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Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

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    Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam (OP)


    Salaam

    Event: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Recent events from the Middle East have placed the Muslim community in Britain in the public eye once more with their every word and action coming under microscopic scrutiny by the media and politicians. This is only the latest chapter in an ideological attack that has been ongoing for significantly longer.

    Whereas the attacks on Islamic concepts of war, political governance and the unity of Muslim lands are nothing new, they have now increased on an unprecedented scale in the wake of the rise of ISIS and its declaration of a Caliphate. The matter is not about supporting or opposing the version of a Caliphate as demonstrated by ISIS but rather the criminalisation of Islamic political thought and ideology. The concepts of jihad, shariah and khilafah are not the exclusive possession of ISIS but core Islamic doctrines subscribed to by almost one third's of the world's population. It is telling that the government's treatment of ISIS is similar to its treatment of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut Tahrir, and the Taliban, despite the enormous differences of belief and methodology between the groups.

    The Islamophobic nature of the criminalisation of those who believe in fighting in Syria against Assad is underlined by the lack of concern for British Jews who fight in the Israeli Occupation Forces, particularly at times where they are engaged in war crimes and other atrocities, such as the recent attack on Gaza.

    On the flips side, Muslims who wish to aid their brothers and sisters through the provision of humanitarian aid via aid convoys are having their homes raided, being harassed by the security services and are effectively being accused of engaging in terrorism. Charities are having their bank accounts closed without explanation and are coming under investigation by the Charity Commission simply for being involved in crisis zones like Gaza and Syria. Witch-hunts such as the Trojan Horse hoax and the mass hysteria over issues of the niqab, halal food and conservative Muslim values demonstrate that the criminalisation is spreading beyond Middle Eastern politics. Individuals and organisations within the Muslim community who have been speaking out against these policies are now under attack. They have had their organisation, business and bank accounts arbitrarily closed. Even their children's bank accounts have been closed. They are maligned in the media as terrorist sympathisers, extremists and jihadists. Some have even been imprisoned.

    The common element across all these cases is that those targeted cared for the oppressed and for those who are suffering. They have been criminalised because they cared.

    Join CAGE at this series of events around the country to unite the Muslim communities against this criminalisation of our faith, our beliefs, our mosques and organisations, and our leaders. The following regional events will take place with the large conference taking place on 20 September at the Waterlily in London.

    Sunday 14 September - 6pm

    Pakistani Community Centre, Park Hall, London Road, Reading RG1 2PA

    Jamal Harwood
    Dr Adnan Siddiqui
    Dr Uthman Lateef
    Anas al-Tikriti
    Taji Mustafa
    Wednesday 17 September - 7pm
    East Pearl Banqueting Centre, Longsight, Manchester
    Ibrahim Hewitt
    Abdullah Andalusi
    Jahangir Mohammed

    Friday 19 September - 6.30pm

    Muslim Student House (the Daar), Moseley, Birmingham

    Dr Uthman Lateef
    Ismail Adam Patel
    Abdullah Andalusi
    Dr Abdul Wahid
    Fahad Ansari

    http://www.cageuk.org/event/it-crime-care

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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

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    Salaam

    Can they can ever mind their own business, now they want to interfere in the raising of our children.



    Humanists to help shape religious curriculum after threatening legal action to sit on education board

    Humanists are set to help shape religious education curriculum after winning a legal battle to sit on a council’s education board. Humanists UK, the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people which campaigns for a secular state, has won a proposed legal challenge against a London council that rejected its application to join its religious education body.

    The organisation said that the decision is “likely to pave the way for more humanists to sit on such bodies across England”.

    Rachel Taggart-Ryan applied for full membership to Greenwich Council’s Standing Advisory Council on RE (SACRE), the body that oversees the religious education curriculum in the local area and which has members from varying religious groups. However its sitting members voted against giving her full membership and voting rights because she is a humanist, with the Council backing this decision on the grounds that humanism is not a religion.

    Their decision came in spite of an identical 2017 legal challenge in Wales which saw that Council back down and decide to admit another humanist, Kathy Riddick, as a full member.

    It then prompted the Welsh Government to issue guidance clarifying that human rights law means humanists have the right to be full members, and subsequently decide to change the underlying education law to explicitly reflect the need to treat humanists and humanism equally in religious education. The law in Wales is identical to England.

    After being refused by Greenwich Council, Rachel sent a letter before action to them, arguing that she had been discriminated against because she was a humanist. The Council again refused to admit her as a member.

    As a result, Humanists UK then instructed solicitors, who notified the Council of their intention to apply to the High Court to take a case. Only then did the Council decided to acknowledge that there is a legal basis on which humanists can be full members of SACREs. Ms Taggart-Ryan, who is the charity’s campaigns officer, has now been admitted as a full member of Greenwich Council’s SACRE.

    She said: “I applied to my local SACRE because I believe it’s important that children have the opportunity to learn about a broad range of beliefs in RE including humanism.

    “The key way to get involved in this is to join the local SACRE, but I was completely dismayed when the panel rejected my application solely because I am a humanist. This issue is a matter of fairness and equality so I am glad that I now have the right to participate and vote in my SACRE.”

    Councillor Jackie Smith, Cabinet Member for Children's Services and Community Safety said: “The Royal Borough of Greenwich has admitted Rachel Taggart-Ryan as a member of its Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education and welcomes her contributions in helping shape the local curriculum for our diverse population”.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...atening-legal/
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam!

    format_quote Originally Posted by Kelsey28 View Post
    Thanks for all the information in this thread - o different to what i have been taught back in usa . Learned so much here
    format_quote Originally Posted by Kelsey28 View Post
    Feels embarrassing to be amercian sometimes so apologies for that Junon. I am earning new ways here in London and udenrstanding islam muc more than i ever did before.
    Relax, you have nothing to apologise for , we all have to start from somewhere. I was in the same boat a couple of years back when trying to understand the USA (history, politics, culture, faith).
    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-07-2019 at 06:53 PM.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    thanks for your understanding - sometimes i feel i have been center of whole thing with all the usa usa usa hockey stuff. The imam here says I should convert asap take a new strong muslim name and give up the hockey stuff. Gte out of the hockey gear into hijab and it woud be my way of making amends.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-13-2019 at 09:41 PM.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    More on Dr Zakir Naik being targeted.

    Blurb


    The Indian investigating agencies are leaving no stone unturned to bring the controversial Islamic Preacher back in India. But seems like the efforts are hitting a wall when it comes to Interpol. The agency has once again refused a Red Corner Notice (RCN) against Naik citing lack of evidence and proof of wrongdoing. Not only that, The international police organisation has also instructed all its offices to delete all data on Naik from its files.

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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update



    Would you appoint Nigel Farage for a Brexit “independent” review?

    Imagine if the government wanted an ‘independent’ review of Brexit, but proceeded to appoint Nigel Farage to conduct the review. To appoint someone so clearly in favour of Brexit would be completely absurd.

    Yet the government has appointed Alex Carlile[1]– a man who has made no secret of the fact that he is a supporter of Prevent – to be the so-called ‘independent’ reviewer for this harmful policy.

