Aamer Anwar and Asif Siddique (brother of Mohammed Atif Siddique) will be speaking at a public meeting on Tuesday 13 November
7.30 pm, Mitchell Theatre, Granville Street, Glasgow
Other speakers include Alasdair Gray (author), Doug Jewell (CAMPACC), Carlo Morelli (UCU), Noman Tahir (IWitness), Jonathan Shafi (Glasgow Stop The War Coalition)
Admission Free – All welcome. Doors open 7pm
Sponsored by SACC and Glasgow Stop The War Coalition
An extensive mapping program launched by the LAPD’s anti-terrorism bureau to identify Muslim enclaves across the city sparked outrage Thursday from some Islamic groups and civil libertarians, who denounced the effort as an exercise in racial and religious profiling.
Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing, who heads the bureau, defended the undertaking as a way to help Muslim communities avoid the influence of those who would radicalize Islamic residents and advocate “violent, ideologically-based extremism.”
“We certainly reject this idea completely,” said Shakeel Syed, executive director of the Islamic Shura Council of Southern California. “This stems basically from this presumption that there is homogenized Muslim terrorism that exists among us.” Syed said he is a member of Police Chief William J. Bratton’s forum of religious advisors, but had not been told of the community mapping program. “This came as a jolt to me,” Syed said.
Hussam Ayloush, who leads the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the mapping “basically turns the LAPD officers into religious political analysts, while their role is to fight crime and enforce the laws.”
Los Angeles Times, 9 November 2007
See also Associated Press, 9 November 2007
Ministers set on locking people up without charge should listen to the Muslim mainstream, not the neocon fringe, argues Seumas Milne.
Terror detention ‘a kind of modern torture’
By Tom Mellen
Morning Star, 8 November 2007
TWO innocent brothers who were locked up for a week under anti-terror laws urged MPs to resist the attack on civil liberties on Wednesday. In a passionate appeal to backbenchers, they described government plans to double the amount of time suspects can be detained as amounting to “modernised torture.”
Mohammed Abdul Kahar, who was shot in the chest during the infamous Forest Gate raid in June last year, urged MPs not to back plans to extend the maximum amount of time that terror suspects can be held from 28 to 58 days. Giving evidence to the home affairs select committee, Mr Kahar told them: “If you give the police more time, they do everything slower. It is just prolonging the time, it’s more modernised torture,” he warned.
His brother Abul Koyair said of his seven days of questioning in Paddington Green high-security police station in west London: “It makes you want to admit to anything they want to hear.”
Mr Kahar said that he did not regard Britain differently after his experiences but he had lost faith in the police. “The police have a difficult job, but they are putting innocent people’s lives at risk. It’s not only Muslims,” Mr Kahar said, noting that Jean Charles de Menezes wasn’t a Muslim. The threat is not only to Muslims – it’s a threat to the whole public.”
Mr Kahar warned that, “if I wasn’t as strong as I was, I could have been turned against this country. I have so much hatred towards the system, someone else could have used it in a bad way.”
“Pity Samina Malik, the young woman who will live for the rest of her life with the consequences of a terrorism conviction simply for being a suburban shopgirl who expressed her fantasies on the internet.
“Scribbling doggerel in praise of al Qa’eda on the back of WH Smith receipts will do no more to bring about the universal caliphate then a smartarse politics student with a Che Guevara poster in his bedroom does to further guerrilla struggle in South America.
“Malik is just one of many millions of kids in every country around the world wrapped up in a flirtation with any variety of anti-establishment symbolism that comes immediately to hand. Mostly it stops at posting message on online talk boards, as it did in her case….
“Let’s keep a sense of proportion here. Yes, I am in favour of intelligence service surveillance against violent Jihadists. But what is needed is action against real terrorists, not lyrical ones. Just imagine how counter-productive Malik’s conviction is going to prove in the struggle for the hearts and minds of alienated Muslim youth.”
Dave Osler at Dave’s Part, 8 November 2007
To put an end to extremism we should support, rather than demonise, the organisations trying to engage with young people in a positive way, argues Anas Altikriti.
