The Muslim Activists Who Call You An "Extremist"

Further examples of communist and Islamist activist groups, pressuring the state to silence their critics.

Two weeks ago, I detailed how Islamist and communist activists have conducted a successful ‘Long march through the institutions’ in the UK. Much of this material was drawn from my research, published with Courage Media, on how Muslim activists influence the government, via pressure campaigns against Prevent, and establishing activist networks within the Home Office.

The body responsible is called RICU — the Home Office’s Research, Information, and Communications Unit. [You] may have heard of it in a report by GB News this month, which revealed that civil servants produced a report calling the grooming gang scandal, in which thousands of girls across England were sexually exploited by predominantly-Pakistani Muslim perpetrators, a “grievance narrative” fabricated by “right-wing extremists”. The report warned “right-wing extremist narratives (particularly around immigration and policing) are in some cases ‘leaking’ into mainstream debates”. It classified “Cultural Nationalism” as “extreme right-wing”: with the “main belief” being “’Western culture is under threat from mass migration’”. Another example: “Claims of ‘two-tier’ policing, where two groups are allegedly treated differently after similar behaviour”.

RICU has also received notoriety in recent years as the parent body of counter-extremism programme, Prevent. Like many ostensibly neutral institutions, Prevent has been subject to ideological capture since its inception. A recent video circulating on X, urging those undergoing Prevent training to report teenagers for posting stickers opposed to mass immigration, has alerted some to this. But the insidious absurdities stretch back over a decade.

A review of Prevent found that, in 2019, RICU had compiled a dossier of materials circulated by social media users described as “actively patriotic and proud”. The canonical texts of these far right radicals include: books by Peter Hitchens, Melanie Phillips, and Douglas Murray; Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan; John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government; Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France; The Lord of the Rings; Beowulf; C.S. Lewis; Micahel Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys; and, without a hint of irony, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Curiously, the Qur’an and Hadiths were not mentioned — despite Islamic groups being the predominant perpetrators of lethal terror attacks both in the UK and the world. Ninety percent of the suspects on MI5’s watchlist are Islamic terrorists — equivalent to 1% of the entire British Muslim population. Since October 7th, arrests for terror offences in the UK have increased by 23 percent. But this embarrassing obsession with neo-Nazis hiding beneath every bed led to Prevent thinking watching The Thick of It would turn you into Anders Breivik.

As such, the Shawcross review concluded “Prevent is not doing enough to counter non-violent Islamist extremism”, and has applied “a double standard when dealing with the extreme right-wing and Islamism.”

Only 22% of Prevent referrals in 2020 – 2021 were for Islamic extremism; despite Islamic extremism comprising 80% of the Counter Terrorism Police network’s live investigations. Right-wing extremism were only 10% of live investigations, but 25% of Prevent referrals. Shawcross was concerned that Prevent had become myopically obsessed with right-wing extremism. A tragic example of Prevent’s skewed priorities is the recent revelation that Abi Harbi Ali — who murdered Sir David Amess MP at a constituency surgery in Southend, Essex on October 15, 2021 — had been reported to Prevent in 2014, but had only one meeting before his case was closed. Amess’ daughter, Katie explained to The Times that “The police told us they didn’t follow up with him due to an admin error”. According to a July 2024 coroner’s report, Ali’s six-month case review was “missed”, and a 12-month review revealed “nothing of concern”. Meanwhile, RICU staff were classifying right-wing extremism to encompass reading The Chronicles of Narnia.

You can read the full report on Courage.Media.

As Steven Edginton reported last April, a 700-strong Islamic Network within the Home Office have worked since 2005 to recruit more Muslim staff, “influence policymakers”, and “Facilitate and support Home Office engagement with external stakeholders from Muslim communities” to support “Muslim needs”. A Home Office whistleblower described it as “an Islamic lobby group [which] represents a serious threat to the Government’s aims in combating Islamic extremism and granting asylum to those fleeing Islamic countries over religious persecution.” In March, Permanent Secretary Matthew Rycroft and other senior civil servants attended an Islamic Network event to celebrate Ramadan. This may explain why Rycroft and Home Office minister Jess Philips MP refused to answer questions from civil servants concerning which foreign nationals commit the most crimes in Britain.