    Prevent and counter-extremism policy is generally suffering from a lack of support. It is like the dead parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch. It has become an ex-policy. It has ceased to ‘be’ – well, to be credible, at least.

    Why there is no faith in this policy

    Recent articles have supported the idea mainstream within the Muslim community that Prevent is about spying on Muslim communities. [2]

    But criticisms of the policy go beyond the community that it affects most, with a senior counter-terrorism police officer recently referring to it as a ‘toxic brand. [3] His predecessors, [4] had warned that the police were in danger of becoming ‘thought police’,[5] who would have to define what was or was not ‘extremist’ without any clear definitions.

    Various sections of civil society – universities, teachers,[6], doctors, nurses,[7] and social workers – who are expected to police the thoughts and beliefs of those they serve had expressed their concerns, including the absence of a precise and consistently applied definition. This has left the policy open to being politicised as well as becoming a form of McCarthyism, where views became ‘problematised’ without being formally criminalised.

    The most vocal advocates for counter-extremism policy have not been the policy makers who designed it – the ‘organ grinders’, so to speak. It was their ‘monkeys’ – mainly brown-faced, Muslim-named, state-funded ‘experts’ who had taken over from community leaders. For these people. ‘Prevent’ has been an extra source of income for not having to do much.

    These ‘experts’ were the people publicised by the media, who chose not to highlight the conflict of interest that these (often narcissistic) personalities could only really maintain their relevance and incomes by perpetuating myths about ‘extremism’ and deflecting attention from failed policies. These myths include that violence in the world is caused by an ‘Islamic’ ideology (not destructive policies by secular states) [8]; that the more Islamic you are, the more of a problem you become; that the grievances of Muslims are false, [9] not real; and that Muslims need to be made less Islamic, i.e. deradicalised in a ‘muscular liberal’ way to conform to secular norms. [10]

    But these ‘experts’ have little credibility, hence the calls for ‘Prevent’ to be scrapped or ‘reviewed’.

    Putting lipstick on a pig

    Today, as confidence in counter-extremism policy is at a low point, there is a major PR exercise under way to rebrand it. The ‘lipstick’ on this pig of a policy appears to have two layers.

    The first layer is the ‘independent’ review led by Alex Carlile.

    Speaking in Parliament in January 2015, Carlile claimed that he ‘played a part in the formation of the current Prevent strategy’. [11]

    In May 2019, he was on record as saying ‘“It would be a tragedy if the Prevent programme was removed.” [12]

    Speaking to Douglas Murray’s neoconservative Henry Jackson Society, he ‘voiced his support of the Prevent Duty, and argued that Control Orders should be reinstated as a mechanism to monitor potential terrorists’. [13]

    In short, Alex Carlile is a fan of Prevent. One should not expect any substantial change to the policy after his review.

    The second layer of rebranding Prevent was through the launch of a commission for counter-extremism, currently calling for evidence.

    But this commission has had credibility problems from day one. This is mostly because the lead commissioner came from the same stock of the aforementioned brown-faced, Muslim-named ‘experts’ who had previously failed to make ‘Prevent’ sound credible.

    The credibility problem was summed up in an interview last month with the lead commissioner, [14] where people had concerns of the commissioner’s role as a government appointee.

    She did little to dispel these concerns when she defended her ‘independence’ by citing her criticism of the DoE’s failure to support schools against parents with legitimate concerns about their kids’ education. Yet the implications of all her comments on this matter (describing parents of primary school kids as like a ‘mob’),[15] is that she views parents with concerns about the way LGBT is taught in schools as ‘extreme’. Thus, her criticisms are that the government is not being ‘muscular liberal’ enough!

    The commission’s attempts to gain credibility is that it has been ‘calling for evidence’ since April 2019 so that the Prevent policy can be evidence-based.[16]

    But what of the existing evidence that has been present in the public domain for years but which the government chooses to ignore because it does not fit with the state narrative? We know that politicians regularly try to discredit evidence from Muslim community organisations such as CAGE, who have offered evidence-based critiques of the policy. There are academics and other civil society organisations that have reviewed the existing evidence and found serious problems with Preventand counter-extremism policies as they currently exist.[17]

    The commissioner, it would seem, has a Groucho Marx approach to evidence. If she doesn’t does not like what she sees, there’s plenty more to choose from and pay people enough (the calls for evidence came with a potential £10 000- fee, [18] an incentive academics are not offered very often).

    A fig leaf for systemic failure

    In the end, what governments in Europe and America and their proxy-commissions never seem to do is to accept responsibility that their policies around the world for decades have created violence and instability that now plays out in their own countries.

    Instead, they point the finger at Islam and Muslims so that people look away from the real causes of the problems, as well as the failing political, economic, and social problems in their own countries that are caused by disaster capitalism and the failing experiment of liberalism.

    This explains why it is Islam, and normative Islamic beliefs, that are the brunt of muscular liberal counter-extremism policies.

    Islam, far from being its portrayal as a negative force, offers an alternative for humanity to the current failed system across the world. This is the threat that policymakers sense – not a threat to life, but a threat to their dominance.

    https://www.islam21c.com/opinion/wou...eview/?sharex_
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update. The British government 'Hearts and Minds' subversion campaign continues.







    REVEALED: The 'woke' media outfit that's actually a UK counterterror programme

    This glitzy, youthful 'news company' warns of the dangers of fake news. In fact, it's part of the Home Office's Prevent strategy


    A social media network for young people that has been launched around the term “woke” is actually a covert British government counterterrorism programme, security officials have admitted.

    A Facebook page and Instagram feed with the name This Is Woke describes itself as the work of a “media/news company” that is engaging “in critical discussions around Muslim identity, tradition and reform”.

    In fact, it was created by a media company on behalf of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) at the UK Home Office.

    The OSCT is refusing to disclose information about the network, however, and will not explain the reason it was created, claiming that to do so would “prejudice the national security of the UK”.

    This Is Woke draws upon the popular expression “stay woke”, a call - originally African-American - to remain aware of social and racial justice issues.

    Launched earlier this year, the network features videos with titles such as "A trillion ton iceberg has broken off Antarctica" and "Millions of pangolins are hunted each year".

    Alongside them are other videos with titles such as "It’s time to hold extremism to account for terrorism, not Islam". This video went viral, being viewed 1.7 million times.

    It also features videos of short panel discussions, with four young people sitting on a sofa debating subjects such as "Will we all become vegan?" and "Are dating apps the way forward?", interspersed among these are videos with titles such as "What does wearing a hijab mean to you?"

    One discussion video on the This Is Woke Facebook page is entitled "What is fake news?" The four young participants offer contributions such as "online, we can never know who the source is" and "we have to train ourselves against what’s going on out there".

    They are then filmed on the street, conducting vox pops among members of the public and asking them: "How do you know the news you hear is real?"

    The content of the This Is Woke Instagram feed includes quotations from Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and one from Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Islamic caliph - “sometimes the people with the worst past, create the best future”. There are also photographs of smiling women in hijabs.

    National security concerns

    The content of the Facebook page and Instagram feed was created for the OSCT by a London-based communications company, Breakthrough Media, several people with knowledge of the project have confirmed.

