wrong with the above, per say. People are free to talk about Rojava, Kurdistan, and “Safe conditions, no evictions!” all they want. The line gets crossed when they invade Generation Identity’s events to cause harm.

That’s a problem when it comes to this Cowley Club “radical social centre” in Brighton. That issue is compounded on the fact that money is involved. If you take a look at this page you can see the funding scheme at work in this Antifa headquarters:

“So, why not invest in this grass roots project, rather than keep your money in the bank where it is invested in any number of environmentally damaging and ethically unsound projects? Over the last eleven years we have repaid over 45,000 pounds to our original loanstock lenders and have acquired just over 70,000 pounds of equity.”

It’s something called loanstocks.

Chris Tomlinson published an article recently that talks about how far-left Antifa militants in Syria vowed revenge against the French State after anarchist groups were evicted. The threat came from “Antifascist Forces in Afrin,” a group that released and then quickly removed a video statement on their Facebook page. The only reason we know about this Antifa threat in the first place is because Nicolas Henin posted screenshots of it to Twitter.

One of the evictions happened at Tolbiac University in Paris, with the result being small fights with police. But the kicker is the report from French newspaper Le Parisien which says the squatters did more than a million euros in damages.

“We fought al-Qaeda and al-Nusra. We fought the Islamic State and the Turkish State. We will fight the French State with the same determination. We will no longer allow them to interfere in every aspect of our lives. The enemy started this war, not us. But we will be the ones who put an end to it,” they wrote.

Tomlinson adds that Antifa groups in Germany claimed responsibility for one of the firebombing attacks that happened at a Turkish mosque in recent weeks. The arsonists said they attacked the building because members of a group with ties to the far-right nationalist Great Unity Party of Turkey had used it.

Chris is pointing towards a significant connection that these Antifa groups have. One to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. They’ve been at war with the Turkish state since 1984. Their goal in the Iraq and Turkey region was to achieve an independent Kurdish state, but at some point they changed that to a fight for equal rights among the Kurdish people.

Both the United States and United Kingdom have listed the PKK as a terrorist organization. That’s what makes this whole connection between them and Antifa worth mentioning. A 2016 report details the use of child soldiers by PKK in combat situations. Children involved with these groups told Human Rights Watch that they’ve also done time staffing checkpoints, or cleaning and preparing weaponry.

But UK Antifa groups like the one in York won’t mention that. They’re all about glorifying their contribution to the fight against ISIS. That child soldier stuff gets shuffled under the rug.

Take the two things in the above as our dots. Let’s connect them.

• March 7th 2018. Anti-Fascist Network Twitter account announces that their upcoming AFN conference will take place at the Kurdish Community Centre 11 Portland Gardens, Harringay, London N4 1HU. The agenda of this training camp includes things like “the Kurdish struggle” among their usual “fascism today in Britain” rhetoric.
• That Kurdish center in Haringey used by Antifa in 2018 is the same one raided by police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act back in December 1997. The raid there and at a Kurdish center in Stoke Newington happened because of connections to an “ongoing investigation into alleged money-laundering.” Many British Kurds were PKK sympathizers back then, and expressed worries of official criminalization happening in the UK after the US classified them as a “foreign terrorist organization.”  Further confirmation that the Antifa location is the same one that was around in the 1990s is available here.
• Besides the general interest stuff, like Northern London Antifa following several Kurdish accounts on Twitter, or the Antifa Cowley Club making it clear that the Kurdish fight is “worth supporting,” there’s more direct evidence of Antifa’s devotion to the Kurdish causes. An entire account called @AntifaTabur is dedicated to this matter. Looks like it was set up to report on the situation from the ground as this fight was going on. It shows Antifa soldiers in military gear, and they identify themselves as the “YPG International Battalion.”
• This POLITICO report from September 2017 makes it clear what’s going on. “Some of the antifa activists have gone overseas to train and fight with fellow anarchist organizations, including two Turkey-based groups fighting the Islamic State, according to interviews and internet postings.”
• So we’ve identified that Antifa fighters are going overseas. We’ve also shown they fight under the banner of YPG.  All that’s left to do is show that the YPG is a PKK offshoot. Article from November 24th 2017 says “Ankara continues to rule out any place for the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its militia the People’s Protection Units (YPG).” So YPG —> PYD. The CIA world factbook has identified “Salih MUSLIM Muhammad leads Kurdistan Workers Party’s Syrian wing, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD),” thus proving PYD —-> PKK. However I must make note of the fact that the CIA has for some reason since removed this line from their text in that section. A comparison between the April 3rd edition of the page (when it was there), to an archive on April 12th (and any point thereafter, even today) demonstrates there was a change. The only reason I noticed this was because I tweeted about Antifa’s connections to the PKK back in March. Naturally the CIA world factbook is something I mentioned. Returning to the website later on in April is what made me notice it was gone. I will look into this matter further and update as necessary.
• In the interests of making this certain, I’ll point out a testimony given by Obama-era Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Start 35 seconds in the video is when the line of questioning starts. Secretary Carter is asked if he’s ever heard of the PYD. He responds that he has. Then he asks if he’s heard of the YPG. Again, Ash Carter says he has. When asked to confirm, Ash Carter confirms that the YPG are the military wing of the PYD. The clip goes on to explore the issue of the PYD’s connections to the PKK. When asked if that fact in itself was true (PYD connection to PKK), Ash Carter confirms it as true.

There you go. The circle is complete. We’ve gone from Antifa to PKK, all the way. So when it comes to asking if Antifa supports a group that uses child soldiers? The answer is yes.

It certainly didn’t surprise me to see Hope not Hate’s Joe Mulhall tweet his #PKK sympathies. It brings things full circle too. As in January 2015 Joe Mulhall went to the Kurdish area in Northern Iraq to film a documentary for Hope not Hate. He asked his Antifa brothers online for their thoughts and feedback on it.

The troubling thing here is the PKK is a proscribed organization in the United Kingdom. Much in the same way that National Action is. They have been since March 2001. This makes Joe Mulhall’s show of affiliation with the group in July 2015 worth further analysis.

To top the “United Kingdom doesn’t talk about Anti-fa” section off? I’ll provide you with the name of the Brighton Anti-fa leader. His name is Richard Pursell, or some variation on that last name. It’s never really made clear.

