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UK: Website for young Muslimas that counters “extremism” found to be funded by the Home Office

Sep 16, 2019 1:00 pm By Robert Spencer

Last month the Muslim social media network This Is Woke was discovered to be a government project, and now this. Why is it so hard to find actual moderate Muslims who will work against the spread of the jihad ideology within Muslim communities? And Muslims are enraged now: activist Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan fumes: “[It matters] because not only our public institutions, but our media platforms, arts and culture events, civic life and social lives are being targeted at every level because we are Muslim. This is what decimates trust. Who and what are we supposed to trust for information or opinion or insight when our identities and experiences are being violently coopted and repackaged to us in the name of ‘protecting’ us? At every level of every institution, the idea that Muslims are all at risk of perpetrating violence has been enshrined in the name of security and is causing the mass surveillance and targeting of us across the board. This is Orwellian.”

Nowhere did SuperSisters suggest that all Muslims were at risk of perpetrating violence, but its being unmasked as a Potemkin village will make genuine counterterror efforts all the more difficult.

“Lifestyle website for Muslim teens is covertly funded by the Home Office,” by Nosheen Iqbal, Observer, September 15, 2019:

A Muslim online lifestyle platform targeting British teenagers is covertly funded by the Home Office’s counter-extremism programme, the Observer has learned.

The revelation about funding of the project has led to a row between its owners, a former Muslim employee and its Muslim audience.

SuperSisters was built in 2015 by J-Go Media, a company of nine staff members from east London that describes itself as “a not-for-profit community group” and has two decades of experience of engaging with Muslim communities in East London. SuperSisters is promoted as a “global platform for young Muslimahs in east London to share and create inspiring and empowering content”.

But after realising that recent funding for the project was coming from Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT), an arm of the government’s counter-extremism strategy, readers expressed anger and accused its directors of betraying the Muslim community. Two Muslim employees have since resigned.

Sabah Ismail, a social media manager for SuperSisters from February to August this year, said: “In my naiveity, I thought that through this ‘opportunity’ at SuperSisters, I really could help to make real change, pushing forward a different narrative from Muslim women themselves, showing that we are empowered and multi-faceted … I realise now that with the Home Office funding the project at the root, there was no way I could do this, regardless of the content I was pushing out.”

SuperSisters was conceived by J-Go in response to Shamima Begum and two other British schoolgirls running away to Syria in 2015. The project secured funding from Prevent, the National Counter Terrorism Security Office’s controversial strategy, which was set up to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. Prevent has repeatedly faced claims of state-sanctioned spying on Muslims and is currently under independent review.

J-Go’s directors, Jon Hems and Jan Bros, stated: “Where we acknowledge we went wrong, and we apologise for it, is not more clearly stating the source of funding on the SuperSisters Instagram and blog, not just our [parent] website [J-GoLtd.com].”

According to J-Go, “countering extremism for us is about sharing an alternative narrative to highlight positive stories coming from a diverse contributor network”.

However, SuperSisters is left battling the widespread suspicion that it was purposely designed to promote a state-approved notion of the Islamic faith with the potential to track its target audience of British Muslim girls aged 13 to 19. One reader, Aeysh Ahmed, wrote on Instagram: “I am actually shocked … it’s deeply problematic that non-Muslims feel they have the right to define what our unified identity is.” Another user, @the_hybrid_life, said: “This is truly shocking and disturbing and feels entirely like a violation.”…

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, an activist and poet who withdrew from the Bradford Literature festival in July after learning it was also funded by BSBT, describes the Home Office’s practices as “shadowy” and “racist”. She said: “[It matters] because not only our public institutions, but our media platforms, arts and culture events, civic life and social lives are being targeted at every level because we are Muslim. This is what decimates trust. Who and what are we supposed to trust for information or opinion or insight when our identities and experiences are being violently coopted and repackaged to us in the name of “protecting” us?

“At every level of every institution, the idea that Muslims are all at risk of perpetrating violence has been enshrined in the name of security and is causing the mass surveillance and targeting of us across the board. This is Orwellian.”

BSBT has awarded more than £9m to organisations since 2015. The Home Office said: “BSBT is an open and transparent programme, which supports local people in their vital work to bring communities together, promote fundamental values and tackle the spread of all extremist ideologies.

“The Home Office has provided BSBT grant funding for the SuperSisters project since 2018 to provide support for Muslim women.”

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Filed Under: Internet jihad, United Kingdom Tagged With: Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT), Home Office, SuperSisters


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Comments

  1. mortimer says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 1:28 pm

    Robert Spencer raises a good point: How many will believe that they are working for the British government on the basis of rumor alone ? Muslims tend to believe the rumor mills, because foundational Islam is based largely on hearsay, so fact-checking and critical thought are not parts of Islam … but blindly following an ‘authority’ is normative.

    When the mullahs recommend this website for girls, then it will be believed. Fat chance.

    See what you think …

    https://www.supersisters.co.uk/about/

    “Hi guys, this is the JGO team here, as you may be aware, there are a lot of accusations and rumours swirling around the SuperSisters project right now and we wanted to get a chance to address them here head on.

    TLDR: Are “middle-aged white men” behind the content of the SuperSisters platform?

    No. Completely false.”

    • gravenimage says

      Sep 16, 2019 at 7:40 pm

      What Muslims would call themselves “SuperSIsters”?