    When Middle East Eye asked the Home Office for information about the project, under the terms of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, the OSCT confirmed that it held such material but refused to disclose any, citing the section of the act that concerns national security.

    While acknowledging that there was a public interest in transparency surrounding such projects, the OSCT said that national security concerns were “of overriding importance”.

    Disclosure of information about This Is Woke “would open up detailed information about organisations and individuals who are engaged in the delivery of, and who are supporting activities to prevent terrorism”, the OSCT said.

    “This includes activity to disrupt those who promote terrorism, and protect individuals who are vulnerable to recruitment, or who have already been recruited by extremists.”

    As a consequence, disclosure of any information about This Is Woke under the Freedom of Information Act would “undermine the effectiveness of the Home Office strategies, and hence weaken and prejudice the national security of the UK”.

    The OSCT also cited commercial confidentiality. MEE is appealing the refusal.

    As well as refusing the request made under the Freedom of Information Act, the Home Office declined to answer a number of questions about This Is Woke, including queries about the project’s objectives and methods, and the deception involved. Nor would it respond to a suggestion that it could be accused of generating a form of “fake news”.

    Instead, the Home Office issued a statement which said: “We are committed to using all of the tools available to counter the threat from terrorism in the UK.

    “The Home Office works in partnership with a range of organisations from across civil society, industry, private and public sectors to reduce vulnerabilities to organised criminal, extremist and terrorist threats in the UK.”

    The project is part of the UK’s controversial counter-radicalisation programme known as Prevent, which is one of the four main strands of the UK’s counterterrorism strategy.

    As part of this programme, a secretive unit within the OSCT called the Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) has for several years been mounting covert propaganda campaigns.

    After an overhaul of Prevent in 2011, Theresa May, then the UK’s home secretary, told a parliamentary committee which provides some oversight of the OSCT that RICU was “road-testing some quite innovative approaches to counter-ideological messages”.

    Internal RICU documents seen by MEE show that these messages are intended “to effect behavioural and attitudinal change” among what the unit terms “Prevent audiences”. These are defined as British Muslims, particularly males, aged 15 to 39.

    Meanwhile, Breakthrough Media - which has in the past been RICU’s favoured private-sector contractor - says privately, in internal papers, that its work on behalf of the unit is intended to “promote a reconciled British Muslim identity”.

    Breakthrough has recently changed its name to Zinc Network, a move that started in Australia, where the company had been caught persuading Muslims and a Christian clergyman to promote Australian government policies, without explicitly informing these individuals that it was working for the government.

    Zinc Network also refused to answer questions about the project and the deception involved.

    In a statement, the company said: “Zinc Network is enormously proud of the work we undertake for our clients.

    “Providing support to communities, brands and governments to promote positive social change and tackle some of the most complex issues in the world today is the driving force of our agency.”

    Rest of article here.

    https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/r...rror-programme













    This is sinister.







    To be fair they did retract it.



    Finally spot the difference.

    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-17-2019 at 08:16 PM.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update



    Astroturfing and the rise of the Secular Security State in Britain


    Opaque government manipulation of British Muslim community life has become pervasive. Time to roll back the secular security state, Yahya Birt argues

    Imagine you are a British Muslima writing content for an online website that discusses heartfelt issues of importance to your community. Your posts strike a chord because you are writing from authentic personal experience, and they get the most attention. But you are the only person of colour and the only Muslim in the office.

    The rest of your team are middle-aged white men pretending to be “sisters ” online. You smell a rat. You thought this was a legit job, but investigating further, you find out that this organisation is funded by the Home Office either through Prevent or Prevent-related funds.

    You resign in protest at the clandestine co-option of your voice for the needs of what I shall describe below as the secular security state.
    This story is not made up. This was told to the poet and civil rights activist Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan this week. As she comments on Twitter,

    “The betrayal of trust that we face at every level of every institution including online spaces, media platforms, arts and culture events, civic life and everything else is honestly something I think everyone concerned w[ith] racism at ALL needs to be SCREAMING about! This is urgent!”

    It is indeed urgent. And what is particularly urgent is to call out the “astroturfing” that is going on and adversely impacting our community.
    What is astroturfing and why does the British government practise it with respect to British Muslims?

    Astroturfing is designed to give the appearance of “grass roots” mobilisation, or community-led bottom-up civil society initiatives, when in fact it is driven from above by state funding, patronage, training, in-kind services, etc. channelled through proxies. It is at its most pernicious when this state support is opaque or invisible; if it is open and transparent then at least it can be publicly scrutinised.

    Astroturfing at its most secretive subverts the normal, healthy and authentic development of Muslim youth cultures by chaining it to the War on Terror logic of the good/bad Muslim binary driven by political purposes (as proposed by Mahmood Mamdani). But when uncovered it also creates fear, suspicion and distrust within Muslim cultural and intellectual spaces — something that is also a negative dividend of the policy.

    By and large, New Labour (with exceptions) went for a partnership approach that was relatively open, or one could say relatively “weak” forms of astroturfing, as there was a measure of dialogue and consent and openness in it (and therefore the possibility of scrutiny and contestation). The Coalition and the Conservatives have gone for a much more opaque or strong form of astroturfing.

    With regard to British Muslims, astroturfing has its historic roots in counter-insurgency practices and doctrine developed in colonial British Malaya, named the battle for “hearts and minds”. The battle was 10% military, 90% political.

    This was taken up by the Americans in Iraq under David Petreaus, and this revived “hearts and minds” approach duly influenced British domestic policy towards British Muslims recast as an insurgent population after 2005. “Hearts and minds” was a common mantra under New Labour’s Prevent policy.

    Prevent funding for community partnerships was distributed on the basis of the Muslim demographic as recorded in the National Census.
    The picture became murkier after 2011 with the revised Prevent strategy alongside the counter-extremism strategy that grew out of Prevent after 2013. Briefly some of the key opaque or non-transparent strategies have been as follows:

    (a) Use of subcontracted private companies (e.g. Breakthrough Media) with Home Office funding to deliver counter-extremism/counter-terrorism messaging in astroturfed forms. Through this is provided funding, training, in-kind services (e.g. website development), public relations and press promotion. One good example has been the intensive support given to Inspire whose founder went on to head the Commission for Countering Extremism.

    (b) Renaming entities or funding streams with the same overall purpose to avoid association with the toxic Prevent brand. This is to allow for a technical defence that “Project X is not Prevent funded”. Or the rebranding of Breakthrough Media as the Zinc Network. This can also be seen in the creation of a new fund delivered through a charity and an advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, “Building a Stronger Britain Together”, with Prevent-related counter-extremism goals, which has funded projects for cultural bodies like the Bradford Literature Festival.

    (c) Intersectionality from above. Direct interference in ethical and theological debates within the Muslim community, which itself operates along an axis of positions that increasingly mirrors those of post-Enlightenment European Jewry from orthodox to reform to secular.

    It means weaponising certain vectors of Islamic reform or mobilising wedge issues, especially those pertinent to Muslim youth, for the purposes of state security policies. The dynamism of digital Muslim youth culture makes it both open to astroturfing as well as resistant to it at the same time. It rides parasitically on youth countercultures more generally that British Muslim youth activists tap into, e.g. African American civil rights movements like Black Lives Matter, with projects such as “This is Woke”.