What you see in the video above is Richard Pursell’s face caught on camera during the June 2013 charity walk incident with Kevin Carroll and Tommy Robinson. Based on the radicalized history of Richard, there’s reason to believe he had violent motives. We know more about Pursell beyond that. Reportedly the owner of the Cowley Club. First seen as far back as 2009. Pops up again in 2014 and 2016. In June of that year the folks over at MEND tweeted an article about Richard being jailed for violence caused at the Dover far right vs anti-fa demonstrations.

“Richard Pursell, 44, of no fixed address, was recorded punching and kicking opponents in the race and immigration demonstrations in Effingham Street and Folkestone Road,” the article says.

To top it all off, in 2003 he saw an Israeli bulldozer kill Rachel Corrie during his activism work in the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement (ISM). If the UK government’s PREVENT policy gave any attention to left-wing radical anti-fa extremists, Richard Pursell would be a prime example of that.

So to see William Baldet, a PREVENT coordinator (a UK government initiative designed to go after all kinds of extremism), say this in response to a clear display of chaos with Anti-fa disrupting a Sargon of Akkad event?

It makes me question the authenticity of the PREVENT initiative’s entire overall effort. Let’s break down William’s ignorance in particular. From the above tweet alone, we can confirm his acknowledgement of Anti-fa as a group. He knows they exist. On my Twitter account prior to being suspended I pressed him to explain why they gloss over the Anti-fa issue. No response. This is a guy that says PREVENT tackles “all forms of extremism.” But in his “The Hate Equation” article he’s missing the crucial left-wing radical Anti-fa variable.

To further back my statement that the United Kingdom is willfully ignoring Anti-fa violence, I can show you more PREVENT Coordinators who fail to address the problem of the radical Left.

Meet Bill Knopp. His Twitter biography says he’s the “Police Prevent Coordinator for East Mids Working with public & partners to build resilience in communities & safeguard the vulnerable from terrorism.”

Bills travels around preaching the PREVENT gospel. In presentations like this one from 2015, you can see that even in the classroom setting they peddle the Islam vs. Far Right tunnel vision. 2016? Same thing, different year. Add in some “pre-crime” lingo in there, just to signal to the world how Orwellian things are. It’s painful seeing how close Bill is to putting things together in 2017. April? “PREVENT strategy has an increased focus on Far Right.” August? “We must not make this all about ‘us v them’.”

Rinse and repeat. I urge anyone to look into this matter further for yourselves.

In response to a MEND tweet asking if something qualified as extremism, from June 2015, Bill told them “Prevent will seek to reduce the risk extremism poses regardless of the type of ideology underlying it” in response.

People should hold you to that, Bill.

Meet Pinakin Patel. He says his job description is “head of Prevent (Counter Extremism/Radicalisation), Strategic Prevent Coordinator, head of London Prevent Network,Prevent Advisory Group;London Prevent Board.”

His pinned tweet goes to an article detailing about the “far right threat.” Despite being the guy in charge of PREVENT, there’s not one mention of anti-fa in that entire piece. I’m jack’s complete lack of surprise, Pinakin. I can see why your program doesn’t do so well. A peek at Pinakin’s tweets reveals exactly everything you might expect. He started in 2011 by watching Tommy Robinson’s career with interest, only to jump on the “violent anti-Muslim hate group” label for EDL in 2013 because Media Matters said so, Islamophobia this, Islamic state that. 

In November 2016, Pinakin tweeted “#AltRight meets our definition of extremism as defined in the #Prevent Strategy. #PreventWorks by looking at all forms of #extremism.”

So he does keep tabs on radicalized groups. I hope someone asks him about anti-fa.

The thing about PREVENT is that these people make anyway from £36K – £45K. The thing about PREVENT is that people get paid to push the political agenda of multiculturalism.

It begs the question whether or not these PREVENT Coordinators would continue to work at this job of theirs if they were told to push different political messages.

Conclusion

As I write this final passage, my Twitter account is still suspended. It has been six days. I’m not sure I’ll get it back tomorrow like I’m hoping. Almost one month now. Nope. Right now is the best possible moment for me to get my thoughts out. The heart of all things is the meaning of value. There’s something about that, which resonates across all our borders and all our countries, but still feels powerful. That fundamental dynamic of human understanding is what we’re fighting for now.

That attack on human dignity employed by the United Kingdom government is what made our conflict here inevitable. 

The technique that Fiyaz Mughal employs with religions and faith is much like the globalist mentality of the European Union. They seek to erase borders much like how Mughal seeks to erase borders of a different kind. But in doing so he’s erasing DISTINCTION, not the DIVISIONS. Now there’s an important difference here. Self respect. The distinctions between religions is where their individual values and respect comes from. Their dignity. Mughal is asking religions to give a bit of that up for the sake of this utopian fever dream. That’s because Fiyaz isn’t comparing UK society to religion systems in other countries for his benchmark of success. Instead Mughal is encouraging a dynamic between the government and the people that’s the most intrusive possible.

That is to say Fiyaz Mughal is running away from the exact thing that he needs to embrace. That clash of religious differences is the only way a mutual understanding and harmony is possible at the end of the day. By trying to stop the clash in the first place it just makes things worse.

The challenge and debate of ideas is intrinsically tied with the notion that something may be considered offensive. The underlying dynamic of TellMAMAUK creates a dependency on the government to solve culture problems. It’s a subtle way of reducing the qualities of self-reliance and self-confidence that religious groups have. The mentality of collectivism entertains the notion that society as a whole needs to solve everyone’s problems for them and take care of them.

Let me lay this out in image form. Maybe it’ll get the point across better.

We build our history based on what is. Not what is not. To that effect, the fact that human progress up to this point had ugly and brutal moments needs to be emphasized.

Human beings aren’t perfect creatures. So when it comes to community cohesion and the interaction of cultures, this is at play. Perfect example of this process is happening right now in this very article. You’re a goddamn fool if you think I wrote this whole essay here perfectly. The first sentence on the first page, followed sequentially by the second and third, onward to the end. In the two months I spent on this, there was a lot of jumping around between the different sections and pages. Hell I didn’t even have the final format as you see it now until at least a month in. Nor did the total entirety of all the thoughts and ideas written here come all at once.

