In praise of Fiyaz Mughal who is correct about religious extremism.

Picture Shows: Fiyaz Mughal who has hit out at the Home Office for not doing enough to counter religious extremism.

About eight to ten years ago I had a lot of online run-ins with Fiyaz Mughal, the former head of the Tell Mama organisation and founder of that organisation. Much of the antipathy I held towards him and his organisation was due to his organisation’s seeming lack of willingness to have, or even allow others to have, an open debate about Islamic extremism, phenomena like the Rape Gangs and the growing problem of Islamic communal-based political corruption and sectarian political activity.

Tell Mama’s social media feeds at that time were full of exaggerated nothingburger stories about Muslim women having hijabs pulled off (some of which turned out to be utter rubbish) whilst ordinary Britons (including some open minded Muslims) were trying to get their voices heard regarding some of the terrible problems that could be laid at the door of sections of Britain’s Muslim communities. He also pushed for the prosecution of a friend for ‘racist’ emails that were nothing of the sort but used the Arabic word ‘taqiyya’ in them, which some claim is an anti-Islamic smear, because it implies that Muslims will lie to protect or promote Islam, which resulted in the gaoling of this man for 12 weeks. In addition he attempted to prosecute me for mocking him but this prosecution failed as even the now ideologically bent Metropolitan Police could not find enough evidence to call me a racist and make it stick. Maybe the giant Jewish wedding certificate on my wall told even the ideology stuffed cops of the Metropolitan Police that perhaps I was not the neo-Nazi they thought they were looking for.

Mr Mughal’s organisation Tell Mama was also allegedly involved in silencing those on social media who spoke up about some of the problems that parts of Britain’s Islamic community had created. At the time, about a decade ago, there were many rumours going about that Tell Mama had infiltrated social media platforms such as Twitter as was and Facebook, in order to silence those who spoke up about Britain’s Islam-related problems.

I admit I did mock this man mercilessly, even at one point portraying him as Big Brother from 1984, issuing commands to an audience of sycophantic police officers, members of the ‘lanyard class’ and politicians. This was because I saw Mr Mughal, and in particular the Tell Mama ‘Islamophobia’ monitors themselves, as a major impediment to being allowed free debate about Islam, just as Christianity, Judaism and other religious and secular ideologies are debated.

However this post is not in any way a post that resurrects my dispute with Mr Mughal or his former Tell Mama organisation. I do not write this article in order to bury Mr Mughal but instead to praise him and stand with him. I do this because Mr Mughal has himself allegedly been silenced and cancelled, because he spoke up about Islamic extremism and he asked the Home Office why in counter-extremism meetings the focus is not as targeted on Islamic extremism as he believes it should be.

Yes I know that Tell Mama exaggerated the ‘attacks’ on Muslims and made them seem worse than they were but on the subject of Islamic extremism Mr Mughal is correct in his assertions in my view. Counter-extremism policies in the UK are firmly focused on minor problems such as the genuine far right, whilst they play down the far greater and more dangerous problem of Islamic extremism. There are approximately 40,000 Islamic extremists of interest currently being monitored by Britain’s security services and specialist police, whereas the number of hard core neo-Nazis who pose a similar violent threat could probably fit under the average bus stop shelter. The two threats to public order, Islamic and far right extremism, are not of the same order of problem. One of them, Islamic extremism, is clearly more of a threat than the other.

After he stepped down from Tell Mama, Mr Mughal went on to being a government advisor on extremism but he seems to have been frozen out of that world after he brought up concerns that counter-extremism groups in the Home Office were not treating the issue of Islamic extremism with the degree of seriousness that this problem deserves. According to a report on GB News, a report accompanied by a video featuring Mr Mughal, Mr Mughal was put under ‘insidious pressure’ to not speak about or bring up the issue of Islamic extremism.

Here’s the GB News link from X with a copy of the video itself.

https://x.com/DaveAtherton20/status/2020796897649193276

This story about Mr Mughal being forced out of counter-extremism work because of his awkward questions about Islamic extremism confirms what many of us may have suspected, which is that there are some in the Home Office who do not want to touch the issue of Islamic extremism. The Home Office staff seem to prefer to concentrate on counter-extremism aspects that they are more ideologically comfortable with, such as the ‘far right’. Why the Home Office staff have this attitude is debatable but it may well be down to fears within the Home Office that robustly tackling the issue of Islamic extremism may harm ‘community cohesion’.

This story has also been commented upon by The Campaign Against Antisemitism who said in a post on X:

‘A former government adviser and extremism expert has criticised the Home Office for trying to silence him after he raised concerns about the threat of Islamism in the UK. Fiyaz Mughal, a counter-extremism expert who has worked on numerous Government projects tackling anti-Muslim incidents and extremism since 2005, quit his Home Office role last year due to feeling “insidious pressure” from the Government to not speak out about Islamist extremism whilst he was working there. He recalled how he was contacted last year by the Home Office after an article he had written about their summit on extremism questioned why Islamism was completely absent from the first 90 minutes of the discussion. He recalls it as “a clear attempt to get me to shut up about the lack of discussion, activity, and focus on Islamist extremism as the primary threat to the country.” Mr Mughal further stated that he believes the Government has “bought into the ruse that it will cause community divisions” and that it “will cost them politically if they speak out about it.”’

Source: https://x.com/antisemitism/status/2020848910806208612

What the Campaign Against Antisemitism have said backs up what many of us have suspected, which is that the Home Office for various reasons do not want to make an issue of Islamic extremism, even though it is clearly one of the major security problems facing the United Kingdom. This is a dangerous situation for Britain to be in, where the government department that has the lead in tackling crime, and in particular terrorism, voluntarily silences itself and silences others about a major security threat to the nation.

Fiyaz Mughal could have just said nothing and kept in with the government and civil service staff who wanted the status quo of not saying anything about Islamic extremism but he did not. Mr Mughal could have kept his nice little gig and gone along with the narrative that the security problems facing Britain all came from the ‘far right’ but he didn’t. He spoke up about the failure of the Home Office to take Islamic extremism seriously. This was a really brave, moral and honourable route for Mr Mughal to take.

What Mr Mughal has revealed about the conduct of the Home Office when it comes to Islamic extremism is extremely worrying and his words on this matter deserve a much wider hearing than they’ve got. We should expect that the Home Office, the government department that is supposed to protect Britons against terrorism, to be honest about where the main threats are coming from but that’s not what has happened. Instead of prioritising the issue of Islamic religious extremism the Home Office and its counter-extremism groups are downplaying it and that’s not a recipe for the security of Britons.

Britons deserve to have a Home Office that concentrates on real and actual terrorist threats, not just those ‘threats’ that exist only as part of a false narrative that it is the far right that is the main problem and not religious extremists. At present we don’t have that recognition, and this is something that a future right leaning or sensible centre left government is going to have to change.

Fair play to Mr Mughal for speaking out on this issue. It takes guts to do what he did with regards to the utterly compromised Home Office counter-extremism committees. He’s opened a window into the world of government counter-extremism work and has exposed its failures. I cannot do anything else but have an immense amount of respect for Mr Mughal doing that.

Give Fiyaz Mughal a round of applause for what he has exposed, even if like me and some others you have had disputes with him and his organisations in the past, or have criticisms of them now. This is because it is to be hoped that his exposure of poor practise in the Home Office helps to precipitate positive change, with counter-extremism practitioners being more realistic from here on in, about where and from whom the majority of terrorist threats come. Islamic religious extremism is a threat to all of us, including those Muslims who have thrown their lot in with us and Mr Mughal’s intervention and his exposure of seriously shady practises by the Home Office is of benefit to us all.