What is reproduced and linked to below could very easily be described as a conflict in which sensible people would wish both parties could lose. Both the Islamic group MEND and Fiyaz Mughal and his various organisations and projects could quite properly be described as equally malodorous and this conflict between them classified as a ‘collision of turds’
What the conflict revolves around, is accusations made by Mughal to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, against the MEND group that they described Mughal and his Tell Mama vehicle as ‘too friendly to Jews’ and implied that groups like MEND accused Tell Mama of being ‘Zionist leaning’. It should be noted that in additional written evidence given to the HASC Mughal’s Tell Mama organisation also made a number of unsubstantiated allegations about a number of organisations, writers and publications, including this one, Fahrenheit211.
MEND called the allegations made against them by Mughal as ‘libellous and defamatory’ and set out their reasoning for this view in an 8 page response to Parliament which I have both linked to and embedded below. For those unaware of MEND’s activities they are very much a group in the political Islam mould. They campaign for more involvement of Muslims in the British political system and are opponents of the State of Israel.
In a critical article on the subject of the MEND group, written by Andrew Gilligan and published in the London Daily Telegraph Mr Gilligan peeled back the moderate curtain that MEND covers itself in and showed the world a group with some quite unsavoury views and connections.
Mr Gilligan said:
At first glance, it looks admirable: two closely connected campaigns, called YouElect and Mend (Muslim Engagement and Development), to get British Muslims involved and voting in this year’s general election.
Mend says it is “creating and supporting an environment in which British Muslims can confidently and critically engage in politics”. One of YouElect’s leaders, Jamil Rashid, told the Islam Channel: “We’re all part of this society, so I think it’s extremely important that Muslims stand up and be counted.” Who could disagree? That, no doubt, is why the Electoral Commission has made Mend an “official partner” in registering Muslim voters for the coming campaign; why at least 10 Labour and Tory MPs joined the launch of Mend’s “Muslim manifesto” in the Commons earlier this month; and why even Lynton Crosby, the Conservative campaign director, addressed a Mend fringe meeting at last year’s Tory conference.
Mend also holds events with police chiefs, gets funding from the EU and is a “key partner” in the Hacked Off campaign for state-backed controls on the press. The truth, however, is that these distinguished bodies and people have been conned. Both Mend and YouElect are clever fronts to win political access and influence for Islamists holding extreme and anti-democratic views.
When not giving reassuring interviews, Mr Rashid is a director of the London-based Muslim Research and Development Foundation, the think tank of one of Britain’s most notorious hate preachers, Haitham al-Haddad, an extremist cleric and Sharia judge from east London.
Haddad describes democracy as “filthy”, regards music as a “prohibited and fake message of love and peace”, states that Jews and Christians are the “enemies of Allah” who will “all go to hellfire” and advises Muslims not to “integrate … as simple as that”.
On March 6, Mr Rashid spoke at a rally organised by Cage, the pro-terrorist lobby group which had the week before provoked outrage by describing Mohammed Emwazi, “Jihadi John”, as a “kind and gentle” man who had been “radicalised by MI5”. He described Cage as “the leaders in our community – we are all Cage, and we stand with them in all their endeavours”. Ismail Patel, the director of YouElect, is also spokesman for the British Muslim Initiative, closely linked to Hamas, the terrorist group which wants to destroy Israel, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to replace secular democratic government with a caliphate under Islamic law.
Mr Gilligan also claimed that MEND had supported the CAGE group when they were attacked in the media and political spheres for CAGE’s support for ‘Jihadi John’.
Mr Gilligan continued and said that MEND had:
…..links to Haddad, who, despite his views on democracy, has appeared in a Mend video urging Muslims to vote. He has said in the past that voting may be permissible to return a Muslim majority government in “50 years, something like this” as a prelude to “Islam spreading all over the world”.
Many reasonable people would look at MEND and look at them as a threat to democracy rather than an addition to it because of this groups core and publicly expressed views and known dodgy associates.
MEND’s argument with Mughal is that he used Parliamentary privilege to defame MEND although there are many of us who can quite justifiably claim that MEND do not require defaming as they expose and condemn themselves by their own words and actions. In the introduction to MEND’s refutation of Mughal’s allegations MEND said:
This supplementary submission is presented by MEND (Muslim Engagement and Development) in response to evidence given to the committee byMr Fiyaz Mughalon Tuesday 13 December.
During the session, Mr Mughal abused parliamentary privilege to make a number of libellous allegations against MEND. We take this opportunity to set the record straight and torespond to claims made against MEND to the committee.
Mr Mughal made remarks referring to “attacks from small sections of Muslim communities” faced by his organisation, Tell MAMA, and described such “attacks” as consisting of claims of “being too Jew-friendly’; for being the friends of Zionists, because our chair is Jewish; for being in the pay of Mossad
“.He said “These are some of the daily regurgitations we come across from groups whopurport to be tackling Islamophobia.
“He went on to argue “those groupsalso have some sway in this house, and it is extremely troubling,it isextremely troubling in our society to come across mindsets that live in our country,that promote this absolute nonsense that corrode communities and who give that absolute view toextremists beyond the Muslim community that all Muslims are like that.