The writing process can be ugly. It definitely was, here. That same description can be said about cooperation between Christians and Islamic communities. In the end, both things look good from the outside. But the journey to that point is filled with late nights, gallons of beer and energy drinks, about 30 cigars, and some trial and error. But in the end a stable, long-lasting relationship between religious communities is established because of the friction. It’s what made social media like Twitter and Facebook fun in the first place.

That’s where personal meaning and value come from. It’s why I stand by all three of my friends in full confidence, and have no problem telling the emotionally barren Home Secretary Amber Rudd where to shove it. There’s freedom in taking such a stance in spite of the strength brought by any opposition. In standing up for my friends, I free myself and my personal convictions too.

Neither Fiyaz Mughal or the United Kingdom government understand this. It’s the exact reason a group with the name “Hope not Hate” can come off having the same sentiments as a Big Mac. You’d be hard-pressed to find something more synthetic and empty as this. Click any of these links to become emotionally tapped into that superficiality.  It’s that same difference between what love is when its used in a Valentine’s Day marketing campaign, in contrast to what love means when you find that one special person who you want to spend the rest of your days living and being with.

With that in mind you can better reflect on the irony of the far-left Anti-fa extremists, who forcibly try and suppress their ideological opposition. Going to the extent of manipulation within the realms of industry and commerce because of it. Likewise it’s how a story such as “Small Town Mayor Forced to Quit for Following Kassam, Steyn, Wilders on Social Media” seems entirely foolish and nonsensical, unless considered through the Left’s obfuscated lens.

Saturation.

There’s a reason why my friend Ian Miles Cheong is evermore happier now than he was three years ago. He was trapped in the doctrine of social justice. Then one day he realized that lifestyle was shallow and disingenuous. The only fundamental change he made that day he decided to give his old ways up was vowing to be authentic. Politics weren’t entirely a factor at all. Rather, having the freedom to choose individual beliefs and opinions for himself, and make up his own mind, was.

There’s a reason why banning guns doesn’t stop mass shootings. Likewise, if the United Nations made universal peace and harmony a law across the globe, they’d be shocked to discover it doesn’t stop wars. If we humored this sort of thought process, the governments of the world would just pass into law an order that the people obey them without question.

The governmental regulation of human emotion is the fast-track road to hell. Its time people “reframe” freedom of speech to not just include the freedom to express yourself, but also the limitations of allowing someone else (UK government) to get offended and deem what’s acceptable or not on your behalf.

One day I’ll have a family. I’ll have kids. The world they grow up in needs to have the same personal freedoms for self-exploration that I was afforded. They deserve to have the opportunity to interact with the world, make mistakes, and deal with conflict. So they can grow up to be strong and stable adults themselves. That’s the meaning of life. To make such a lasting impression on the world as a result and in spite of our differences. My fingers are crossed that I’ll be able to teach my child right from wrong, and not have the state forcibly delegate away that responsibility from me.

So I do what I can for the fight against the anti-fascist fascists too.

Hope not Hate can tell you Martin Sellner is some sort of far-right Nazi. But they can never show you what it’s like praying with Brittany and Nicole at 2 in the morning over Skype while he’s getting rescued off the Mediterranean Sea from a boat Hope not Hate stranded there. They can label Brittany Pettibone as an extremist, but never mention the thoughtful warmth of her sending you something for Christmas. The SPLC can call Lauren Southern an “alt-right dog whistler,” but they can never express the genuine effort she puts into her political documentary projects.

My friends mean the world to me. I can’t tell you how much it broke my damn heart have these wonderful people that have enriched my life beyond measure, get targeted by the flawed system of the United Kingdom.

Things don’t have to be the way they are right now. We don’t need to exist in this hyper political conscious bubble that people like Fiyaz Mughal and the UK government have put our society in. By trying to rid the world of cultural friction, they made the worst conflict of them all. The UK government can’t demand mutual respect between cultures. They can’t force harmony between Islam and the West.  By mandating people get along “or else,” the authorities have created a new kind of intolerance. An unnecessary civil war for our definitions of value.

“If you try to make everything multicultural, you end up with no culture at all.”

More to the point – your cultural heritage and identity aren’t property of the state. They are yours to be proud of. They always and will forever more be property of the people.

The true vision of perfection is self-acceptance of our imperfections. The alternative to that is a road to hell where we find ourselves never satisfied and proud of who we are. I dream of a day where the sanctity of free speech can retire from this war it’s fighting. That time can only come when people take ownership of their values back from the governments that hijacked it away from them. The moment when the definition of hope and change has their authenticity restored, and they’re no longer brand slogans used to manipulate or deceive others on what it means to be good.

This is where we’re at now.

The night before the sentencing trial, Count Dankula had a stream. His girlfriend, who stayed by his side throughout these turbulent years of litigation, was visibly overcome with worry about his lover’s fate.

“You all right?” Dankula asked her.

“No.” she replied.

The Three Stooges

When it comes to the Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, and Martin Sellner UK situation, the responsibilities and blame fall squarely on the shoulders of those at the top of the government authority ladder. Throughout my research on the issues it became clear to me the level of competence on display is on par with The Three Stooges. The situational comedy here falls a bit more flat in comparison, of course. To put this another way, when I look at Amber Rudd, Theresa May, or Sadiq Khan’s various misadventures in government they’ve embarked on? I consider myself blessed and fortunate to be living in the United States. Here, the metaphorical shadow of politicians fumbling around in the dark is much less pronounced. Sure, it still happens. But at least America still has some dignity. The same can’t be said for the country going through a messy divorce with the European Union.

I’ve only gotten around to finishing this page of my research now, after publishing the bulk of my findings, because it seemed more of an add-on that didn’t exactly stay close to the main point I was going for in my UK essay. I decided to finish what I started anyway because it still speaks to the state of affairs with free speech and governance in the United Kingdom.

I felt like something still had to be said too, here. I find it miraculous the UK managed to survive as long as it has. But that’s more a testament to the people’s strength to persevere rather than the incompetence of those in charge.

Guess I didn’t realize things were this bad.

Amber Rudd

She was the Home Secretary in charge of the banning of Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern, and Martin Sellner from the UK. But in the middle of putting this whole essay series together she resigned. The event that set off the calls for Amber Rudd to resign was an internal Home Office memo leaked to the Guardian. The subject is migrant deportation quotas. Something that the Home Office doesn’t have the best history of, seeing as they lost 56,000 foreigners liable for deportation late last year.

