Harry's Place

This is a cross-post from UK Media Watch

Fraser, in his Aug. 17th column, faults Israel’s prime minister for his three-day delay in condemning the antisemitism inCharlottesville, which he contextualises by citing a recent interview on Israeli TV with Richard Spencer, a Charlottesville hate rally leader. During the interview, Spencer compared his white supremacist ideology to Jewish nationalism.

Fraser comments on it thusly:

Speaking on Israel’s Channel 2 News on Wednesday, the alt-right’s Richard Spencer, one of the leaders of the Charlottesville rally, gave an astonishing example of this “antisemites for Israel” philosophy. “Jews are vastly over-represented in what you would call ‘the establishment’ and white people are being dispossessed from this country,” he said of the US. Yet he continued: “An Israeli citizen, someone who has a sense of nationhood and peoplehood, and the history and experience of the Jewish people, you should respect someone like me who has analogue feelings about whites. You could say I am a white Zionist – in the sense that I care about my people, I want us to have a secure homeland for us and ourselves. Just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”

Fraser then insinuates that Spencer may have a point:

This is staggering stuff. Richard Spencer is the man who chanted “Heil Trump” during a Washington rally. His followers responded with the Nazi salute. Praise from a man mired in the worst sort of antisemitism should prompt soul-searching on the right of Israel’s political establishment. These are not admirers that they should want.

This is beyond disingenuous.

First, imagine the reaction of Fraser, who’s an outspoken Jeremy Corbyn supporter, if he and others within the British far-left were asked to “search their souls” when, last year, former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (another white supremacist leader who spoke in Charlottesville) praised the Labour Party leader for his ‘brave’ opposition to Zionism.

Moreover, the suggestion that Spencer, who has quoted Nazi propaganda and refused to denounce Adolf Hitler for murdering six million Jews (1:46 of this video), truly “admires” the Jewish state is absurd.  Spencer wants the US to be a ‘racially pure’ white European state, and has previously said he doesn’t consider Jews to be European.  So, this ‘support’ for Zionism – if it exists – is likely utilitarian: his goal of an all-white US would be advanced by non-racially pure American Jews fleeing en masse to Israel.

Fraser continues:

More shocking, some concede that Spencer and his like have reason to find common cause with some of Israel’s outer political fringes. As the former PM Ehud Barak said of Charlottesville: “You can’t say you don’t see things here that bear a certain similarity – when you look at the Lehava demonstrations or La Familia activity, or the ranting against journalists covering Netanyahu investigations.”

Lehava is an acronym of the Hebrew for “Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land”. It is especially against mixed marriages (like mine) between Israeli Jews and non-Jews. And it also wants to rid Israel of Christianity. La Familia are fans of the Beitar Jerusalem football team. A few months ago I went to see them playing an Israeli Arab team from Galilee, Bnei Sakhnin – though the Sakhnin fans were not allowed into the ground. My remedial Hebrew was not enough to make out what they were singing to the rows of empty seats opposite. “We are going to burn your village down,” was how my friend translated it.

As you can see, Fraser’s ‘evidence’ to support his suggestion of an overlap between “right-wing” Zionism and US-style white supremacism is practically non-existent. It consists of one quote from a former prime minister (desperate to stay politically relevant) citing some racist football fans and one marginal extremist group which has been condemned by political leaders from across the Israeli political spectrum.

Fraser concludes:

Barak is right, the parallels with Charlottesville are sometimes difficult to avoid. And the problem everywhere with these outer fringes is that they are getting less and less outer. Frightening, isn’t it?

The only conclusion “difficult to avoid” is that Fraser seems to salivate at every opportunity to demonise Israel, even if he has to legitimise the sophistry of a white supremacist to do so.

It amazes me that just as the dust settles from Nazi jackboots marching through Charlottesville Virginia articles about Israel keep popping up. From New York’s Jewish Daily Forward to the UK’s Guardian articles have appeared that start off talking about the Far Right going after the Jews of American and then veer off course to talk about Israel.

Weird?

Well not especially, everything seems to be about Israel, whether you’re on the extreme right wing fringe of the United States or on the centre left website The Guardian. Over in the USA I would have expected Naomi Dann who works for Jewish Voice for Peace to be writing about the need for her fellow Americans to band together with the Jewish community to fight the threat posed to all of them by domestic fascism. Instead she looks at the situation and decides to write a scathing article about Israel. She writes that;

The most promising solution to anti-Semitism lies in building relationships and coalitions, recognizing how our freedoms are bound up together with those of people who have fewer rights than us, and having those difficult conversations when conflicts arise.