This network may also have influenced the agenda of RICU and Prevent. Former MI6 officer Charles Farr established RICU in 2007. In 2011, a government review concluded that an effort to “identify credible partners” and develop “more professional counter-narrative products” was required. To oversee this, they appointed Richard Chalk, chief of staff to then-Conservative Party chair, Baroness Warsi, as its head. Chalk had returned from conducting classified work in Baghdad during the Iraq war, for British PR firm Bell Pottinger. David Hill became Bell Pottinger’s CEO in 2007, after serving as Tony Blair’s Director of Communications since 2003. Hill replaced spin doctor Alastair Campbell — infamous for compiling the “dodgy dossier” which encouraged Britain and America to invade Iraq in search of fictitious WMDs. Hill is married to former Downing Street press officer Hillary Coffman, herself previously married to David Seymour — Alastair Campbell’s editor at the Daily Mirror. This incestuous network might explain Campbell’s demand that Douglas Murray be arrested for suggesting Blair and his successors’ immigration policies fuelled the riots following the Southport massacre. The permanent fixtures of the political establishment have grown so intolerant of criticism, that Murray’s bestseller, The Strange Death of Europe, earned a place on Prevent’s terror watch-list.

But RICU didn’t spend all its time treating beloved authors like Manchurian agents. Following the Home Affairs Select Committee hearings in 2016, The Guardian reported that, “Under Chalk’s leadership, RICU began communicating with British Muslims in a manner more reminiscent of counter-insurgency operations than a traditional public information campaign”. The purpose of RICU became to manage public perceptions in the aftermath of Muslim terror attacks. Middle East Eye reported on internal RICU documents which stated the unit worked “at an industrial scale and pace” to develop messages which “effect attitudinal and behavioural change”. Methods were modelled on observing how social media was used to coordinate the 2011 Arab Spring, and contingencies to manage public anger in the event of a terror attack during the 2012 London Olympics.

I was interviewed about the history of Prevent, RICU, and pro-Islam activism within the Home Office by Peter Whittle, for The New Culture Forum.

The most egregious example of this industrial-scale gaslighting operation was in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, where Muslim suicide bomber Salman Abedi murdered twenty-two people, including seven children, at an Ariana Grande concert. After the Manchester Arena attack, Easthope wrote in The Guardian, “I was wrong to insist in my training that the first message should be “we will overcome” [and] that the fight rhetoric has gone too far”. What Easthope appears to insinuate is that the Home Office had a hand in coordinating the response, which involved telling the grieving parents and British public, “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

Despite accusations that it “targets vulnerable young British Muslims”, the purpose of RICU seems to be selling the native British public on mass Muslim immigration in the immediate aftermath of Islamic terror attacks. Effectively, the Home Office acts as a PR body for Muslims in the UK — demanding the British public not be enraged by the violent Islamists imported into their midst before the bodies of their children are cold.

So it is bitterly ironic that, last week, on the 9th of December, a new report was released a report alleging Britain “faces a chronic risk of democratic decline due to the spread of extremist narratives and conspiracies, growing societal threats and declining social cohesion.”

It was written by former government Counter-Extremism Commissioner, and Independent Adviser for Social Cohesion and Resilience, Dame Sara Khan. For those unfamiliar with Sara Khan’s career history, I refer you to my new essay, also on Courage Media, reviewing the findings of her report:

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, Khan was appointed to the Home Office's Tackling Extremism and Radicalisation Working Group in 2005, following the 7/7 Bombings. She then launched Inspire, an anti-extremism Muslim charity, in 2008; and wrote The Battle for British Islam: Reclaiming Muslim Identity from Extremism, in 2016. She was nominated for an honours by government Ministers, and awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2022.