    (d) Subverting Cultural Outputs. The growing evidence that cultural outputs on television and the stage are put out to provide counter-terrorism/extremism messaging with secretive HO assistance. Similarly there is the silencing of counter-establishment art and culture outputs that question the dominant narrative, e.g. Homegrown’s cancellation by the National Youth Theatre.

    (e) Business and think-tank support for Astroturfing. There is a think tank and business element to astroturfing that was particularly evident in the American-influenced Obama-era “Countering Violent Extremism” strand. This has led to additional support from Silicon Valley companies such as Google and Twitter, who have supported initiatives such as Imamsonline in UK for instance.

    In my judgement, all this is doing is retarding and holding back the organic and authentic development of British Muslim communities from one generation to the next by bringing it into the domain of securitization.

    What is securitization and why is it important to understand this critical term?

    The concept of securitization was developed just after the ending of Cold War by a group of academics in Copenhagen. In essence, the state deems a population (or sector) as a security risk, in this case British Muslims, and while this is disputed by said population (or sector), this allows for the state to indulge in “exceptional measures” that would not be acceptable in normal (or non-security) issues.

    That is how it is with us British Muslims. We now live under the secular security state. Now one classical conception of secularism is the theory of “twin tolerations” as outlined by the late political theorist Alfred Stepan. In essence, state-religion relations are characterised not by the intensive state management of religious life and community but by recognising certain fundamental religious freedoms of conscience, association, etc.

    This can be defended as a classic liberal democratic ideal of secularism, and indeed it can be characterised as a British inflection of moderate political secularism in the terminology of political scientist and philosopher Tariq Modood.

    However, I would contend that this tradition of “twin tolerations” or “moderate political secularism” has been under huge pressure in the last twenty years, and one overriding factor in this has been securitization.

    In Britain, securitization creates, in sum, what I define as the “secular security state”. My hypothesis is this: securitization acts as a trump card to cancel out moderate traditions of secularism and gives license to a stronger laic or interventionist and policing role for the state vis-a-vis Islam and indeed some other religious groups too like Orthodox Jews or Evangelical Christians

    The SSS can intervene directly or indirectly into the religious, intellectual and cultural lives of British Muslims that would not be tolerated or supported by any other community. And it can do so with relative impunity and legitimacy.

    This is where a second concept developed by the Copenhagen School becomes important. This is desecuritization, namely the need to move a sector or a population out of the security domain back into normal politics so that crucial human rights, civil liberties and other social values can be restored to their proper place with respect to it, i.e. to British Muslim communities.

    As the War on Terror drags on without end, we British Muslims are entitled to ask with the philosopher Georgio Agamben whether what was once seen as a temporary emergency measure has become our new and continuous reality, “a permanent state of exception”.

    Britain is no longer a temporary “secular security state” but is abandoning its traditional moderate secularism for the coercive policing and religious remodelling or marginalisation found in France, Turkey, with even some features of the formally atheist communist states.

    Let us wake up and consider how far we have let matters slide — we have normalised the abnormal and internalised an unacceptable and unwarranted level of state interference in our community life. Now is the time to take a stand.

    https://twitter.com/YBirt/status/1162655669545263105

    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-19-2019 at 10:24 PM.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Summary of the controversy so far.

    Blurb

    Now it's been openly admitted...





    Another update.





    Where is the government Anti Muslim hatred working group on all this? Are they aware this is happening? Why do they not speak out on it?

    Their silence will only mean complicity in the @ukhomeoffice and RICU psychwar that is being played.

    Time to call people out.
    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-20-2019 at 07:57 PM.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update, more on the hounding of Zakir Naik.

    Blurb

    Dr Zakir Naik has been systematically targeted and perused by the Indian government in a very cheap and dirty game.



    Dr Zakir responds to allegations of racism.

    Blurb

    Dr Zakir Naik’s Response to Detractors who accuse Him of being a Racist.

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  15. #471
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Like to share, humorous take on the 'moderate muslim' project.

    Blurb

    Graham Jarvis is back with a challenge. Here is his guide on how he made Ali Dawah a moderate muzlim.

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  16. #472
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update

    EXCLUSIVE: Why I left Breakthrough Media, the Home Office’s secretive propaganda agency

    In this exclusive interview with 5Pillars, 21-year-old Amina Aweis who previously worked for the Home Office’s propaganda agency ‘Breakthrough Media’, describes what she witnessed as a content creator for the secretive government project.

    Q: How did you get into Breakthrough Media?


    I had finished my A-Levels and decided not to go to university in order to explore my interests in the creative field. I came across several opportunities during this time, one of which was an apprenticeship scheme in digital marketing and business. The apprenticeship was a year long and the skills I needed to complete my qualifications was enough to pique my interest. I secured my place and the skills my course was planning to equip me with were matched against several job roles that were available for me to apply for.

    One of the roles I came across was a social media manager for a platform called Zinc – an online space “promoting positive social change”. It was marketed as a “creative and informative platform” which would shed light on various topics and issues, be it social, political and environmental with video segments of inspirational stories of individuals and charities who were doing meaningful work in their communities.

    It was exactly what I was looking for and the aim of the platform aligned with my own values – promoting positive social change. My interview went smoothly, I had the advantage of having already built an online presence of my own. I accepted the offer and began the job immediately.

    Q: What did you know about Breakthrough Media at the time?


    Breakthrough Media was barely mentioned during my interview, other than that it was a digital agency that worked with “grassroots organisations”. I wasn’t really told much about it in and of itself, which looking back, made me feel uneasy although at the time, I couldn’t quite figure out why. I was more focused on making a good impression at my first 9-5 job and focusing on improving my skills and learning as much as I could.

    I was mainly involved with Zinc, and joined at a time where their Facebook page started to gain a lot of traction, and was growing rapidly in following.

    It was an exciting time for me, I was passionate about what the platform claimed to have represented and looked forward to contributing my ideas.

    Q: When did you start having doubts about Breakthrough Media?

    There were instances where Breakthrough Media would be brought up in relation to budget cuts for Zinc. I believe it was during this time that I had begun to wonder how this specific platform was tied to Breakthrough Media, and how its business model was set up. This was because it was always marketed as its own independent project where there was no external “client”. Whenever I did want a bit more clarification, I would be left even more confused.

    In fact, I was encouraged to not mention the name too much and avoid talking about it in depth outside of work. I was also made to sign the Official Secrets Act which was a bit puzzling at the time. I had assumed that this was normal procedure and so I didn’t think much of it then.

    Q: What did you personally witness there, especially with non-Muslim contributors posting content as Muslim women?

    The work to begin with was very simple and nothing new to me in terms of managing online content. I was in a small team which meant we all did more than what our job title suggested. There were many other teams working on the same floor, so I was exposed to a lot of other projects and supposed “grassroots” work.

    I was also exposed to situations that didn’t sit well with me. A lot of the content on these platforms mainly targeted young British Muslims, particularly Muslim women. However, the people behind these platforms didn’t reflect that. In fact, one of the few Muslim women who contributed so much towards these platforms was continuously gaslighted, bullied, and labelled as too “abrasive” to work with.