  2. mortimer says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 1:32 pm

    This video shows what they are trying to fight … girls who run away to ISIS .

    “My Daughter and the Caliphate” – DW Documentary Published on Sep 5, 2019

    A father fights to save his daughter who has run off to join the terror organization Islamic State. For four long years Maik Messing doesn’t know if she will survive the ordeal. And for those same four years he was joined by a camera Team.

  3. Angemon says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 2:02 pm

    However, SuperSisters is left battling the widespread suspicion that it was purposely designed to promote a state-approved notion of the Islamic faith

    I’ll let the implications of that speak for themselves…

  4. CogitoErgoSum says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 2:11 pm

    They want to push forward a different narrative for Muslim women? Wouldn’t the final word for anything a Muslim believes come from the Koran? What about the Muslim women who stay at home?

    Koran 9:122 — “And the believers should not all go out to fight. Of every troop of them, a party only should go forth, that they (who are left behind) may gain sound knowledge in religion, and that they may warn their folk when they return to them, so that they may beware.”

    Doesn’t this mean that those who do do not go out to fight but stay behind should gain sound knowledge of their religion? Where else would that knowledge be found but in the Koran, the Hadiths, and in the life of Muhammad? Is there any good in the hearts of the unbelievers who try to persuade Muslims otherwise?

    Koran 9:125 — “But as for those in whose hearts is disease, it only addeth wickedness to their wickedness, and they die while they are disbelievers.”

    The disbelievers at the Home Office are trying to get Muslims to forget about the Koran, the Hadiths and the life of Muhammad. This is why they so desperately want to vilify people like Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller who speak the truth but those Muslims who study the Koran know what Allah wants. Most of the ones being fooled by the Home Office are those who disbelieve in the Koran. The believers and those whom Allah loves follow the Koran.

  5. elee says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 3:16 pm

    (1) Why dont they promote moderatee Nazism while theyre at it?: (2) If they actually consider the life of a jihadist brood mare preferable to the first-world life the blood and treasure of others has bought them, why bother? Let the go spawn dysgenics in Mogadishu or some other s**thole Muslim utopia.

  6. rubiconcrest says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 5:59 pm

    So the government knows full well the dangers of Islam and yet needs to engage in this sort a programing to change peoples minds. Would it not be better to teach people about Islam so that everyone, including Muslims are very clear about the ‘faith’ and what it teaches. Expose it for all to see and let the chips fall.

  7. Aussie Infidel says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 6:16 pm

    Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan says Muslims “are being targeted at every level because we are Muslim”. Is she surprised? Westerners consider Muslims prone to violence because that’s exactly what many Muslims do – perpetrate violence against non-Muslims – as they are commanded in their holy scriptures. There are over a hundred such verses in the Quran alone:

    “And fight them until there is no fitnah (opposition) and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah. And if they cease – then indeed, Allah is Seeing of what they do.” (Quran 8:39).

    “Fight them; Allah will punish them by your hands and will disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the breasts of a believing people.” (Quran 9:14).

    Manzoor-Khan might also be “shocked” that the British government is using covert “positive methods” to try to change the “unified identity” of Muslims, because at least some in government have realized at long last that the ‘Muslim invasion of Britain’ allowed by past governments was a massive mistake – and indeed a ‘clash of civilisations’. And their remedy now – when it is almost too late – is to try to change the violent, racist, anti-democratic, misogynistic Muslim mindsets produced by the so-called religion of peace. One way to prevent Muslims from becoming terrorists is to remove the motivation for terrorism at its source – the verses of violence in the Quran and Hadith calling on Muslims to murder unbelievers. Until Muslims learn to live and let live, they will always be treated like pariahs wherever they go.

    Another way out of the Islamic nightmare is to empower its women, who under the Sharia, are treated as second class citizens with fewer rights than men – and this is the method being used on the SuperSisters website. However, I disagree emphatically with that site ‘s claim that “Muslim values are also British values”. How can they be, when Britain has signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; but the Muslim countries adopted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, which grants human rights only to Muslims?

    Islam is a supremacist, misogynistic, criminal ideology which has no place in a civilized society. Anyone who thinks they can remain a Muslim and still aspire to British values and norms is living in fairy land.

  8. ntesdorf says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 6:54 pm

    This is yet another example of the mis-guided British govenment’s attempts to come to grips with the malignant anti-social growth that is Islam without having the slightest knowledge of Islam’s real nature and beliefs.

    • gravenimage says

      Sep 16, 2019 at 7:42 pm

      They have a sneaking suspicion that Islam isn’t really up to anything good–but that’s about it.

  9. gravenimage says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 7:10 pm

    UK: Website for young Muslimas that counters “extremism” found to be funded by the Home Office
    ……………………..

    How often has this turned out to be the case–that it is not “moderate” Muslims trying to steer their coreligionists away from “extremism” at all?

  10. Lydia Church says

    Sep 16, 2019 at 9:33 pm

    So much for covert deprogramming programs to deradicalize extremist terrorists from islam!
    That one has ‘bombed out’ as well…. for any of those taking notes.

    • gravenimage says

      Sep 16, 2019 at 9:37 pm

      ‘Fraid so…

  11. Battle says

    Sep 17, 2019 at 6:29 am

    There are no moderate rattlesnakes.

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