Six pages long, saying the department had set “a target of achieving 12,800 enforced returns in 2017-18.” But more importantly, the memo talks about progressing on the “path towards the 10% increased performance on enforced returns, which we promised the home secretary earlier this year.”

That means Amber Rudd knew about it. Which becomes an issue after she told Yvette Cooper of the Home Affairs Select Committee “we do not have targets for removals.”

The memo was prepared by Hugh Ind (director general of the Home Office Immigration Enforcement agency) back in June 2017. Amber Rudd, her immigration minister Brandon Lewis, and several other senior level people were copied into the document. Sources told the Guardian there was no way Amber Rudd didn’t know, as she had set that 10% removal goal herself. It was painful to watch Amber flip-flop in the public eye so recklessly in the days prior to the memo. All she did was dig her own grave in terms of public trust.

Amber Rudd has a past history of misleading her government colleagues. In fact, on the same line of topic in terms of goals/milestones she was responsible for overseeing. When Amber Rudd served the post of Energy Secretary back in November 2015, it came out she misled Parliament when promising the UK was “on course” for their renewable energy target. The letter leaked to The Ecologist revealed that the UK was nearly 25% short of meeting the EU’s renewable energy targets by 2020.

Amber turned in her resignation letter to Theresa May on April 29th 2018. The paper it is written on is dirty and stained. A perfect reflection of her political career.

Let’s explore her decision making a bit, over this past year. To that effect the European migrant issue is a good place to start. On July 3rd 2017, Amber Rudd announced the UK Syrian refugee resettlement program (20,000 migrants brought to Britain by 2020) was going to expand the allowed nationalities. Any Iraqi, Kurdish, or Palestinian caught up in Syria and having to flee again would be welcomed at Britain’s doorstep. Amber said the UN refugee agency’s advice of “more diversity” in regards to quotas is what led her to make the move. Here’s a thought. That migrant return quota that caused Amber Rudd to resign wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place if these “diversity initiatives” like the one just mentioned were pursued to begin with. Same thing applies to terrorism. If you don’t want your cities in Europe to be attacked, curbing migration does wonders on decreasing the chances of that.

In a demonstration of her tone-deafness on terrorism, at the end of July 2017 Amber Rudd made the bold claim that “only terrorists” use encryption. What Rudd says those that are “real people,” would be willing to part with it.  Encryption at its most basic form is a feature of technology that vitalizes the privacy rights of individuals. People have a right to keep to themselves and away from the snooping eyes of websites, law enforcement, and the government.

Here’s what she said for herself:

“Real people often prefer ease of use and a multitude of features to perfect, unbreakable security … Who uses WhatsApp because it is end-to-end encrypted, rather than because it is an incredibly user-friendly and cheap way of staying in touch with friends and family? Companies are constantly making trade-offs between security and ‘usability’, and it is here where our experts believe opportunities may lie.”

The reaction from Rudd’s critics were apt in pointing out that it wasn’t her place to make such statements. From another angle it was also nonsensical that Amber’s strategy would be feasible from a marketing standpoint. If only some apps gave up end-to-end encryption, users would move to a competitor who did offer those options.

On October 3rd 2017, Amber Rudd announced a ban on the sale of acids to anyone under age 18. This was in light of more than 400 attacks that happened in the six months prior. Selling corrosive substances to anyone under the age of 18 would carry six months in prison or a fine, or both. Anyone caught carrying acid could face up to four years in prison, or a fine, or both. Both of these punishments were backed around how the UK government legislated their bans on knives. Also on the 3rd, Amber Rudd announced a law concerning people who repeatedly viewed terrorist content online being punished with up to 15 years in jail.

This is to say, as Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s approach to dealing with extremism and radicalization was the complete removal of content that could offend.

“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law,” said Rudd.

While the Home Office gave their reassurances there’d be wiggle room for people who are curious or click a link by mistake. But when it comes to academics and journalists there’d be contention abound. On a side note, Amber was clearly resentful on how tech companies were treating the demands of politicians like her, calling their attitude “patronising.” What kind of demands was Rudd making? Let’s see. On April 9th 2018, Politico reported on the call to action Amber was making to social media companies in regards to violent crime. She was passing the blame on to someone else, as news got around the internet that London surpassed New York in murder rates. When faced with claims of police cuts causing the problem she was stone-faced in her denial of such a connection. Passing the blame off instead.

“Judge us on our record,” Amber Rudd says.

Well Amber, I am. Your record sucked.

Theresa May

When it comes to the United Kingdom’s problems, there has to be mention of the folks at the top. That means Prime Minister Theresa May. She wouldn’t have been as relevant to the issues of free speech in the UK, if it weren’t for the fact May served as Home Secretary beforehand (from 2010 to 2016).

Let’s take a walk inside Theresa May’s head when it comes to the topic of “defeating extremism.” In this speech from March 2015, we can get a better understanding of the agenda at work here. She makes it clear in her opening remarks that this “completely new counter-extremism strategy” she’s putting forward is in response to not just events in the United Kingdom, but internationally. Her stated aim is to tackle extremism in any form. To that effect, Theresa May’s definition of “British values” contradicts itself in its embracement of particular Western values (regard for the rule of law, participation in and acceptance of democracy, equality, free speech and respect for minorities) while simultaneously asserting that’s possible to incorporate in a pluralistic fashion (multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-religious).

“Islamist extremists believe in a clash of civilisations. They promote a fundamental incompatibility between Islamic and Western values, an inevitable divide between “them and us”. They demand a caliphate, or a new Islamic state, governed by a harsh interpretation of Shari’a law. They utterly reject British and Western values, including democracy, the rule of law, and equality between citizens, regardless of their gender, ethnicity, religion or sexuality. They believe that it’s impossible to be a good Muslim and a good British citizen. And they dismiss anybody who disagrees with them – including other Muslims – as “kafirs”, or non-believers. We must always take care to distinguish between Islam – a major world religion followed peacefully by the overwhelming majority of one billion Muslims worldwide – and Islamist extremism. Islam is entirely compatible with British values and our national way of life, while Islamist extremism is not – and we must be uncompromising in our response to it.”

In the face of the government’s battle with hate crime, Theresa May props up Community Security Trust to contend with antisemitism, along with TellMAMA when it comes to anti-Muslim attacks. The UK government’s approach is to build relationships with civil society organizations that they believe serve as an extension to their overall goals.