    There was one hijabi woman who left soon after I had joined because she was put in a predicament that did not align with her values. She warned me to be careful and to set boundaries for myself when working with the people there. I stuck to her advice as best as I could at the time. It was after she left that I really noticed some things that did not add up.

    I went from wanting to give it my all to make a good impression to picking my battles carefully. It was mentally, physically and spiritually exhausting and I really underestimated how much of a toll it took on me both at work and at home. I was being shut out of meetings with clients whose target audience were people like me and having my ideas discussed without me being present or fully involved in the process.

    When there were good times, it was hard to celebrate because it felt empty, simply because I couldn’t see my own progression within the company. I saw overqualified people tucked in the same place and freelancers consistently being exploited. I became numb to the environment around me and my patience had peaked. I felt invisible in a place that had the resources to speak to my communities. Soon after, I became selective of how much I would contribute to all these “grassroots” platforms and I no longer wanted to be associated with it.

    Q: What are your views about Breakthrough Media now, considering its links to the Home office and counter-extremism apparatus is confirmed?

    My feelings towards Breakthrough Media is one of frustration followed by a wave on unease upon discovering its undeniable link with the Home Office. My suspicions regarding their links to the UK Government was confirmed firstly, the way the business was structured in terms of when certain projects were receiving funding.

    Secondly, when I found out about individuals in the office who had certain affiliations to political parties whose values did not align with the clients they were working with.

    This was followed by the report advocacy group CAGE published, which gave me a deeper understanding of Breakthrough Media’s role in propagating content which they even admitted targets vulnerable young British Muslims.

    Q: How does the latest revelation of “This is Woke” being another Home Office project make you feel about state surveillance of Muslims and people of colour?


    Ironically, what the revelation of Woke’s Home Office funding proves is that digital spaces have become a hotbed for exploiting communities to spread problematic political agendas in the wake of fake news and misinformation.

    At a time where nearly half of online readers see fake news on their social media feeds at least once a day, it’s no surprise that this phenomenon has influenced and affected many political agendas and engagements. This leads to further distrust of the government and its various power structures, which is a sentiment that’s largely held within many minority communities, not just Muslims.

    In light of Breakthrough Media’s exploitative nature in the digital space, it’s clear that the state security for British Muslims is not with the aim of safeguarding, but rather maintaining control through surveillance to fuel political agendas which align with the Home Office.

    Amina Aweis is a writer, content strategist, social commentator and a software engineer. She is passionate about getting more women into tech and more Muslims in the creative industries. You can follow her on Twitter @Ayymina_.

    https://5pillarsuk.com/2019/08/21/ex...ive-pr-agency/

    Last edited by سيف الله; 08-27-2019 at 10:52 PM.
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  17. #473
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another random example of British government propaganda. Its so crude and vulgar, how can anybody fall for this.





    More generally.



    Last edited by سيف الله; 09-04-2019 at 10:23 PM.
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  18. #474
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another example of (British) government subversion.



    Lifestyle website for Muslim teens is covertly funded by the Home Office

    Two SuperSisters employees resign after discovering links to counter-extremism strategy


    A Muslim online lifestyle platform targeting British teenagers is covertly funded by the Home Office’s counter-extremism programme, the Observer has learned.

    The revelation about funding of the project has led to a row between its owners, a former Muslim employee and its Muslim audience.

    SuperSisters was built in 2015 by J-Go Media, a company of nine staff members from east London that describes itself as “a not-for-profit community group” and has two decades of experience of engaging with Muslim communities in East London. SuperSisters is promoted as a “global platform for young Muslimahs in east London to share and create inspiring and empowering content”.

    But after realising that recent funding for the project was coming from Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT), an arm of the government’s counter-extremism strategy, readers expressed anger and accused its directors of betraying the Muslim community. Two Muslim employees have since resigned.

    Sabah Ismail, a social media manager for SuperSisters from February to August this year, said: “In my naiveity, I thought that through this ‘opportunity’ at SuperSisters, I really could help to make real change, pushing forward a different narrative from Muslim women themselves, showing that we are empowered and multi-faceted … I realise now that with the Home Office funding the project at the root, there was no way I could do this, regardless of the content I was pushing out.”

    SuperSisters was conceived by J-Go in response to Shamima Begum and two other British schoolgirls running away to Syria in 2015. The project secured funding from Prevent, the National Counter Terrorism Security Office’s controversial strategy, which was set up to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. Prevent has repeatedly faced claims of state-sanctioned spying on Muslims and is currently under independent review.

    J-Go’s directors, Jon Hems and Jan Bros, stated: “Where we acknowledge we went wrong, and we apologise for it, is not more clearly stating the source of funding on the SuperSisters Instagram and blog, not just our [parent] website [J-GoLtd.com].”

    According to J-Go, “countering extremism for us is about sharing an alternative narrative to highlight positive stories coming from a diverse contributor network”.

    However, SuperSisters is left battling the widespread suspicion that it was purposely designed to promote a state-approved notion of the Islamic faith with the potential to track its target audience of British Muslim girls aged 13 to 19. One reader, Aeysh Ahmed, wrote on Instagram: “I am actually shocked ... it’s deeply problematic that non-Muslims feel they have the right to define what our unified identity is.” Another user, @the_hybrid_life, said: “This is truly shocking and disturbing and feels entirely like a violation.”

    Former contributors have claimed that at one point there were no Muslim women employed by J-Go working on the editorial for SuperSisters, while still giving readers the impression that this lifestyle site covering health, politics and current affairs and poetry was made for and by young Muslim women. J-GO deny this and stated: “There were Muslim women on the team the entire duration of the project ... We have never claimed to be a platform made by Muslim women ... our ‘SuperSisters’ are the women and girls we’ve featured on our page.”

    But Ismail confirmed that she was surprised to find there were no Muslim women in the editorial or creative team when she joined, and that “despite [J-Go] running a project for Muslim women, most of the team were far removed from the principles of Islam, some even disagreeing out-rightly with our beliefs”.

    She worked on the project under the lead of a non-Muslim, female creative producer who ran SuperSisters for two years and prior to joining J-GO, had tweeted: “I can handle religion if you’re not involving me in it and its not causing world wars, terrorist attacks or homocides. Oh wait…”.J-GO has been rocked by the resignations of two members of its Muslim staff last month and has suspended activity on its blog. Ismail says she felt “used” as “a female Muslim puppet” to legitimise the project and in her final month, was given a managerial role running SuperSisters while still only being paid the London Living Wage (£10.55 per hour). Amid producing videos, articles and social media posts, Ismail used religious text quoting the Prophet Muhammad in content designed for a Muslim audience. One day she turned up to work to find “all that was taken off the site and archived. They said they wanted to do away with anything overtly Islamic”.

    It has been reported that state agencies have been actively involved with online propaganda targeted at Muslim citizens by offering “counter-narratives” to what they consider radical Islam. The Home Office’s Research, Information and Communications Unit, or Ricu, has worked extensively with PR agencies and new media companies since 2007 to target those who fit the profile of vulnerable young Muslim.