The ignorance as to the challenges Nazism posed to Jews in Germany in the 1930s is staggering. According to a study published in the American Economic Review in 2013 intermarriage between Jews and non Jews in Germany in 1932 stood at 65.1%. German Jews were certainly “building relationships”. It didn’t help much when the time came. What did help stamp out fascism, at least in the USA at the time, were Jewish criminals armed with baseball bats attending rallies of the German American Bund.

Most bizarrely Dann’s comment about unity comes at the end of an article she must know will cause fissures among the very Jews currently reeling from the attack on them. Way to go.

Over the pond in the United Kingdom Giles Frazer writes in the Guardian that;

Actually they’re really easy to avoid when you’re the one who’s making them. Just don’t make them. I hear there are some big parallels with the Far Right in Italy also but no one seems to be talking about that… I shouldn’t be surprised much less hurt that when Nazis march in Virginia people feel the need to talk about Israel’s far right in Israel. But I am. Particularly when I read this from Dann;

A few months ago, Spencer stunned a rabbi at an event in Texas when he said: “Do you really want radical inclusion into the State of Israel? And by that I mean radical inclusion. Maybe all of the Middle East could go move into Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Would you really want that?”

The rabbi didn’t have an answer and he’s not the only one.

Again Dann might need to check her history. Not only would we want to live happily with our Arab neighbours, bring down the borders of statehood and forego sovereignty entirely but our grandfathers and great grandfathers didn’t bother with a state for a couple of thousand years. The result was a couple of thousand years of living at the mercy of whatever group happened to be in charge at the time.

My own country the UK has just voted to commit economic suicide to avoid having Europeans (mostly white I might add) coming and living in its neighbourhoods. The Scots were a whisker away from ruining their own economy by voting to leave the United Kingdom. The desire for homeland is a strong one among all peoples. Some need a home more than others. Tell the Kurds they shouldn’t have a country of their own right now, tell the Yazidis that having a country based on ethnicity is racist and offensive to your moral code and see what they have say about it.

Again though I can’t say I’m surprised. Ever since the British parliament decided it was too moral to prevent genocide in Syria by bombing the people carrying it out the writing’s been on the wall for the morality of the so called ‘left’. This is the wonder brought to us by a generation that has been brought up to think that whoever their enemies are there must be a moral equivalence involved. If someone wants to kill Jews then Jews must have done something to make them angry, if someone is attacking Americans then Americans must have bought oil or supplied arms to the wrong people. this kind of thinking is precisely the reason our societies stand so deflated, demoralised and uncertain.

The truth is that Spencer compared himself to a Zionist because he knew people like Dann and Frazer would jump all over it and start blaming Israel for something…anything. His own people hate the Jews regardless of anything he says and Dann and Frazer and too many others will look for any fodder allowing them to write something critical of the Jewish state.

To them I say simply that Nazis marching in Charlottesville has nothing to do with Israel.

Deal with it.

Can you guess by which of the two sides (to which President Trump has assigned approximately equal blame) Charlottesville’s Jews felt more endangered?

Alan Zimmerman, president of Congregation Beth Israel, writes:

On Saturday morning, I stood outside our synagogue with the armed security guard we hired after the police department refused to provide us with an officer during morning services. (Even the police department’s limited promise of an observer near our building was not kept — and note, we did not ask for protection of our property, only our people as they worshipped).

Forty congregants were inside. Here’s what I witnessed during that time.

For half an hour, three men dressed in fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood across the street from the temple. Had they tried to enter, I don’t know what I could have done to stop them, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them, either. Perhaps the presence of our armed guard deterred them. Perhaps their presence was just a coincidence, and I’m paranoid. I don’t know.

Several times, parades of Nazis passed our building, shouting, “There’s the synagogue!” followed by chants of “Seig Heil” and other anti-Semitic language. Some carried flags with swastikas and other Nazi symbols.

A guy in a white polo shirt walked by the synagogue a few times, arousing suspicion. Was he casing the building, or trying to build up courage to commit a crime? We didn’t know. Later, I noticed that the man accused in the automobile terror attack wore the same polo shirt as the man who kept walking by our synagogue; apparently it’s the uniform of a white supremacist group. Even now, that gives me a chill.