A further review of Theresa May’s actions as Home Secretary serves as supporting evidence of her political goals. Such as accusing Edward Snowden of “damaging national security” when he revealed how intimate the access is for GCHQ to people’s emails and messages thanks to their relationship with the NSA. While Theresa had strong words on her “toughness” towards illegal migrants, the programs she put in place only resulted with 11 people having to leave country. The usual passing-the-blame game for failing on mass migration cuts ensued within the cabinet later on in May’s tenure. Theresa outsourced explaining to the public why she couldn’t keep her promises to her immigration minister James Brokenshire.

The Guardian article on the topic isn’t exactly flattering.

“Her six years at the Home Office were marked by an instinctive secrecy, a talent for “going missing” or delegating when things went wrong, and a too careless approach to civil liberties.”

The brass balls on display by Theresa May in her speech at the Police Federation Conference in May 2014 was a turning point for the police of Britain. Her remarks were harsh on topics like “stop and search” and other perceived public failures. May wasn’t afraid to lay blame to more than “a few bad apples.” She went full blanket, vowing to break the power of the police union. It was disrespectful enough to cast a long spell of silence over the audience. 36 organizational reforms were shoved down the federation’s throat under threat that “change” would come. Whether they all liked it or not. Attendees were kind in calling Theresa May a “bully” afterward, giving the tyrannical malice forced by her hand.

Where this leads in terms of policies came to be known in August 2014. That’s when she wrote her outline for the future in regards to the fight against extremism. Syria’s collapse and the emergence of ISIS groups made it clear that the threat of the Middle East was evolving. By this point already, 500 British citizens traveled to Syria and Iraq, joining terror organizations. Already at that point, May had “toughened” the Royal Prerogative rules. Giving the Government powers to remove passports from British citizens if there’s reason able to believe they’re traveling abroad for nefarious purposes. But the threat of homegrown extremism within Britain’s borders served as another task ahead. To tackle “radicalisation,” Theresa May was: tightening up the rules surrounding charities and the powers vested to the Charity Commission, working closer with Ofcom to stop “extremist broadcasts,” and improving relations on the issue with schools, prisons, and universities. This meant the UK government was re-evaluating the PREVENT program and enacting measures to make sure they don’t work with organizations that “don’t share British values.”

But most importantly, the lines were getting tighter over their attack vector. Offline and online.

“Dealing with terrorism and extremism will require continued commitment and international collaboration. Since I was made Home Secretary, I have constantly made the case for legislation to ensure the police and security services have access to the communications data they need, for example. And when it comes to preventing radicalisation, I want us to build on the work of the Extremism Task Force, which was set up following the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby last year. The Government will therefore make Prevent a statutory duty for public bodies; I am looking again at the case for new banning orders for extremist groups that fall short of the legal threshold for terrorist proscription, as well as for new civil powers to target extremists who seek to radicalise others.”

So as you can see, it was Theresa May that made PREVENT evolve into more of a legal obligation.

In April 2015 Theresa May promised attacks on Muslims would become a specific hate crime if the Tories would win the upcoming election. That is to say – it was indeed a move in order to score the Islam vote. Even at this early stage, TellMAMA was positioned as the go-to entity for approval in this regard. They praised the decision. Especially in light of the information sharing agreement the group signed with police forces in the previous month.

If the implicit political moves Theresa May took against police in May 2014 (befitting of only a dictator) weren’t enough? In May 2015 Theresa worked hard to remove any doubts of her totalitarian soul. She proposed counter-extremism powers that’d allow vetting for programs from British Broadcasters. To put it more simply, it was a plan to check TV shows for extremist content and have British authorities censor out what they thought went “too far.” I’ll say it plain and clear. This is generally considered to be a red-flag of Totalitarianism. The fact that Theresa May felt so little about stifling freedom of speech here should raise your eyebrows. You should be thankful that the former culture secretary Sajid Javid wrote a letter to David Cameron telling him how tone-dead Theresa May was being here. One of his laid-out concerns to Cameron in particular was the difficulty the UK government had in defining extremism. With that in mind, in the same article, it says May had plans to require the Home Office “extremism analysis unit” to dictate for the first time in particular which individuals or organizations the public sector should or shouldn’t interact with.

“This will make sure nobody unwittingly lends legitimacy or credibility to extremists or extremist organisations.” said Thought Leader Theresa May, before setting ablaze the grave of George Orwell.

By the 3rd of December 2017, it became clear that Theresa May goofed up rolling out her social policies. Alan Milburn (former Labour cabinet minister and chair of the government social mobility commission) announced his social mobility team was walking away from their duties over “lack of political leadership.”

Alan wrote a scathing resignation letter to the Prime Minister:

“I do not doubt your personal belief in social justice, but I see little evidence of that being translated into meaningful action. The need for political leadership in this area has never been more pressing. Whole communities and parts of Britain are being left behind economically and hollowed out socially. The growing sense that we have become an ‘us and them’ society is deeply corrosive of our cohesion as a nation. The 20th-century expectation that each generation would do better than the last is no longer being met. At a time when more and more people are feeling that Britain is becoming more unfair rather than less, social mobility matters more than ever.”

I couldn’t have phrased the sentiments better myself. Mr. Milburn hits the nail on the head of the overarching problem going on, in the administrative and political sense. When he says the government “does not seem to have the necessary bandwidth to ensure the rhetoric of healing social division is matched with the reality,” he means Theresa May is all talk, no walk.

Alan wasn’t alone in his thoughts. The former integration tsar Dame Louise Casey came out two days later, criticizing the UK government for doing “absolutely nothing” in regards to community cohesion for one full year after her report on their failure to address it.

Sadiq Khan

Sadiq Khan is the Mayor of London currently. The sanitized version he provides in terms of his background comes from this website of his. Our first Muslim Mayor of London was born locally. His parents migrated from Pakistan in the 1960s and got relatively sufficient work and living conditions to raise a family with. Backed by a state-school education, Khan’s political career took hold in 2005 when he was elected MP for Tooting.  It should come as no surprise, given the earlier topics highlighted in this paper, that Sadiq Khan’s first ministerial post was to the spot of Minister for Community Cohesion. Much like Fiyaz Mughal and Shahid Malik, Sadiq Khan also had a hand in the shaping of UK government policies in regards to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. After a stint as the Minister of Transport, Sadiq Khan found himself taking lead in the Labour Party’s 2015 General Election campaign for London.