“Mr Mughal further said: “we have to tackle that group head-on as well, and make very clear that their conspiracy, their anti-Semitism, their hatred towards other communities and that their uni-polar view of life actually will be challenged.
“When asked to identify by name the “groups” he was alluding to, Mr Mughal said
“Well I can giveyou some groups. MEND for example, I can give you other groups like CAGE for example.
“Mr Mughal went on to say, with direct reference to the groups he had previously named, “
These groups attack us daily because of our view we work with Jewish communities. This is something
that this house needs to understand and also I say to the Home Secretary and to the Home Office there is a time where we have to stand up for core values. We talk about British values, now’s the time to stand up for them.”
MEND then went on to trot out their excuses and reasoning why they had been defamed by Mughal and denied calling Tell Mama an organisation that was too ‘Jew friendly’. MEND also appear to be upset that Tell Mama’s Jewish co-chair had allegedly helped to get a ‘Palestinian’ hate preacher Shaykh Raed Salah, excluded from the United Kingdom.
MEND are a group that are connected to some pretty nasty people as we can see by the excerpt from the Telegraph report and are attempting to use their activist muscle to influence British elections. It needs to be said at this point that MEND have been unwisely indulged by politicians just as Tell Mama have been indulged over recent years. Both these groups have too much influence and both groups provide good reasons why they should be opposed.
MEND are not a group to be trusted. Despite the eloquent and persuasive language and the seemingly plausible excuses that have been used in MEND’s submission to the HASC, MEND want more Islamic influence on British politics and British society and that is a wish that a growing number of non Muslim Britons are none too happy about.
Mughal on the other hand, is the founder of a group called Tell Mama which was set up by Mughal to monitor ‘Islamophobia’ but which has been notable for inflating ‘hate crime’ figures, linking with press censorship groups like Hacked Off, and engaging in morally questionable activities such as exploiting a mentally ill transsexual convert to Islam for political purposes. Mughal’s group has been given the epithet of ‘mendacious grievance mongering taqiyya artists’ by the large number of opponents to Mughals’ Tell Mama organisation. Mughal’s various groups and projects that range from Tell Mama itself through Tell Mama’s parent organisation ‘Faith Matters’ to some of Mughal’s projects prior to forming Faith Matters, have been heavily criticised for being a waste of public money. These projects were the usual sort of wasteful ‘communal’ ones that should be eradicated and included a ‘care for converts to Islam’ project which netted Mughal and his project the grand total of £100,000. This information comes from Freedom Of Information Act requests made to the Department of Communities and Local Government that were submitted by those not directly connected to the Fahrenheit211 blog. A comprehensive list of articles published by Fahrenheit211 concerning Fiyaz Mughal or Tell Mama or other organisations that are connected to Mughal can be found by searching on the F211 site for either ‘Fiyaz Mughal’ or ‘Tell Mama’ or by using the name of any other organisation that is connected to him.
This dispute between Fiyaz Mughal, Tell Mama and MEND is one that as I said earlier many will wish would both lose. Nearly all parties to this conflict are considered by an number of those opposed to the spread of Islam and especially political Islam in our societies, as to be dangerous, dishonest, seditious, wasteful of public funds and exercising an undue influence on the governance of Britain and on public policy. The MEND, Tell Mama, CAGE, Fiyaz Mughal nexus is one that brings no benefit to the majority of people and it would be better if the political class saw these individuals and entities for what they are which are a motley collection of vexatious grievance mongers that often put on a smile for those who are useful for them but support, to a greater or lesser degree, the advancement in Britain of the violent and disagreeable ideology of Islam.
I can’t quite shake a particular and mildly inappropriate mental image that this conflict between MEND, Tell Mama and Mughal gives me. That image is that of an 18th century duel between two English gentlemen, both claiming their honour had been besmirched but both equally disagreeable characters, who are facing each other on the lawn getting ready to fire at one another. This spat between MEND and Mughal’s Tell Mama group is a case of ‘pistols at dawn’ for two comparably dodgy groups. It’s a damned shame that both these groups cannot pull their metaphorical triggers and despatch themselves into the political hereafter at exactly the same time. This would remove two nasty Islam related political irritants who do nothing to improve the nation or enhance its freedoms, from the country at one fell swoop.
To conclude: I feel that the nation would be far better off all round if all these various Islamic grievance mongers and political charlatans were seen for the threat to our democracy and freedom that they represent. As a matter of urgency they need to be both removed from their positions of unwarranted and unaccountable political influence and most certainly be removed from the teat of public funding.
Links
MEND’s written evidence to the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee
http://mend.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/HASC151216_MEND.pdf
Andrew Gilligan article from the Telegraph on MEND
Inside Fiyaz Mughal’s money making machine
The scandal concerning large amounts of money being spent by the taxpayer on various Fiyaz Mughal-related projects
Tell Mama group defames the Fahrenheit211 blog amongst others to the Home Affairs Select Committee
PDF of the MEND statement