    J-Go declined to comment on whether they had ever worked with or for Ricu but admitted erasing some of Ismail’s posts, and told the Observer: “We acknowledge that J-Go is not an Islamic organisation in either mission, majority staff composition or majority leadership composition. We therefore do not believe we have the credibility or authority to post passages from theological texts.”

    Aside from its online presence, SuperSisters was also funded to organise workshops and events aimed at British Muslim girls in east London. J-Go denied this was a data capturing exercise and said: “There are two forms which we ask attendees to complete during the workshops. The first is an attendance sheet. As part of our safeguarding policy for supervising children under 18, we ask that parents put in their postcodes in case we cannot locate the parent in an emergency ... it would be incorrect to imply that the SuperSisters project could ever be a data capturing operation. We do not have the resources, motivation or requirement to do that.”

    Yet the scandal at J-Go comes after another media company, which claims to “counter fake news and champion authentic voices”, was exposed last month by Middle East Eye for creating a social media network called This is Woke, targeting young Muslims on behalf of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT). The staff, working under Breakthrough Media, which has subsequently been rebranded as Zinc Network, have been bound by the Official Secrets Act. The company, located near Westminster, is closely aligned to government and has been key to the delivery of multiple RICU projects. The Home Office declined to comment on this case, claiming that national security concerns were “of overriding importance” against public interest in transparency surrounding its counter terror and extremism projects.

    Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, an activist and poet who withdrew from the Bradford Literature festival in July after learning it was also funded by BSBT, describes the Home Office’s practices as “shadowy” and “racist”. She said: “[It matters] because not only our public institutions, but our media platforms, arts and culture events, civic life and social lives are being targeted at every level because we are Muslim. This is what decimates trust. Who and what are we supposed to trust for information or opinion or insight when our identities and experiences are being violently coopted and repackaged to us in the name of “protecting” us?

    “At every level of every institution, the idea that Muslims are all at risk of perpetrating violence has been enshrined in the name of security and is causing the mass surveillance and targeting of us across the board. This is Orwellian.”

    BSBT has awarded more than £9m to organisations since 2015. The Home Office said: “BSBT is an open and transparent programme, which supports local people in their vital work to bring communities together, promote fundamental values and tackle the spread of all extremist ideologies.

    “The Home Office has provided BSBT grant funding for the SuperSisters project since 2018 to provide support for Muslim women.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...he-home-office

    EDIT - Another update.

    Being a Muslim is reduced to nothing more than having a hair style. Can the propaganda get any more cruder?

    Last edited by سيف الله; 09-16-2019 at 11:20 PM.
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  20. #475
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update



    Muslim charity workers suffered ‘humiliating questioning’ by terror police during aid trip

    A Muslim charity has launched a legal challenge against the government after its aid workers were subjected to ‘humiliating questioning’ by counter terrorism police at Heathrow airport. Human Aid UK, says it was left with no option but to launch the legal bid to challenge controversial counter terrorism laws after a ‘large pattern of harassment of Muslim Charities at UK borders’.

    The charity says it provides aid to war-torn areas across the Middle East, including Gaza, Syria and Yemen. It claims that in the latest incident on 9 July, its delegates and charity workers were stopped at Heathrow airport by border officials and counter terror police, as they tried to travel to Gaza to deliver aid. The charity says its donations for projects were also seized by the UK Border Agency during a schedule 7 stop.

    One of those who was questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, was the charity’s operations director, Sohidul Islam, who described being ‘humiliated’ and feeling ‘violated’ during six hours of questioning.

    He told Metro.co.uk: ‘The schedule 7 stop made me feel violated. I went on this aid delegation to help the besieged women and children of Gaza, I am innocent yet I was treated like a criminal. ‘Why? ‘I was held for 6 hours, asked several questions, had my fingerprint and DNA samples taken. ‘Additionally I was photographed from all angles like it was a police station mug shot.’ Sohidul says he was released without charge following the questioning, but he and others had missed their flight and felt like their aid work was being ‘criminalised’. He added: ‘I was asked questioned about my religion, which mosque I pray at, my family member’s details, and all things which seemed unconnected and irrelevant to the purpose of my travel, it seemed like a total fishing exercise to find something that isn’t there.’

    "The Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 allows individuals to be detained at the border for up to six hours if counter terrorism officers believe they could be engaged in terrorist activities. Those detained have no right to silence, have to surrender their phones, computers and passwords and provide fingerprints and DNA. The chair of the charity, Nur Choudhury, says his staff and volunteers have been ‘stopped repeatedly’ under schedule 7 powers. He added: ‘Like many Muslim charities delivering lifesaving aid overseas, Human Aid UK has had staff and volunteers stopped repeatedly under Schedule 7 powers. ‘During these stops, our aid workers are searched, interrogated under terrorism laws and their fingerprints and DNA samples are taken.

    ‘There seems to be no way to stop this harassment and criminalisation of aid work. One begins to wonder ‘is it a crime to care for others?’ A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘The use of Schedule 7 is vital to the police in their work to combat terrorism. ‘The decision to examine an individual using Schedule 7 is operational, undertaken independently by police, and arbitrary or discriminatory use of the powers is prohibited. ‘Large amounts of cash being taken in or out of the country for which a legitimate origin cannot be found are liable to be seized by Police or Border Force under powers in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.’

    https://metro.co.uk/2019/09/15/musli...re.top.twitter

    Last edited by سيف الله; 09-16-2019 at 11:21 PM.
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update.



    How Whitehall Secretly Weaponises 'Inspirational' Online Content for Counter-Terror Purposes

    SuperSisters, a “global platform for young Muslims in East London to share and create inspiring and empowering content”, has been exposed as a covert government counter-extremism project funded by the Home Office’s controversial Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT) programme.

    The site’s true nature was revealed after Sabah Ismail resigned her post as project and social media manager at SuperSisters in August after six months, and began publicising her adverse experiences working for the enterprise.

    “In my naivety, I thought through this ‘opportunity’ I really could help to make real change, pushing forward a different narrative from Muslim women themselves, showing we are empowered and multi-faceted…I realise now with the Home Office funding the project at the root, there was no way I could do this, regardless of the content I was pushing out,” she told The Observer 15th September.

    SuperSisters was created in 2015 by J-Go Media, which styles itself as a “regeneration and training agency working as a social enterprise based in the East End of London”. Claiming to have a “long history of engaging with Muslim communities in East London”, the firm boasts among its clients a number of government departments, local councils and state-funded initiatives – although the Home Office and BSBT programme are conspicuously absent.

    Sabah feels she was “used” as “a female Muslim puppet” to legitimise the project - when she joined the site in February this year, there were no Muslim women on the site’s editorial or creative teams, and moreover most of the team were “far removed” from the principles of Islam, “some even disagreeing out-rightly with our beliefs”. For instance, a producer she worked under – and who’d run SuperSisters for two years - tweeted “I can handle religion if you’re not involving me in it and it’s not causing world wars, terrorist attacks or homocides. Oh wait…” prior to joining the project.