There’s a rather important part to the history of Sadiq Khan, though. One that gets glossed over in his personal biography.

“As a human rights lawyer, I defended people who were discriminated against, and ended up helping run a firm of 50 employees. I saw first-hand the impact discrimination can have on people’s lives – and this has made me determined to fight it wherever I see it.”

There’s a bit more… nuance to it than that. It’s important to come at this issue by first understanding the significance of Sadiq Khan’s background in law. It’s something that the BBC’s sanitized biographical profile on him manages to do more justice to than Khan himself can. He studied law at University of North London, getting straight to work as a trainee solicitor under the guidance of human rights lawyer Louise Christian in 1994. The BBC tip-toes around this part of Khan’s life carefully, electing to play up his courtroom conflicts with Met police especially.

Point here being when it comes to officialism in sourcing, the BBC is reliable in setting the career foundation for Sadiq Khan’s controversial ties.

The political baggage of Sadiq Khan is a thick chunk of history to contend with. It’s remarkable. Each article that explores the subject has its own contributions thrown into the mix, adding to a very damning stack of life choices. A fairly significant element of Khan’s debacle here is the fact he served as chair on the Muslim Council of Britain’s Legal Affairs Committee. A job and position that obliges one to advocate on behalf of the MCB’s interests in light of trouble with UK law. For an entity that acts as one of Britain’s biggest Islamic groups. While Sadiq Khan made his transition from law to politician after exiting the MCB by 2004, it’s still worth mentioning revelations in regards to the MCB made afterward. 

In doing so it gets to the heart of the matter a bit. It’s easy to find yourself lost in the various strands of stories and rumors surrounding Sadiq’s hey-day. But by grounding yourself with the context that Khan was the legal person behind the Muslim Council of Britain? It puts it all into perspective here.

It took years for the UK government to acknowledge the issues surrounding MCB. In their December 2010 investigation, the authorities claimed that there wasn’t sufficient evidence to back the allegations brought forward against the Muslim Aid charity (which was founded by members of the MCB).  At the time, the organization’s connections to funding Hamas and other dubious groups were brought into question (see the earlier section on Shahid Malik for more on that). Andrew Gilligan provided one of the best rebuttals you’ll find out there in terms of pointing to direct evidence on the matter. He hits home the point that the UK government acted in willful ignorance by ignoring nearly all of the allegations against Muslim Aid, and hamfisting the investigation in a way that allowed the illusion of being cleared and absolved of wrongdoing. But the stall tactics by authorities didn’t last too long. By 2014 Muslim Aid came under fire once more when it was revealed there were “irregularities” on their part. Seeing as how the group got £1,263,000 in UK government Gift Aid, the Charity Commission felt it was prudent to investigate the matter.

The grand slam connecting the Muslim Council of Britain to extremism came in December 2015. On the 17th, the UK government released a report that point to the Muslim Council of Britain having links with the Muslim Brotherhood. To be clear here, the review says Muslim Brotherhood supporters “played an important role in establishing and then running” the MCB and other organizations.

The Times article discussing these connections (behind a paywall so here’s a full copy) demonstrate why the Muslim Brotherhood is a bad thing to be connected to.

“The Brotherhood, a movement that views western society as corrupting and “inherently hostile to Muslim interests”, has exerted “significant influence” on the MCB, the Muslim Association of Britain and “Britain’s largest Muslim student organisation”, understood to be the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (Fosis).”

Despite the best efforts at sweeping the issue under the rug, the Muslim Council of Britain’s involvement with extremist groups could no longer be ignored. The ties between the UK government and the MCB were slashed back in 2009 after the group signed a document condoning violence against any country that supported a Gaza arms blockade.

Sadiq Khan was the lawyer for the Muslim Council of Britain. There. Is. No. Way. He. Was. Not. Aware. Of. These. Ties. Someone in Khan’s position is privy to confidential information and given intimate access to the organization’s innermost secrets. In the end, Sadiq thought the best course of action as someone in his position was go into politics.

A lot of Sadiq Khan’s controversial ties came out during the final stretch of his campaign for Mayor, and thus didn’t get the full air of objectivity and overall public attention it deserves. With that in mind, the most effective approach to this discussion is by looking not at what the adversaries have claimed. What about Khan’s sympathizers?

In an apparent defense of Sadiq Khan, Maajid Nawaz penned an article for The Daily Beast. Nawaz’s first-hand account is the closest thing to a counterargument on Khan’s behalf that exists. One that was made conveniently after Khan’s Mayor campaign victory. Their connection is Khan served as Maajid’s lawyer back in 2002 while captive as an “Islamist political prisoner in Egypt,” according to Nawaz.

The crux of Maajid’s argument is here:

“Sadiq Khan is no Muslim extremist. And it is not only his track record voting for gay rights that proves this. Having known him when I was a Muslim extremist, I know that he did not subscribe to my then-theocratic views.”

Nawaz makes it clear from the outset that scrutinizing Sadiq Khan’s history is just as important as any other person in such a career position. The facts are laid bare here. Khan’s brother-in-law Makbool Javaid served as a spokesguy for the al-Muhajiroun terror group. By 2003 Khan had popped up in the London Islamist social sphere. Seen at conferences with the likes of al-Muhajiroun’s Sajeel Abu Ibrahim (who ran a Pakistani camp that trained 7/7 bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan). The hypocrisy of which is astounding when considering that in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings Sadiq Khan participated in an open letter to Tony Blair blaming foreign policy for the tragedy. By 2004 Sadiq Khan was coming to the defense of characters like the Muslim Brotherhood cleric Dr. Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Sadiq argued to the House of Commons, as chair of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Legal Affairs Committee, that Qaradawi (author of a book titled The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, which argues in favor of wife beating) wasn’t an extremist. Qaradawi would later be denied entry to the UK after issuing a fatwa that advocated in favor of suicide bombings against Israeli citizens.

“Why is it OK for a mayor to have shared panels with all manner of Muslim extremists, while actively distancing himself from, and smearing counter-extremist Muslims?” is a central question presented by Nawaz.