In 2014, Khan was supported in her #MakingAStand campaign by then-Home Secretary, Theresa May. While Prime Minister, Mrs. May went on to appoint Sara Khan as the government’s first Counter-Extremism Commissioner, working under then-Home Secretary Amber Rudd. It should not surprise us that this was Khan’s career trajectory: in a 2015 government document, titled “Prevent Strategy: Local delivery best practice catalogue”, the Home Office referred Khan’s #MakingAStand the campaign as a “RICU Product”. It was launched with the support of the UK government, and a portion of RICU’s £12-23 million annual budget. At the time, Sara Khan’s sister, Sabina Khan, was the deputy head of RICU.

It was Khan’s campaign that produced the Sun front page, with a photograph of a woman in a Union Jack hijab, published after British aid worker Alan Henning was beheaded on video by ISIS in 2014.

The image was not made specifically for Henning’s murder: rather, it had been prefabricated by Breakthrough Media, a communications company with connections to the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism at the UK Home Office, and held in reserves to counteract negative perceptions of Islam in the event of an Islamist terror attack, to “promote the true face of Islam among vulnerable UK communities”.

Emails procured by freedom of information access requests show RICU monitored online responses to the front page, calling it “our product”.

Even after departing the Home Office, Dame Sara Khan continues to attempt to set the government’s policy agenda.

I summarised the report and its authors' questionable credibility this week on Tomlinson Talks on LotusEaters.com.

Kahn’s allegations may sound serious, to those who believe she is a neutral observer. But it transpires that leftist activist group HOPE Not Hate commissioned the research, on behalf of criminal justice think-tank, Crest Insights.

Given HOPE Not Hate commissioned and framed the questions for these surveys, we should be sceptical as to the veracity of this data. Sara Khan has had a longstanding working relationship with HOPE Not Hate: in 2017, they featured an article from Khan in their State of Hate report, and their founder, Nick Lowles, joined the May government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group, with Khan appointed commissioner. HOPE Not Hate also made news this year after Lowles spread multiple admitted hoaxes online: including claims that Muslim women were being acid-attacked by “Far Right” rioters after the Southport massacre. This was cited by members of a Muslim militia, and shared by Labour Josh Fenton-Glynn MP — who retracted when Middlesbrough police said there was no evidence to support Lowles’ claim. Questions were also raised about the legality of HOPE Not Hate operative, Harry Shukman using a fake passport, to pose as alias “Christopher Charles Morton”, during their documentary Undercover: Exposing the Far Right.

(As it transpires, Shukman is due to release a book with Penguin Random House about his exploits. Perhaps he’ll explain how he procured this potentially illegal document in there?)

HOPE Not Hate’s Head of Intelligence, Matthew Collins was a former member of neo-Nazi organisations including the British National Party and Combat 18, before joining the British Communist Party. At an event in 2013, Collins was filmed saying “Comrades, brothers and sisters, HopeNotHate.co.uk, you are our Red Army!”, standing in front of a Soviet Flag. Given his trading in one brand of genocidal socialism for another, I don’t think Collins is a good judge of what constitutes “Extremism”. Furthermore, if any organisation had employed a member of the British Union of Fascists, HOPE Not Hate would be quick to condemn them as a Nazi-sympathising outfit. Therefore, I don’t think it’s wise for the government, or those seeking to stamp out extremism, to work with communist-sympathising outfits either. But clearly, having relied on them for survey data, and cited their definitions 22 times in the report, Sara Khan does think it acceptable to let HOPE Not Hate dictate who is and isn’t an “extremist.”

So, Khan, whose record at the Home Office was (according to Shawcross’ report) one which saw Islamist terrorists like Sir David Amess MP’s murderer, Abi Harbi Ali slip through the net, while they myopically monitored fans of Douglas Murray as “right-wing extremists,” feels qualified to tell us what should be done to combat extremism — and draws on communist group HOPE Not Hate to do so.

