Fiyaz Mujhal
Andrew Gilligan reported in the Telegraph last June 9 that Tell Mama was not going to “have its government grant renewed after police and civil servants raised concerns about its methods.” What was wrong with its methods? It had “claimed that there had been a ‘sustained wave of attacks and intimidation’ against British Muslims after the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby.” But Tell Mama and Fiyaz Mujhal (spelled “Mughal” in Gilligan’s report and elsewhere) “did not mention, however, that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity that took place only online, mainly offensive postings on Twitter and Facebook, or that a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified. Not all the online abuse even originated in Britain. Contrary to the group’s claim of a ‘cycle of violence’ and a ‘sustained wave of attacks’, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment.”‘
No attack on any innocent person is justified. Tell Mama is clearly not interested in defending innocent people, but in inflating the numbers of attacks on innocent Muslims, so as to create and perpetuate the false and tendentious claim that resisting jihad terror and Islamic supremacism somehow endangers innocent people. Tell Mama and Faith Matters showed this clearly when they demanded that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and me from entering the country; the Home Office should have recognized the dishonesty at the heart of their effort in light of their manipulation of the “Islamophobia” figures. And now we learn that even though this group has been discredited, the Association of Chief Police Officers is still working with it. Insane Britannia indeed.
“UK Islamophobic Attacks Surge in 2013,” from OnIslam, December 27:
LONDON — Hundreds of anti-Muslim hate offences have been carried out across the country in 2013, with Britain’s biggest force, the Metropolitan police, recording an increase of 49% than last year.
“The far right groups, particularly the EDL (English Defence League) perniciously use the internet and social media to promote vast amounts of online hate,” Fiyaz Mujhal, director of Faith Matters, which runs the Tell Mama project, told Press Association on Friday, December 27.
According to Mujhal, reaction to the murder of Fusilier Rigby had caused the number of Islamophobic crimes to “significantly jump”.
Reports released on Friday found that the Metropolitan Police recorded 500 Islamophobic offences from January to mid-November this year, compared with 336 offences in 2012 and 318 in 2011….
Mujhal asserted that tougher sentences were needed to tackle Islamophobic crime, noting that the guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were “not fit for purpose”.
“They raised the bar of prosecution significantly.
“Now unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.
“We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig’s head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence.
“When you target a mosque, you are targeting the whole community.”…
The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) has previously said 71 incidents were reported to its national community tension team (NCTT) over five days after Fusilier Rigby was murdered on May 22.
“The police service is committed to reducing the harm caused by hate crime and it is vital that we encourage more victims who suffer crimes to report them to the police or through third party reporting facilities such as Tell Mama,” Superintendent Paul Giannasi, Acpo’s spokesman on hate crime, said.