When services ended, my heart broke as I advised congregants that it would be safer to leave the temple through the back entrance rather than through the front, and to please go in groups.

This is 2017 in the United States of America.

Please read it all.

Update: For those who seem determined to minimize what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday, or to change the subject.

These are not very fine people.

Further update: As I’ve noted before, the most trenchant commentary on Trump is coming from appalled conservatives (RINOs and cucks to some). Here is Rich Lowry, editor of The National Review:

Over the past few days, Trump hasn’t spoken as the leader of the country, or even leader of one party, but as a leader of an inflamed faction. In general, Trump’s news conference was a tour de force of whataboutism, one of the most important rhetorical tools of the pro-Trump internet. The ‘alt-right’ marched on Charlottesville? Well, what about the ‘alt-left’? Robert E. Lee’s statue is coming down. Well, what about George Washington? … [They] were used, as whataboutism so often is, as cover for Trump’s failings and to obscure rather than sharpen distinctions. Charlottesville highlights how the problem with Trump is not the crudity of his expression. This, at times, can be part of his charm and makes him a distinctively powerful communicator. It’s the crudity of thought and feeling.”

After dutifully reading off a teleprompter on Monday, President Trump on Tuesday said what he really thinks about the awful events in Charlottesville– assigning moral equivalence to the white nationalists and the counter-protesters, with somewhat more blame placed on the latter.

His latest comments have drawn a number of reactions.

From Republican Senator Marco Rubio:

The organizers of events which inspired & led to #charlottesvilleterroristattack are 100% to blame for a number of reasons. 1/6

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) August 15, 2017

From neo-Nazi David Duke:

Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville & condemn the leftist terrorists in BLM/Antifa https://t.co/tTESdV4LP0

— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) August 15, 2017

When Marco Rubio is challenging you head-on, and David Duke is praising you, something is dreadfully wrong.

And there’s this from Democratic Senator Brian Schatz:

As a Jew, as an American, as a human, words cannot express my disgust and disappointment. This is not my President.

— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) August 15, 2017

Hagai El-Ad is the Executive Director of B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom. The pair sat down earlier this year for an in-depth discussion. What does El-Ad think has been the impact of the occupation not just on the Palestinians but on Israeli democracy and society? Why does B’Tselem insist that the occupation is a human rights issue? How does he understand the relationship between politics and human rights? How does he respond to the storm of criticism of B’Tselem from the Israeli Right? Why did he decide to make a speech against Israeli settlement policy to the UN in 2016, prompting the Israeli prime minister to say he had joined the ‘chorus of mudslinging’ against Israel? What is B’Tselem’s report card on Israeli democracy? READ HERE.

In April 2017 the social democratic German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel decided to meet with Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem, two Israeli NGOs, while he was visiting Israel. He did so knowing that this would result in the Israeli prime minster refusing to meet with him. Self-confessed Israeli ‘leftist’ Gadi Taub examines the political meaning of ‘the Gabriel Affair’. Why did the prime minister make it a matter of ‘B’Tselem or me’ and was he right to do so? How should Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem be characterised – as legitimate human rights organisations or as demonisers of the State of Israel? And what should be the proper relationship between human rights advocacy and the unresolved national question in Israel and Palestine? READ HERE.

As you may have seen, Anne Marie Waters’ leadership candidacy has been confirmed by UKIP’s NEC.  I’ve noticed more than one liberal commentator claiming that she has changed greatly over the past few years.  I think the degree of change has been overestimated – and also think that this impulse to overstate the shift in her views reflects the difficulties facing people (including some who defended AMW vigorously back in 2013) when trying to negotiate the boundary between liberal secular values and bigotry.  Maybe it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that you didn’t spot a problem initially. The danger isn’t just in crossing the line from liberalism to anti-Muslim sentiment – as many would say Waters has done.  If you steer too clear of it you may be falling into a parallel problem: becoming an apologist for Islamism, glossing over genuine concerns – and fuelling the far right in the process.  The grooming gang issue provides a clear example of these dangers.

Nazir Afzal writes well about this problem, engaging directly with the cultural and religious background of the perpetrators, and issuing a robust challenge to some in his own community, while also reminding readers that Islam is not a monolith.  I was less sure about Sarah Champion’s intervention in The Sun.  The headline was quite inflammatory.