One would expect Sadiq Khan to take a unilateral approach for the entire Muslim faith. That it’d be beneath him to exploit the inner feuds within the Islamic sects and community. But that’s exactly what Sadiq Khan did. He “gamed” the community cohesion system in a grab for power.

Hats off to Maajid Nawaz for going over this in his article. It’s more indicative of the type of character Sadiq Khan is, with reflection on his actions. When 2010 rolled around, Khan’s re-election in Tooting had him facing off against a Liberal Democrat named Nasser Butt. Nasser was also a Muslim. But the difference between Khan and Nasser was their sects of Sunni and Ahmadi, respectively. By exploiting the built-in societal bias against Ahmadi Muslims, Khan created enough of an inter-wedge to secure his victory.

Let me remind you that these past behaviors were highlighted by someone who has all means of reason for being lenient when it comes to discussing Sadiq Khan’s past. This was brought up by someone who has more personal weight in Sadiq’s favor.

It raises questions about Sadiq Khan’s authenticity. How important are human rights values to someone who took part in a political meeting with Islamic extremists that mandated the segregation of ladies to a different entrance upon arrival?

Doesn’t seem very western to do that sort of thing.

All in all this echoes the divisiveness seen in the wake of Sadiq Khan’s campaign trail. The political values and morals therein which bleed through to his tenure as Mayor of London.

Sadiq Khan was one of the voices speaking out that Amber Rudd needed to resign in light of the Windrush scandal.

“Latest revelations have exposed Amber Rudd even further as someone who appears completely unaware about what is going on in her own department. It frankly beggars belief. What the home secretary and prime minister don’t appear to understand is that the Windrush scandal is the direct consequence of their policies and not just another example of the administrative chaos at the Home Office. It is about a generation who have lived all their lives here suddenly feeling they are not wanted here. Rather than hiding behind process or blaming civil servants yet again, the time has now surely come for the home secretary to resign.”

But Sadiq was nicer to Amber Rudd in that regard, in comparison to the demands for Ken Livingstone’s resignation he pushed the very next day. This came in light of Livingstone calling Hitler a Zionist. Apparently statements like that are grounds for suspension from the Labour party because they see that as anti-Semitism. One could argue ex-mayor Livingstone’s situation seemed more urgent in the eyes of Sadiq Khan than what was going with the Home Secretary all the meanwhile. When taking into account other occasions Sadiq has suggested politicians resign (like Boris Johnston in November 2017 over some side-comments), it becomes clear the meaning of the word resign has less weight when it comes out of Khan’s mouth.

Something that will stick to Sadiq Khan’s legacy forever is when he said the threat of terror attacks were “part and parcel of living in a great global city.” He wasn’t speaking about London in particular when giving that line in September 2016, but it would haunt his career in the months that followed.

In short? “Do as I say, not as I do” is the best way to sum up Sadiq Khan.

It’s worth pointing out that Sadiq was criticized for focusing on this fast food initiative in the midst of a knife crime epidemic sweeping London. Khan’s tale is also one about where he devotes his attention. In 2018, the potential for misplacing that came into focus. In January already there was a row where Conservative assembly member Shaun Bailey had a hard time getting a straight answer out of Khan, when pressed on the knife crime issue.

Bailey said to Khan:

“Mayor Khan, let me quite clear to you. This is not an attack. We had 85 young people die. I’m trying to help you understand that many people, like myself, who have been youth workers who don’t see a cohesive approach. That’s why I am saying it. I’m asking you discretely, I’m asking you a clear question. What will be different under your approach to what went before to stem the flow? We look at your knife crime strategy and I don’t see a cohesive approach.”

“Well that’s a speech followed by a question, but I’ll wait for the speech to end,” Khan snapped back.

“Just answer the question, Mayor. What’s going to be different? There’s your question.”

When faced with the realities of the people’s needs, Khan has a harder time embracing that. In comparison to his personal agenda goals anyway. Sometimes that clashed. See the comparison between what Sadiq Khan promised when it came to stop-and-search policies compared to what he ended up having to actually do with stop-and-search policies.

A noteworthy highlight of Sadiq Khan’s tenure as Mayor so far is his relationship with US President Donald Trump.  The feud between the two started from the Muslim ban proposed by Trump in December 2015 in light of the San Bernardino shooting. Many see that as an early standout of Trump’s campaign trail pledges and promises. His rationale at the time for proposing a ban of Muslims entering US borders was the threat to safety Jihadi extremism posed to the American people. The extensive blanket nature of Trump’s proposal would of course be challenged once he came into office. But what’s important here is the Islam vs. West theme Donald brought to the forefront of the public eye back then. It’s something Sadiq Kahn would certainly remember.

On May 7th 2016, when Sadiq Khan became Mayor of London, he mentioned Donald Trump in some of his first public remarks. The majority of Khan’s words are the usual jargon about upholding public trust you’d come to expect out of any politician of any stripe in the West these days. The usual rhetoric promises about upholding diversity and equality throughout all sections of society, that the Labour party would usher in the people to a Utopian era.

It was towards the tail end of this Observer piece, when criticizing campaign opponents, that Sadiq called Trump out by name:

“They used fear and innuendo to try to turn different ethnic and religious groups against each other – something straight out of the Donald Trump playbook. Londoners deserved better and I hope it’s something the Conservative party will never try to repeat.”

Of course, Sadiq Khan wasn’t aware Donald Trump was going to win the 2016 Presidential Elections. He prepared for it though. In an interview with TIME magazine he did a few days later, Khan said he was going to meet with U.S. mayors ahead of time in order to work around the possibility of a Donald Trump win. This was in light of the Muslim ban proposal Trump had set out months earlier.

The topic of religious extremism was central to the interview as well. Khan called himself the antidote to it.

“But clearly, being someone who is a Muslim brings with it experiences that I can use in relation to dealing with extremists and those who want to blow us up. And so it’s really important that I use my experiences to defeat radicalization and extremism. What I think the election showed was that actually there is no clash of civilization between Islam and the West. I am the West, I am a Londoner, I’m British, I’m of Islamic faith, Asian origin, Pakistan heritage, so whether it’s [ISIS] or these others who want to destroy our way of life and talk about the West, they’re talking about me. What better antidote to the hatred they spew than someone like me being in this position?”

When asked about the points brought up by Conservatives during the campaign, Khan made it clear he faced fatwa campaigns routinely from traditional Muslims too.

