Politicians, human rights lawyers, Muslim organisations and teachers have expressed dismay at a Scottish Special Branch initiative that sends officers to schools to encourage teachers to inform on pupils who are suspected of flirting with Islamic extremism.
Special Branch (SB) in Tayside is also operating in youth groups at Dundee’s universities and using everything from Asian corner shops and supermarkets to mosques and restaurants to gather intelligence on potential terrorist threats.
Questions are being asked about how the police and intelligence services handled an anti-terror raid in east London after the release of two men. Brothers Abul Koyair, 20, and Mohammed Abdul Kahar, 23, who was shot in the raid, were freed without charge.
Muslim Council of Britain chief Mohammed Abdul Bari said: “The question the community raises is the genuineness of the intelligence.” Mr Bari, who is secretary general of the Muslim council, told the BBC: “It all goes back to intelligence, and the police gave the reason for this massive raid. It all depends on how the police act now. There is an issue of trust.”
Met Police Authority member Murad Qureshi, speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, said: “I think that there were a series of mistakes, which I think that the Met should learn from, and they cover everything from the collecting of intelligence and how you corroborate that to the nature of the surveillance of suspects, through to how the suspects are actually dealt with.” Of particular concern, he said was “how we find ourselves with one of the brothers shot and quite a lot of the slander, quite honestly, which has been out in the press”.
A secret high-level Metropolitan police report has concluded that Muslim officers are more likely to become corrupt than white officers because of their cultural and family backgrounds.
The document, which has been seen by the Guardian, has caused outrage among ethnic minorities within the force, who have labelled it racist and proof that there is a gulf in understanding between the police force and the wider Muslim community. The document was written as an attempt to investigate why complaints of misconduct and corruption against Asian officers are 10 times higher than against their white colleagues.
The main conclusions of the study, commissioned by the Directorate of Professional Standards and written by an Asian detective chief inspector, stated: “Asian officers and in particular Pakistani Muslim officers are under greater pressure from the family, the extended family … and their community against that of their white colleagues to engage in activity that might lead to misconduct or criminality.”
It recommended that Asian officers needed special anti-corruption training and is now being considered by a working party of senior staff.
The report argued that British Pakistanis live in a cash culture in which “assisting your extended family is considered a duty” and in an environment in which large amounts of money are loaned between relatives and friends.
“The broadcast journalist John Ware, responsible for last year’s one-sided Panorama programme on British Muslim leadership, is making another documentary about British Muslims. This time he is focusing on the community’s alleged support of Palestinian groups and aims to expose activists’ links with political movements such as Hamas which Ware considers to be a terrorist organisation….
“Ware’s last programme ‘A Question of Leadership’ was supposed to examine the role of the Muslim Council of Britain. Instead, it degenerated into an ‘McCarthyite’ attack on Muslims and their beliefs, overflowing with Islamophobic stereotypes and glaring inaccuracies. John Ware’s pro-Israel bias was also evident in the documentary. He reserved all his criticisms and condemnations for the Palestinians without a word of criticism for the Israelis. The programme resulted in the BBC receiving over 600 complaints in the first week alone and provoked wide spread condemnation by Muslim groups and non Muslims alike….
“IHRC is deeply concerned that once again BBC is being used as platform to unleash another prejudiced and hate-filled attack on the Muslim community, by a journalist whose anti-Muslim prejudice has been fully exposed. IHRC also feels that by choosing a journalist with a personal agenda against Muslims, to present a programme on the Palestine-Israel conflict, the BBC will be unable to fulfill their duty to report with accuracy and impartiality.”
STOP POLICE TERROR. DEFEND CIVIL LIBERTIES. JUSTICE FOR MUSLIMS.
Sunday 11th June, 2pm, Outside Scotland Yard.
RALLY FOR JUSTICE
The police raid in Forest Gate on June 2nd involving some 250 officers was one of the largest single raids in Britain. With the intensification of “terror raids” throughout the country and “trial-by-media” sensationalism, communities are under severe attack and must show unity.
STOP POLICE TERROR
The heavy-handed tactics of the police are proving counterproductive. Instead of increasing security, high profile police “terror” raids have only spread more fear.
JUSTICE FOR MUSLIMS
Despite the Government’s boasts of a diversified society, the criminalisation of Muslim communities and rising Islamophobia are a direct result of Government policies.
DEFEND CIVIL LIBERTIES
The anti-terror legislation is eroding all of our civil rights and the Government intends to extend police powers without the need for accountability.
SUNDAY 11th JUNE
2pm
ASSEMBLE OUTSIDE SCOTLAND YARD
Nearest Tube: St James Park.
For more information call: 07908 750 748 or 07915 063 564
MPs fear police terror raid will hit community relations
By Nigel Morris and Arifa Akbar
Independent, 8 June 2006
Police and the intelligence services have been warned by Muslim leaders and MPs that the Forest Gate raids have had a damaging effect on community relations in the fight against terrorism.
As detectives were granted more time to question two men arrested in east London last week, supporters of a drive against Islamophobia condemned the operation.
Ghayasuddin Siddique, leader of the Muslim parliament, said: “It has been an absolute disaster, it’s shameful… Police and the intelligence services have lost all credibility.”