British Pakistani men ARE raping and exploiting white girls… and it’s time we faced up to it

It also didn’t seem fully necessary. To me there has been a sense of déjà vu in the recent discussions of this issue.  I thought we’d had these conversations back in 2012. Yet the opening of Champion’s article suggested she was breaking some genuine taboo.

BRITAIN has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.

There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?

The implied reader is cheering Champion on as she breathlessly creates a sense of drama through revelation.  This is frustrating because the later sections of the article seem absolutely fine – drawing attention to what needs to be done, and placing the largely Pakistani grooming gangs within their broader CSE context.

Sarah Champion’s article was singled out for praise by Trevor Kavanagh is his controversial recent piece on The Muslim Problem. Here too we find the suggestion that no one is talking about Muslims/Islam.  (This is particularly bizarre given that he is writing in the Sun.)  Muslims, according to Kavanagh, are a problem – later in the article he does use the phrase ‘some Muslims’ but there is plenty here to reinforce any anti-Muslim prejudice the reader may harbour.

But there is one unspoken fear, gagged by political correctness, which links Britain and the rest of Europe.

The common denominator, almost unsayable until last week’s furore over Pakistani sex gangs, is Islam.

Thanks to former equalities chief Trevor Phillips, and Labour MPs such as Rotherham’s Sarah Champion, it is acceptable to say Muslims are a specific rather than a cultural problem.

The article ends:

One day soon, if Philip Hammond and Liam Fox are right, we will be back in charge of immigration.

What will we do about The Muslim Problem then?

Not surprisingly this caused outrage from both Jews and Muslims through its echoing of the sinister phrase ‘The Jewish Problem’ (or The Jewish Question). The capitalisation seems to actively invite this comparison.

Kavanagh has plenty of form – it was he who targeted Channel 4’s Fatima Manji for reporting on the terrorist attack in Nice while wearing a hijab.

There was something else I particularly disliked in Kavanagh’s closing question. It’s sly and insinuating – it allows space for the reader to come up with different answers, some of which may go beyond the narrow question of immigration.  There’s something gleeful in the prospect  – finally, we can devise a solution free of outside interference.  There’s little space in that ‘We’ for any Muslim reader, no matter how liberal.

About 70 miles east of where I live, in the university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, one person is dead and many others injured after a car plowed into a crowd of people peacefully marching against a white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally.

Here are some of the people they were protesting:

Unfortunately I’m used to seeing Confederate battle flags in my part of Virginia. Fortunately I’m not used to seeing Nazi flags.

Trump has condemned the hatred and violence “on many sides.” When violent Islamic extremists do this sort of thing, he’s usually a lot more specific.

Update:

It is neither unfair nor inaccurate to point out that the president has been tougher on Mitch McConnell than Putin or Nazis in last 24 hours

— Glenn Thrush (@GlennThrush) August 12, 2017

Thank you, Republican Senator Cory Gardner, for having the decency and honesty to say what Trump won’t.

Mr. President – we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism. https://t.co/PaPNiPPAoW

— Cory Gardner (@SenCoryGardner) August 12, 2017

This is a cross-post from Andrew Gilligan

I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph in January last year about something called Prevent Watch, an organisation of Islamist activists linked to the terror-sympathising group Cage (famously supportive of “Jihadi John”) who promote inflammatory stories about the Government’s anti-terrorism policy, Prevent. I discovered that not only were many of the stories false or exaggerated, but that several of the people presented as ordinary victims in them were in fact activists in Prevent Watch.

Among these activists was a lady called Ifhat Smith, also known as Ifhat Shaheen or Ifhat Shaheen-Smith, who won copious newsprint and airtime with a claim that her schoolboy son had been “interrogated” and “treated as a criminal” because he had used the phrase “eco-terrorism” in class. It was, she told the BBC, the act of a “police state.”

I discovered, and reported, that when Mrs Smith took the school (and the Government) to court over the matter, her claim had been dismissed in scathing terms as “bound to fail” and “totally without merit” and she had even been ordered to pay £1000 for wasting the court’s time. I also found that Mrs Smith managed the London office of the Tunisian Islamist party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, Ennadha.

Prevent Watch took us to Ipso about the story – and lost. Ipso ruled that it was not inaccurate for its and Mrs Smith’s claims to be described as false or exaggerated, or for Prevent Watch’s work to be criticised by somebody quoted in the story as a “campaign of lies.”