As for the integrity of the research in the paper — I examined this at length in my new essay for Courage Media:

This reliance on HOPE Not Hate to provide the definitions of “extremist” beliefs, and for various “conspiracy theories”, has resulted in Khan’s understanding of them to seem woefully thin. For example, on page 32, she writes: ‘In recent years these include conspiracies around 5G technology, Cultural Marxism and the Great Replacement Theory.’ On page 82, she provides definitions for these terms:

“Great Replacement Theory: an anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim theory stipulating that white European populations are being deliberately replaced at an ethnic and cultural level through mass migration and minority communities at the hands of the elites.”

“Cultural Marxism: A theory alleging that those subscribing to Far Left ideologies are embedded in cultural and political institutions, and are working to undermine Western culture. Often posits that Jewish people have disproportionate influence within cultural institutions.”

But neither of these definitions receive citations from sources which might give them a fairer hearing. For example, “Cultural Marxism” is a term which refers to writers such as Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marchuse, who transposed Marx’s critique of superstructures from economics to “cultural hegemony”. It also encompasses Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who urged fellow revolutionaries to abandon “wars of maneuver” (direct action tactics) for “wars of position”: a cover infiltration of offices of state, conducting what Rudi Dutschke would later call the “long march through the institutions”. This was cited as the inspiration by Kimberlé Crenshaw, creator of intersectionality, as the reason for formulating Critical Race Theory.

As Daily Wire host and author, Michael Knowles documents in his book Speechless, the attempt to render the study of Cultural Marxism radioactive by labelling it a “conspiracy theory” was itself a conspiracy by left-wing academics, who didn’t want their forebears’ school of thought to be subject to public scrutiny. Given the large volume of academic work written about this discipline, it appears HOPE Not Hate are throwing up another smokescreen here to discredit their political opponents.

Nor is Cultural Marxism an anti-semitic term. Jewish academics Eric Kaufmann and Yoram Hazony have used the term to criticise the aforementioned Frankfurt School theorists. Kaufmann, as well as Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, have explained why secular Jews gravitate to left-wing politics. It would be absurd to call any of these men anti-semitic.

Likewise, the term “Great Replacement” is used to accuse opponents of unfettered immigration as being antisemites. HOPE Not Hate attempted to smear me with this charge earlier this year. However, in the statement they referenced, I was reading straight from the works of Renaud Camus, who coined the term, to refute the idea that it was antisemitic. In 2012, Camus said

“What I call the Great Replacement is the change of people, the substitution of one or several peoples for the people whose ancestral roots are there, whose history had for hundreds or thousands of years coincided with the territory in question. [...] I might, speaking as I am before the France-Israel Association, appeal to an example that should finally convey my meaning: the Great Replacement is what would happen to Israel if, God forbid, we were to accede to the Palestinian demand for the so-called right of return. Under such conditions, could Israel remain a Jewish State, as one says?”

So the term was used in a lecture, delivered to a forum for French Jews, to argue in favour of Israel’s right to defend itself. Camus cited the 1791 influx of Jewish immigrants to France as an example of successful migration, made possible because of their genuine love of French culture.

The fact that Khan includes none of this as context demonstrates her insufficient lack of reading into the topics she claims to be an expert on. Taking HOPE Not Hate’s word for it is not a sufficient evidentiary standard to label an individual or idea “extremist”.

But one “conspiracy theory” Khan singled out made me especially irate:

Khan also writes, on page 43:

“Alongside the promotion of the Great Replacement Theory, contemporary Far Right narratives on asylum seekers allude to them as ‘Muslim invaders’, with small boat crossings being characterised as an ‘invasion of fighting aged men’.”