    In her final month at SuperSisters, Sabah was given a managerial role on the site despite only receiving the London Living Wage (£10.55 per hour) as remuneration. Some of the content she produced during this period included quotes from the Prophet Muhammad - one day she arrived at work to find all overtly Islamic material had been removed from the site, with bosses informing her they wished to “do away” with religious posts altogether.

    Fire Fighting

    The site has remained dormant since Sabah’s acrimonious departure, the most recent post – a review of documentary film One Night in Al-Aqsa – published 7th August, although its ‘About’ section has been updated with an official statement from J-Go’s directors Jon Hems and Jan Bros addressing the “completely false rumours” that “middle-aged white men are behind the content of the SuperSisters platform”.

    It alleges the site was launched by a Muslim woman employed by J-GO, after speaking to residents of Tower Hamlets and asking them “what they wanted to see as a response” to the actions of Shamima Begum, a British-born Muslim who fled the UK with two friends in February 2015, aged 15, to join Daesh in Syria. A common answer, Hems and Bros claim, was the creation of a website and blog featuring “positive stories representing their community and successful Muslim women within it”.

    “We are very proud with the limited staff we have had to see the project grow to the extent it has…We have had from the very start Muslim women involved…The directors of J-Go have never had any creative or editorial control of the platform…We see ourselves as facilitators, who created a platform for Muslim women to come and speak about issues on their own terms. Where we acknowledge we went wrong, and we apologise for it, is not more clearly stating the source of funding on the SuperSisters Instagram and blog,” they explained.

    While failing to acknowledge BSBT’s role in bankrolling the project may stem from mere innocent oversight, SuperSisters’ creators would have good reason for consciously concealing their true funding sources. Since launch in 2015, BSBT has awarded almost £10 million to a total of 233 organisations and projects - including multi-faith bridge-building initiatives, youth centres, health spas and a table tennis club, among many others – that “counter extremism and build stronger communities”.

    Such objectives are arguably benign in theory, but since inception BSBT has been dogged with allegations its activities predicated on the notion Muslims are predisposed to violence and extremism. In July, six writers withdrew from the Bradford Literature festival in protest after it was revealed BSBT helped subsidise the event. Among those who pulled out was activist and poet Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan – in response to the revelation SuperSisters also received funds from the programme, she published a blistering statement via Instagram, slamming the “racism” at the heart of the project, and its “Orwellian” nature.

    “Who and what are we supposed to trust for information or opinion or insight when our identities and experiences are being violently coopted and repackaged in the name of ‘protecting’ us? At every level of every institution the idea Muslims are all at risk of perpetrating violence has been enshrined in the name of security and is causing mass surveillance and targeting of us across the board. Educate yourselves…organise to resist,” she fulminated.

    On top of maintaining a blog and social media presence, SuperSisters has also convened a number of events aimed at Muslim girls in East London, the most recent being a workshop for 11-16 year olds girls “to learn video creation skills, from story-boarding right through to shooting and editing” on 20th August, and a ‘Big Eid Party’ on 6th June, which featured “food, henna, poetry, performers and a bazaar” – the organisers keenly underlined the events were free to attend in both instances.

    While attendees were obliged to fill in forms and hand over potentially sensitive personal information, such as their address and names of family members. J-Go’s directors claim this is required under their safeguarding policies in case of emergencies, and in no way a “data capturing operation”, with the firm lacking “the resources, motivation or requirement to do that”.

    While it’s unknown whether surveillance is part of BSBT’s remit, although its counterpart Prevent – an even more controversial government counter-extremism strategy – explicitly aims to identify and monitor potentially ‘at-risk’ individuals. Launched in 2006, it’s one of four strands within the UK government’s counter-terrorism strategy – the others being Pursue, Protect and Prepare – and aims to prevent individuals becoming radicalised and/or supporting terrorism at home and abroad.

    In July 2015, legal requirements for social workers, teachers, health professionals and council staff, among others were introduced, obliging them to report anyone they suspected of harbouring extremist sympathies to authorities. Furthermore, the barriers for ‘intervention’ were also drastically reduced, leading to a nursery child in Luton being referred to Prevent after he mispronounced the word cucumber as “cooker bomb”.

    Strikingly, in their statement on the SuperSisters site, Hems and Bros acknowledge the project received “some early funding” from Prevent, although they allege the initiative “was not deemed suitable for Prevent funding”, so it duly ended.

    Stay Woke

    In a sense, that the UK government has sought to exploit the digital realm in this manner is hardly surprising. Indeed, it would be amazing if the seemingly ever-increasing popularity of lifestyle content had gone unnoticed by those in power. Charities, think tanks NGOs and ‘grassroots’ movements have long-been surreptitiously coopted if not outright created by the state in order to surreptitiously perpetuate wider policy agendas – online platforms are an obvious next step.

    Moreover though, SuperSisters was exposed as an effective state operation mere days after another social news platform aimed at young people was revealed by Middle East Eye to likewise be a secret state counter-terrorism operation.

    Launched in May 2018, This Is Woke – a reference to the phrase “stay woke” popularised by the Black Lives Matter movement, an entreaty for people to remain cognisant of sociopolitical issues – pledges to keep its followers “in the know about issues which matter the most”, and has attracted 69,410 ‘likes’ on Facebook as of 18th September. There’s no indication it was created at the behest of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) by multimedia agency Zinc Network (formerly Breakthrough Media), the contractor of choice for Whitehall’s shadowy Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), which operates out of the same offices as OSCT.



    The page’s feed offers a steady flow of ‘inspirational’ clickbait videos – some of which have racked up millions of views – covering ‘hot button’ topics such as mental health, endangered species and the environment, and infographics bearing quotes from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and other prominent figures.

    It also features brief clips of panel discussions, in which groups of spritely, handsome individuals donning hip garments discuss issues, including veganism, gender and dating apps. Given the page’s own clandestine origins and manipulative intent, it’s extremely ironic one such conversation centres on the issue of ‘fake news’ – in it, a participant notes it’s often difficult if not impossible to know who or what the source of information is.

    The only clue This Is Woke may have an underlying political agenda is the steady stream of Islam-centric content it publishes – videos clearly targeted at believers and non-believers alike present an extremely friendly face of Muslims in Britain, while preaching unity, community cohesion and non-violence.

    Again, these are entirely recommendable and benevolent messages in theory, but in practice the operation clearly serves a more insidious purpose – namely, ignoring and/or discrediting other explanations for radicalisation, such as discrimination and disenfranchisement at home and the British state’s military adventurism abroad, in favour of the Whitehall-approved narrative that extremism is a perverse aberration without comprehensible motivations.


    Furthermore, other ‘astroturf’ projects crafted by Zinc Network have demonstrably served much darker objectives, and had potentially grave real-world consequences. For example, in 2013 the agency produced a two-part documentary, Return to Somalia, on behalf of the Anti-Tribalism Movement (ATM), an NGO “aimed at educating and raising awareness about the effects of tribalism within communities”.

    The documentary aimed to depict Somalia as a place of “opportunities and optimism, attracting thousands of Somalis to return home”.