Ipso also stated that Prevent Watch had “published comments on their website in defence of a person convicted under the Terrorism Act 2000, [and] it was not significantly misleading to characterise Prevent Watch as having ‘sympathised’ with terrorists.”

Mrs Smith then decided to threaten to sue: much wiser from her point of view. Because last year, as part of its long retreat from journalism, the Telegraph got rid of its former, rather robust lawyers (who successfully fought the Ipso case) and appears now to have taken a policy decision to settle legal threats. The paper did duly capitulate, despite the verdict of a court of law and of Ipso that Mrs Smith’s claim was false.

Now, after the good Mrs Smith, another Prevent Watch activist, Haras Ahmed, has quite understandably decided that he wants a piece of the action. Last week he too trousered a settlement from the paper over the same story.

Here’s the background to his achievement. On 30 November 2015, the BBC reported that a school in Waltham Forest, Greenleaf Primary, had “mistakenly revealed” the names of children deemed at risk of radicalisation “in response to a Freedom of Information request by a parent… Haras Ahmed submitted the FoI request referring to one class at the school, asking if certain children had been targeted.” An indignant Mr Ahmed, presented as an ordinary parent, was duly interviewed outside the school. Prevent Watch used the case to press its narrative of Muslims being picked on.

Alas, a few details were missing from this concerning tale.

(1) Mr Ahmed does not appear to have been a parent at Greenleaf School. At the time he made the FOI request, one of several he made in June and July 2015, he was a parent governor at a different Waltham Forest primary school, Thorpe Hall, which his lawyers, Carter Ruck, described as “the local primary school attended by his children.”

(2) Carter Ruck claimed in its complaint that at the time he made his FOI request Mr Ahmed was not an activist in Prevent Watch, saying he had “never even heard” of the group and had only become involved with it “several months after he had made the FOI requests.” His LinkedIn page says that he was involved with Prevent Watch from January 2015, five months before he made the requests.

(3) Prevent Watch itself accepted to Ipso that Mr Ahmed was “already affiliated” with it “at the time [he] had approached the media” with the Greenleaf story. He has represented Prevent Watch on numerous occasions since.

(4) Mr Ahmed involved a second Islamist front group, Claystone, in the story. (They too campaign against counter-terrorism policy on the basis of exaggerations and lies and they too lost an Ipso complaint against me when I said as much.) Mr Ahmed passed Claystone the emails and they issued a press release on 22 September 2015. This didn’t state that the school had revealed the children’s names – just that seven pupils “had been identified” as vulnerable to radicalisation – and the story got very little coverage. So perhaps something else was needed for a fresh media push in November.

(5) According to Waltham Forest council, which runs Greenleaf Primary, the children’s names weren’t mistakenly revealed at all. The council said the names had been redacted from the document sent under the FOI request, which had then been “manipulated by a third party to reveal the blocked-out names.” Who was the third party? We don’t know.

(6) The council also stated that the counter-radicalisation programme at Greenleaf was “not targeted at children of any one faith” and that the seven pupils referred under it were “of different religions.”

Now Mr Ahmed has managed to extract from the Telegraph £20,000 and a statement saying: “The article suggested Mr Ahmed had, in an interview with the BBC, presented himself as an ordinary parent when in fact he was engaged in a campaign to undermine the government’s anti-terrorism policy.

“We accept that Mr Ahmed’s BBC interview was given in good faith. We also accept that, whilst he is critical of the Prevent strategy (elements of which he believes are highly discriminatory), he does not support Islamist extremists and is in no way himself an extremist.”

If the Telegraph wants to advertise itself as a cashpoint for libel lawyers, that, I suppose, is its prerogative and its problem. It could end up costing the paper a lot more than fighting. But the decision to settle with Haras Ahmed has wider consequences: it raises the bar for anyone else who wants to expose the truth about the likes of Prevent Watch and strengthens the hands of those who want to hamper this country’s fight against terror.

The Democratic Socialists of America has seen a surge in membership and attention following the failed campaign of Bernie Sanders. It is, without a doubt, the largest socialist organization in American politics (sorry Social Democrats USA). Last week, they held their largest conference to date in Chicago, debating and passing their current manifesto.

During my radical days, the DSA always seemed like a marginal afterthought in political organizing; most of its members were boomers from the Michael Harrington era and not young activists. That has changed with a massive insertion of youth into its ranks.