It’s that sort of nuance that would come into effect when circling back around to the clash between Sadiq Khan and Donald Trump. It was this very interview that would later cause Trump to respond directly. Donald said he was happy that London elected their first Muslim mayor with Sadiq Khan, and clarified he’d be among the exceptions to his proposed ban. But Khan snapped back at this response. He wasn’t too big of a fan of it. In a statement to AP, Sadiq replied “Donald Trump’s ignorant view of Islam could make both our countries less safe — it risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of the extremists.”

A rivalry was born. One that happened to play right into the hands of the political climate we see surrounding Fiyaz Mughal’s work. When Trump came into office, he and Sadiq would have their back and forth battles.

As January 2018 rolled around, the Trump/Khan war continued. President Trump ended up cancelling a trip he had scheduled for London in February as a response to the notion that the Obama Administration sold the best embassy location in London for “peanuts.” Sadiq’s sassy response stated outright that the visit was arranged by Theresa May. He claimed that Donald Trump’s visit to the city of London would’ve been met by protests. It’s clear by now that Sadiq didn’t like Donald Trump. With that in mind, you can imagine the look on Khan’s face the next one of his speeches got disrupted by right-wing protesters.

He couldn’t get rid of Donald that easy, either. In late April 2018 it was announced Trump is going to visit the UK in July. Sadiq couldn’t keep his comments to himself here, of course. Khan tweeted out something that swings us back around to the topic of free speech.

Recall that I said earlier that Sadiq Khan was slow on the horse when it came to tackling knife crime this past year. The reality of it right now is one week we’ve got an article (this one from May 11th) talking about how misplaced Sadiq Khan’s priorities are by focusing on this junk food advertisement ban despite the recent wave of stabbing violence in London. Next week on May 18th? A story pops up that another person was stabbed to death in the city.

It seems cut and dry on that basis alone but there’s a bit more complexity to it. Yes, Sadiq Khan eventually got off his butt and actually got more active in dealing with the knife attack epidemic problem. But was it too little, too late? Was it possible that Sadiq could’ve quashed the knife crime wave if he acted sooner? What was Khan doing elsewhere that distracted him from the immediate problems London was facing?

The answer to that is hate speech. Sadiq Khan spent a considerable amount of his valuable time as London’s Mayor speaking out against the terrors of online activity. On March 12th 2018, he posted a video where he read off mean tweets people sent his way online.

Below are the tweets read in Sadiq’s video. I am simply quoting them. These are other people’s words and not my own. However I took the liberty of tracking down where the tweets came from. I managed to find most of them, save one (number six came from a suspended account apparently).

1. “Am I the only one who thinks @sadiqkhan looks like a pigeon?”
2. “@Sadiqkhan looks like a sparrow.”
3. “@sadiqkhan looks like a really shit stunt double for Jose Mourinho.”
4. “I say KILL the Mayor of London and you will be rid of ONE Muslim Terrorist” (signs point to an American being behind this account)
5. “Muslims need to be shot or hanged!! The mayor is doing nothing about attacks.” (came from some guy in Los Angeles)
6. “Muslims have no dignity. I wish Sadiq Khan would just blow himself up like they all do. He might get his 12 virgins.” (mentioned here)
7. “@MayorofLondon I wish someone would build a fire and throw you on it you useless sack of shit.”
8. “if you use a knife to mutilate your daughter’s vagina will the full force of the law be brought down on you? Asking for a Muslim.” (this one has two sources, which we’ll go over)
9. “There’s an easy solution for terrorism. Deport the Muslims. Starting with your pathetic self.” (some guy from Florida tweeted this one)

The second half of the video has Sadiq explaining he’s concerned about minority children see these sorts of tweets online. In addition, he expresses his woes about “young girls and women who have been driven from these” social media platforms and somehow bringing gender equality backwards.

There’s irony in Sadiq’s words. Seeing how one of the tweets came from a vocal, politically-active woman in the Muslim community. But that’ll become clear later.

For now let’s assess these tweets themselves. There’s a necessity for scrutiny and doubts, seeing as in the recent past Sadiq Khan faked tweets in one of his anti-knife crime campaigns. So from nine cherry-picked tweets, we can whittle it down to six based on the fact the first three are throwaway jokes. We can narrow it down to three after taking location into consideration. TellMAMA doesn’t count tweets from America in their “anti-Muslim incident” statistics, so we can use that same principle here. 

Three tweets is what we’re left with. One from a suspended account, another from a random UK taxi driver. That brings us back to the eighth tweet in the list. The thing about that particular tweet mentioning genital mutilation is CONTEXT. More significantly here than anywhere else in that list of tweets Khan prattled off.  To put it simply, the original tweet came from Shazia Hobbs. However the London government’s Twitter account cited a later tweet from a different account that used the exact same wording to that effect. Both tweets were directed toward Sadiq Khan, regardless.

No matter how much they’ll try and deny this, Sadiq Khan used what Shazia Hobbs said to him as something that should be branded as “hateful.”  Who is Shazia Hobbs? She’s someone who survived and escaped from a forced Sharia marriage.

“My experience of it was part of life. I was beaten because he could, and he didn’t need to tell me he had this right under Sharia. It was normal — same as the forced marriage was normal and part of life. I had witnessed others getting forced into a marriage and so when my turn came I went along with it. At first I did protest but soon shut up when I realised protesting was not going to help me. I left him after three years and for that my father and the entire Pakistani community disowned me; I was no longer welcome and had to make a new life in the ‘white’ community. When all you have known is the Pakistani community trying to fit into a different community is hard.”

Now here Shazia Hobbs was, thrown into the blanket definition of what a modern “hater” is in the eyes of the Left. Face-to-face with an uncaring Mayor that doesn’t care how many people get stepped on, in the long march to this political correctness utopia he envisions. So you won’t hear about stories like Shazia’s. Just the usual haze of idealistic nonsense.

At the end of the day we’re left with a London situation that looks like this. If everything else didn’t matter in this case, here would be that exception. “London one of worst capitals in Europe for clean, safe transport, study shows” in big bold print.

Now. Whose fault is that? The product of Sadiq Khan’s work matters much much more than the media circlejerk surrounding him (TIME named him one of the top 100 most influential people), or the perception the public has. No matter how low that might sink.