    The first part follows two young Somali men living in North West London who return to Mogadishu with the aim of setting up an NGO to help eradicate inter-tribal discrimination in Somalia and across the world – in the second, a Somali woman who for some years has been living in the US and working as a hip-hop music manager leaves behind her liberal, carefree life in Washington, DC to embrace a new identity in a mostly conservative society.

    The episodes were viewed by over 200,000 people worldwide, aired by many international TV stations - including Kenya National TV, Islamic Channel and Universal TV – watched by Somalis.

    Return to Somalia’s funding source isn’t entirely certain, but it’s known RICU specifically selected ATM for a project designed to make Somali refugees go ‘home’, following then-Prime Minister David Cameron stating the political situation in Somalia “directly threatens British interests” in 2011, and earmarking £250 million in security and development funding for the country over the next four years.

    Rest here.

    https://sputniknews.com/military/201...twork-prevent/
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  22. #477
    سيف الله's Avatar Full Member
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Like to share, more on the 'moderate' Muslim project.



    Related, Anyone remember the days when Islam was considered the new communism? An evolution of that train of thought.



    Over the years Islamists have come to denote radical guys like us. i.e those who advocate for Shariah. In recent times Western Sufis use the word Islamist to denote guys like us who are apparently inspired by Marxism.

    It is often used interchangeably with Ikhwami, Qutubi or Jamati or simply Wahhabi.

    So, do you see the pattern? People like Hamza Yusuf, Adam Kelwick, etc intersect with people like Majid Nawaz and Quilliam when it comes to the issue of Islamists.

    This divide among the Muslim Community is a very successful execution of the RAND doctrine for the Muslim Community. Us "Islamists" seek restoration(or rather reconstruction) of the Islamic order(which is the most accurate translation of Dar Al Islam).

    We are not really interested in compromises for safe spaces for an unplanned dawah scheme. Ask any celebrity Shaykh today. What is your long term plan?

    Chances are that they have none at all.

    I might ask people to be more fair in their critique of feminism, crt or whatever and I might challenge the Madhabists and Sufis but at the end of the day my allegiance is to the Quran and Sunnah.

    And if seeking restoration of Shariah, if seeking restoration of scholarly etiquette in popular discourses makes me an Islamist, it's a badge I wear with pride.

    But it doesn't change the fact that Muslims are implicitly and explicitly contributing to the divide and fitnah within the Ummah.

    It will be a long while before we can truly break out of this Orientalist paradigm.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...592386048.html
    Last edited by سيف الله; 09-22-2019 at 10:01 PM.
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  23. #478
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Like to share

    Blurb

    The claim that for Muslims to be successful in the West, we need to get rid of "cultural Islam" is dangerous and leads to many bad outcomes.


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  24. #479
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Meet the new 'moderate' Muslim.



    Last edited by سيف الله; 10-01-2019 at 03:47 PM.
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  26. #480
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    Re: Syria, Gaza and the Criminalisation of Islam

    Salaam

    Another update.



    Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army 'psyops' soldier

    Head of editorial for MENA is part-time officer in the 77th Brigade, an 'information warfare' unit which has worked on 'behavioural change' projects in the region


    The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit, Middle East Eye has established.

    Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company's UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 in order to develop “non-lethal” ways of waging war.

    The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as “information warfare”.

    Carter says the 77th Brigade is giving the British military “the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level”; to shape perceptions of conflict. Some soldiers who have served with the unit say they have been engaged in operations intended to change the behaviour of target audiences.

    What exactly MacMillan is doing with the unit is difficult to determine, however: he has declined to answer any questions about his role, as has Twitter and the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD).

    Twitter would say only that “we actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests”, while the MoD said that the 77th Brigade had no relationship with Twitter, other than using it for communication.

    The 77th Brigade's headquarters is located west of London. It brought together a number of existing military units such as the Media Operations Group and the 15 Psychological Operations Group.

    At its launch, the UK media was told that the new unit of “Facebook warriors” would be around 1,500 strong, and made up of both regular soldiers and reservists. In recent months, the army has been approaching British journalists and asking them to join the unit as reservists.

    While clearly engaged in propaganda, the MoD is reluctant to use that word to describe the unit’s operations.

    Instead, the British army’s website describes the 77th Brigade as “an agent of change” which aims to “challenge the difficulties of modern warfare using non-lethal engagement and legitimate non-military levers as a means to adapt behaviours of the opposing forces and adversaries”.

    MacMillan, whose editorial responsibilities at Twitter also cover Europe and Africa, was a captain in the unit at the end of 2016, according to one British army publication. The MoD will not disclose his current rank.

    His involvement with the 77th Brigade was made public when he disclosed it on his page at LinkedIn, the online professional networking site.

    As well as outlining his responsibilities at Twitter, MacMillan wrote that he had an interest in politics and international affairs, had trained at Sandhurst, the British military academy, “and am a reserve officer in the British Army serving in 77th Brigade, which specialises in non-lethal engagement”.

    His page has recently been edited to remove all references to his service with 77th Brigade.

    'Behavioural Change for the Middle East Region'

    MacMillan is not alone in outlining his involvement with the unit on his LinkedIn page.

    A former 77th Brigade officer has said on his page that he served with the unit’s “Information Warfare Teams” in the UK, Bosnia, France, Kenya and Albania.

    Another, a former officer in the UK’s Royal Navy, has said that while serving with the 77th Brigade he was “the lead component on Behavioural Change for the Middle East Region and Counter-Radicalisation”.

    This person - who is not a Twitter employee - added that his duties included “advising the Jordanian Armed Forces and Royal Hashemite Court” and that he was also seconded to the Strategic Effects Team at the UK Ministry of Defence.

    Contacted by MEE, he declined to elaborate.

    Some insight into the unit’s methods was provided by Carter in a speech last year at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based military and defence think tank.

    “In our 77 Brigade … we have got some remarkable talent when it comes to social media, production design, and indeed Arabic poetry,” he said.

    “Those sorts of skills we can’t afford to retain in the Regular component [of the army] but they are the means of us delivering capability in a much more imaginative way than we might have been able to do in the past.

    “We also, though, need to continue to improve our ability to fight on this new battlefield, and I think it’s important that we build on the excellent foundation we’ve created for Information Warfare through our 77 Brigade which is now giving us the capability to compete in the war of narratives at the tactical level.”

    Carter went on to quote a recently published book, War in 140 Characters, in which journalist David Patrikarakos observes that during the war in Ukraine, “counter intuitively, it mattered more who won the war of words and narratives than who had the most potent weaponry”.

    Covert influence campaigns

    With the Arab Spring demonstrating, almost a decade ago, that protestors could topple tyrants after sharing information on social media – and with the wider realisation that technology has shifted some power from national governments and media companies towards networks of individuals – many observers assumed it was only a matter of time before the state began to counter that trend.

    “Homo digitalis may challenge the state,” Patrikarakos writes, “but the state will always fight back.”

    Covert influence campaigns being mounted by states such as Russia and China have been identified and exposed on a number of occasions.

    In August, Facebook announced that it had shut down multiple accounts run by a company called New Waves, based in Cairo, and an Emirati firm, Newave.

    https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/t...l-warfare-unit
    Last edited by سيف الله; 09-30-2019 at 10:53 AM.
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