TellMAMA Decides to work with Conspiracy Theorist and 911 Truther

This is a guest post by Amjad Khan


TellMAMA is an organisation that was set up in 2012 in order to record incidents of anti-Muslim bigotry and hate-crime. The organisation has received considerable government funding over the years and was referenced in a recent governmentreport on hate crime as an example of a project the government supports. The group did attract criticism when they decided to appoint the highly controversial foul-mouthed cyber-bully Nathan Lean to their advisory board. However, it seems they decided to court controversy once again by announcing they are to work with the highly discredited faux writer and conspiracy theorist Nafeez Ahmed.

Readers of this blog will already be familiar with Nafeez and the bizarre world he inhabits. It seems Nafeez spent much of his early career trying to prove that 9/11 was an inside job orchestrated by the US government as a pretext to invade Muslim countries. He also believes the intention of the UK’s Prevent strategy is to “spy on Muslims” – least forgetting this is the same strategy that poured tax-payers money into funding TellMAMA and his wife’s old organisation Muslim Youth Helpline. The height of Nafeez’s absurdity came when he claimed a NASA funded study proved the hypothesis of an ‘irreversible civilisation collapse’. Nafeez is also convinced that David Cameron is Britain’s leading violent extremist? and the Prevent strategy will “radicalise us all.” He is clearly a loon with a loose grasp on reality.

So the question arises – what the hell are TellMAMA playing at?

They either share his paranoid and delusional worldview, are ashamed of their relationship with Government as well as their acquisition of funding for counter-extremism projects – or they are just dumb. TellMAMA’s work with Nafeez Ahmed is dangerous to the counter-extremism message they state to promote. Legitimising an individual who is so keen on promoting the UK as a wildly Islamophobic country will (unsurprisingly) completely undermines and discredits their work to challenge anti-Muslim bigotry. What does this mean to funders and supporters of TellMAMA? Surely if TellMAMA works so openly with Nafeez Ahmed they supposedly share the view that counter-extremism projects are aimed at driving up Islamophobia; therefore to support TellMAMA is to support fear-mongers and conspiracy theorists that seek to drive up Islamophobia?

In reality this is the situation TellMAMA has founded itself in by playing a painfully obvious “double-game.” It aims to appeal to the Government and funders that want to engage in counter-extremism projects whilst simultaneously appealing to a certain regressive strands within Muslim communities who portray the UK as Islamophobic and Muslims as doomed victims.

This double game was also apparent when one looks at TellMAMA’s relationship with the Quilliam Foundation, whereby founder Fiyaz Moghul had to defend sharing a platform with Quilliam to launch a report and then a year later releasing a press statement of how Quilliam are tied to anti-Muslim bigotry. TellMAMA needs to be much more confident in asserting its values, if indeed it has any. The public are not stupid, and won’t be easily fooled by such an obvious double game.


http://hurryupharry.org/2016/07/28/tellmama-decides-to-work-with-conspiracy-theorist-and-911-truther/