I fancy myself a type of social democrat, so I decided to reassess the group in recent months and reached out to local branches of the organization. Many of its organizers were young, idealistic and green: not necessarily a bad thing, but not the grouping I was looking to participate in. With health care as their main policy focus, I supported their efforts to help bring a more equitable and just system to the United States.

Unfortunately, the DSA’s youthful cadres have brought with them some of the worst elements of the current left. It seemed too common to find local branches using communist iconography. Perhaps this is done ironically; young activists may lack the context for totalitarian Bolshevism. I tried to be generous in my assessment of the organization based on what local branches post to Twitter, even when it troubled me to see a “democratic” organization use authoritarian images so frivolously.

pic.twitter.com/28EdG8F6dn

— DSA North Bay (@dsanorthbay) July 9, 2017

Then came the DSA’s official endorsement of the BDS movement and its aims at their convention.

.@DemSocialists votes to officially endorse BDS #DSACon17 pic.twitter.com/FfyQDAdJwa

— Chicago DSA (@ChicagoCityDSA) August 5, 2017

Paul Berman reflects on this unfortunate turn of events for the Democratic Socialists.

The DSA resolution strikes me as a modestly sad event, not because of the part about Saturday voting. It is because of DSA itself and its meaning, faint but real, for the American Jews. DSA does have a political lineage, after all, which is ancient and noble. The original socialist party in the United States was the Socialist Labor Party, founded in 1876, a quarter century after the Republican Party. The Socialist Labor Party was committed from the start, however, to being a narrow and insignificant political sect—which perhaps reflected a fatal and dominant gene, destined to be passed down through the ages. Still, some of the party’s more serious members split away to organize, in a series of steps, the Socialist Party of America, with Eugene V. Debs as principal leader. The Socialist Party was sincerely opposed to superstitious and medieval bigotries of every kind. Therefore it became the first American party truly to open its arms to the Jewish immigrant masses, circa 1900. The first two Jewish members of the United States Congress were Socialists—Meyer London from the Lower East Side and Victor Berger from Milwaukee. The big Jewish trade unions, which improved life for a significant percentage of the American Jewish population and for a great many other people, as well, were products in one fashion or another of the Socialist Party of America. This was true also of the Jewish Daily Forward, which so deeply and positively influenced the American Jewish world, and it was true of the housing cooperatives that arose in New York.

The vote led to longtime members like Eric Lee to leave the organization. He wrote:

I cannot in good conscience be a member of an organization which promotes a boycott of the Jewish state. I consider the BDS campaign to be antisemitic and racist. I oppose it as a socialist and as a Jew. I am appalled that DSA would take such a position.

It is terribly unfortunate that the largest socialist organization in US has taken this path. As long as the left makes its hatred of Israel a driving position, I find it hard to be an active member in its ranks. We need a competent and broad liberal/social democratic alliance more than ever, but the largest left wing organization has made such a union less likely with this vote.

Stirring up anger and division is a core mission for an Islamist agitation outfit. Even if you have to make things up. Is the story absurd? Yes, so let’s run with it!

The MEND crew are adept in this trade. Have a look at this tweet from MEND activist Siema Iqbal. She wants to call The Guardian to account for a “sly” and “low” bit of “subliminal Islamophobia”. In some sports coverage mentioning two Muslim footballers. No, really.

People like tweeter Saddique object. Iqbal is having none of it. And MEND’s CEO, Shazad Amin, steps in to back her.

Indeed, Mr Amin has form in the “subliminal” area. Look at his indignation about a presentation slide from the government’s counter-terrorist team at OSCT. It features a picture of Muslims praying in the street after the Finsbury Park terrorist attack. It is plainly intended to show victims of terror, like the shocked woman leaving the scene of the Manchester attack, who can also be seen in the slide. But not for Dr Amin, oh no.

James Muncie from OSCT talking about #Prevent shows pic of people praying under title ‘terrorist threat to the UK’ #RCPsychIC #subliminal

Then Amin added this observation:

Good example of how controlling visual narrative can subtly influence perceptions of ‘religious’ Muslims as dangerous

Rubbish. The OSCT’s job is to keep all of us safe, including religious Muslims. That’s the point.

This is obviously silly. But it is also important. An Islamist group claiming that The Guardian is playing mind games for the cause of “Islamophobia” while the government is determined to increase hatred of religious Muslims is completely out of order.

No wonder many Labour people are so keen on MEND.