I take umbrage to this personally, as I helped GB News break a story in August last year, involving North African people-trafficking gangs posting videos of British women, filmed without their consent, often drunk and sometimes in states of undress, on Instagram — alongside videos of illegal migrants using their services to enter Europe.

GB News was handed the evidence by a cyber contact who works on ‘machine learning algorithms’ and who discovered multiple accounts he believes are “fronts for criminal people smuggling gangs”.

Another source said they believed this to be “an advertising campaign to predominantly North Africans seeking passage to be smuggled into Europe and Britain”.

In November this year, a 27-year-old man from Bradford was arrested on suspicion of voyeurism and harassment, in connection with several reports of women being followed, filmed, and harassed in Manchester City Centre.

Given we have statements from government officials, Meta, and now an arrest related to this trend, it is bizarre for Khan to deny that an organised network of criminals, facilitating illegal migrants’ passage over the English channel, is putting women at risk.

Speaking of GB News: another report was released that same day, by the Centre for Media Monitoring, which alleged their coverage was an “unhinged presentation of Muslims”. The Centre for Media Monitoring is owned by the Muslim Council of Britain. A 2015 report by the UK government stated that

“for some years the Muslim Brotherhood shaped the new Islamic Society of Britain (ISB), dominated the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB) and played an important role in establishing and then running the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).”

Since 2015, the MCB has maintained it has “no affiliation to the Muslim Brotherhood or any other foreign organisation”, and that it “rejects entirely the insinuation that it is either soft on terrorism or ‘have consistently opposed programmes by successive Governments to prevent terrorism’ as stated by the findings”. However, the MCB has been banned from engaging with Whitehall since its deputy director-general, Dr Daud Abdullah, signed the Istanbul Declaration in 2009. The declaration committed to "carry on with the jihad and resistance against the occupier until the liberation of all Palestine", and was interpreted as calling for attacks on the British Royal Navy by stating “the sending of foreign warships into Muslim waters, claiming to control the borders and prevent the smuggling of arms to Gaza, [is] a declaration of war, [which] must be rejected and fought by all means and ways."

The MCB claims it “never endorsed the declaration” and “specifically reject any notion that we endorse an attack on the Royal Navy”. It did, however, under Abdullah, lead a six-year boycott of Holocaust Memorial Day — and called to “end to the violence in and around Gaza” on October 8th, without mentioning the murders and rapes committed by Hamas on October 7th.

I detailed the MCB’s connections to Islamist causes in my essay for Courage Media.

Khan criticised the Muslim Council of Britain for its campaign against Prevent in 2015. However, she often uses the term “Islamophobia” in her report, to marginalise critics of Islam as irrationally bigoted toward Muslims.

It may interest you to learn that the term Islamophobia was invented by… the Muslim Brotherhood:

Dr. Gilles Kepel alleged the Brotherhood devised the term to seek “symmetry” with antisemitism, and link opposition to Islam with the same objectionable views that produced Nazism and the Holocaust. Former Islamist, Abdur-Rahman Muhammad corroborated Kepel’s account, confirming that confirmed a meeting took place where members of a Muslim Brotherhood outfit, the International Institute for Islamic Thought, conspired to “emulate the homosexual activists who used the term ‘homophobia’ to silence critics.”

Ever since the Runnymede Trust introduced the term into common parlance in 1997 — the same year the Blair government came to power, and proceeded to revolutionise Britain’s legal system — it seems the Brotherhood has achieved its goal.

And speaking of using the UK government to spread Islamist propaganda:

The Cousin Marriage Debate

“Independent” Muslim MP Iqbal Mohamed opposed the Cousin Marriage Ban bill proposed in Parliament by Conservative MP Richard Holden last Tuesday. Mohamed was one of four MPs (five, if you count Jeremy Corbyn) elected to Parliament in July on a pro-Gaza ticket. They plan to form an official party early next year.

(It is worth reminding you that expressing support for the government in Gaza is a crime, given Hamas is a proscribed terrorist organisation in the UK.)