“Monday’s pre-legislation speech by the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans … was a classic ‘frightener’, reminiscent of Alastair Campbell rolling the pitch for a headline-grabbing initiative. ‘As I speak,’ intoned Evans with full dramatic effect, ‘terrorists are methodically and intentionally targeting young people and children in this country, radicalising, indoctrinating and grooming young, vulnerable people to carry out acts of terrorism.’ Note the sexual connotation of ‘grooming’….
“Scaring the public as an act of policy may win a few headlines but it is stupid. It worked short term in 2003 and may prop up yet another terrorism law in yesterday’s Queen’s speech, a law presumably requested by MI5. But it can only damage British liberty in the long term.
“The Blair government ruined Britain’s reputation for fair treatment among the moderate Muslims on whom stopping a tiny number of fanatics now depends. Abroad it declared wars, bombed Muslim capitals, killed civilians, and initiated a crusade for ‘western values’ among people sceptical of their virtues. At home it extended terrorism laws to make every dark-skinned Briton feel he or she is being made a scapegoat. While Britain remains adequately safe from attack, it has been at a wretched cost.”
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, 7 November 2007
Aamer Anwar, the human rights lawyer who represented Mohammed Atif Siddique (see here and here), is to face 3 High Court judges on a contempt of court charge in relation to remarks he made after the trial.
Aamer was reported as saying that Mohammed Siddique did not receive a fair trial and the trial took place in an “atmosphere of hostility”, also describing the trial outcome as a “tragedy for justice” and that the prosecution was “driven by the State”.
Lord Carloway said that “the statement seems to be an attack on the fairness of the trial and thus presumably an attack on the court itself”.
In sentencing Siddique to 8 years, a message was undoubtedly being sent to angry young Muslims not to step out of line. Is Aamer Anwar now about to pay the price for questioning the British state’s increasingly draconian powers?
BBC News report, 6 November 2007
See also Scotland Against Criminalising Communities open letter.
Muslim youth organisation the Ramadhan Foundation expressed concern on Monday after MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans claimed that there are “at least 2,000” individuals at large who “pose a direct threat to national security and public safety.”
Speaking at the Society of Editors conference in Manchester, Mr Evans said that the threat of “al-Qaida-style” terrorism was “the most immediate and acute peacetime threat in the 98-year history of my service.” Making no mention of British militarism in Iraq and Afghanistan, which many believe is a catalyst for the radicalisation of young Muslims, he asserted that “the root of the problem is ideological” and “is the expression of a hostility towards the UK which existed long before September 11 2001.”
But Ramadhan Foundation spokesman Mohammed Shafiq complained that Mr Evans had “failed to accept that 2,000 people out of 1.6 million is a very small problem.”
He said: “This sort of language is inflammatory and we urge all those involved to speak responsibly. There is a real and present threat to the nation from terrorism. Only together can we defeat it. Terrorism is evil and anyone who is involved must be engaged and convinced of why their path is wrong and bring them back to the mainstream.”
But Mr Shafiq stressed: “We are ready to talk to the police and security services about how we should move forward, but we have to be honest about why this threat has appeared, mainly foreign policy. Only then will we be able to defeat terrorism.”
Morning Star, 6 November 2007
For right-wing press coverage of Evans’ speech see for example “Suicide bombers in our schools”, in the Daily Express, “Al Qaeda grooming British children to carry out terror attacks in UK”, in the Daily Mail, and “MI5: Al-Qa’eda recruiting UK children for terror” in the Daily Telegraph.
“Canadians could be forgiven for thinking veiled Muslim women pose an urgent threat to the integrity of our electoral system after Prime Minister Stephen Harper made one of his first priorities in the fall sitting of Parliament a bill to force voters to show their faces at the polls.
“But there is not one shred of evidence that such a problem existed in the first place. Even Harper’s Conservative government has admited ‘there was no apparent case of fraud’ in three federal by-elections that were held in September in Quebec, when unjustified hysteria over veiled Muslim women first boiled over. Yet that has not stopped Harper from trying to fix this imaginary problem by proposing changes to the country’s election law that would require voters to show their faces before they cast their ballots….
“Harper has tried to dress up the bill as a means to ‘enhance public confidence in the democratic process’. But it has nothing to do with electoral integrity and everything to do with pandering to narrow-minded fears about minorities…. Harper and other federal politicians are shamefully playing cheap politics at the expense of Canadian Muslims.”