Dominic Grieve, the Conservative home affairs spokesman, said: “I don’t think you can minimise the adverse impact of events like those of the last week. If somebody has their door kicked down at four in the morning it sends out a very negative impression about the nature of our society.”
He said the raids may prove to have been justified, but if they turned out to be mistaken it would make Muslims feel “confronted and embattled” .
Sadiq Khan, the Labour MP for Tooting, said the police needed to ” reflect on the downside of their activities”. He said: “There’s a concern about the willingness of the community to volunteer information [to the police] if their neighbour, someone down the road, their son has been treated unfairly.”
They were speaking in Westminster at the launch of a commission on ways to combat Islamophobia.
Its chairman, Richard Stone, said: “Police and politicians need to show a bit more sensitivity.”
“Poor Melanie Phillips. Her new book, Londonistan, which argues that the London attacks of 7 July 2005 were the culmination of a sinister Islamist conspiracy to infiltrate Britain and bring our civilisation to its knees, has hit the shelves just a few weeks after the government’s report into the bombings revealed that, in fact, they were the work of four ordinary blokes with no clear links to al-Qaeda….
“In another piece of bad timing, one of the main endorsers of the book – the Iranian author Amir Taheri, who shares the view that radical Islam poses a potent threat to the world – was exposed, at the end of May, as the source of a mistaken story about extremist antics in Iran. Taheri claimed in a column that, in an eerie echo of Nazi Germany, a new Iranian law will force religious minorities to wear coloured badges ‘to indicate their non-Islamic faith’. Canada’s National Post reported on it, as did Phillips in her blog, where she described the law as ‘horrific’, a ‘global obscenity’. But the story, in the words of Maurice Motammed, Iran’s only Jewish MP, was ‘totally false’. The National Post has now published a grovelling retraction.
“Most journalists would be mortified if their book was published just as an official account ripped strips off many of their central claims and as one of their supporters was shown to be unreliable. But Phillips is not most journalists. Something has happened to her in recent years. This once fine writer has become obsessed with radical Islam, to the extent that she will not let the facts dent her deeply held conviction that an evil army of crazed Muslims has launched ‘an attack on the historic core of western liberty’, and that the need to confront this army is ‘no less critical than when [Britain and the US] stood shoulder to shoulder against Nazi Germany’.”
Brendan O’Neill in the New Statesman, 12 June 2006
It’s always good to read a demolition of Mad Mel. But O’Neill – editor of Spiked, the online successor to the Revolutionary Communist Party’s Living Marxism – undermines his own case. His take on 7/7– “What Phillips presents as the handiwork of ‘clerical fascism’ looks increasingly like Britain’s Columbine, a murderous stunt executed by four bored and overgrown adolescents who had nothing better to do” – dismisses concerns about “jihadist” terrorism as just another moral panic. This might serve the ex-RCPers’ speciality of winding people up by provocatively adopting controversial positions, but the reality is that the 7/7 bombers were clearly motivated by the desire to punish ordinary Londoners for the crimes of western imperialism, and they found ideological inspiration in a perverted interpretation of Islam. It is necessary to point out that this is an interpretation rejected by the overwhelming majority of Muslims. Describing the bombers as “bored and overgrown adolescents who had nothing better to do”, however, is just silly.
The man behind last year’s hostile programme about British Muslims is sharpening his hatchet again. Faisal Bodi reveals another exercise in anti-Muslim propanda from John Ware.
There is a particularly stupid post by Brett Lock of the Islamophobic gay rights group OutRage! today on the neocon blog, Harry’s Place. In all seriousness, Lock suggests that Mohammed Abdul Bari, the newly elected general secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, has threatened a violent response to the police raid on the house in Forest Gate, East London, where chemical weapons were supposedly being manufactured for use in a terrorist attack.
Regarding Dr Bari’s role, Lock writes that “nothing in his statements to the press so far appear to concede that the police have a legitimate cause to act on tip-offs. Nothing he’s said (correct me if I’m wrong) has given the impression that he’s taken a leadership role in reassuring the Muslim community of the police’s bona fides and difficult task. Rather he has been a foghorn for grievances an increasingly skittish public is tired of hearing.”
In fact, as anyone not entirely blinded by ignorance and prejudice would know, the MCB has consistently supported police action against terrorism and has repeatedly urged Muslim communities to co-operate with and provide information to the police. Interviewed on the Radio 4 “Today” programme yesterday (listen here), Dr Bari stated:
“Since 7/7 the police have done a wonderful job. After 7/7 we had police officers making very positive comments and they were criticised by the right-wing media. So nobody is talking against the police. It is about the quality of intelligence … the community has to be taken on board to counter this scourge in society … The police have to do their job … if the community is worried … they will not get that mass co-operation. It is important to all of us to get the community on board. So information should come as quick as possible and that has to be disseminated within the community so that the community is assured.”
Asim Siddiqui asks: Why is BBC Radio 4 apparently taking pains to help a weak debater argue that Islam and liberalism are incompatible?
For Yusuf Smith’s report on the City Circle debate to which Asim Siddiqui refers, see Indigo Jo Blogs, 3 June 2006