I do not agree with burning mosques but Tell Mama have no scruples about exploiting such things. (With apologies to Francis Ford Coppola and zero apologies to Tell Mama)

Back in 1986 there were many people, myself included, who welcomed the launch of the Independent Newspaper. I observed, through my media job at the time, how one particular Press Baron, Robert ‘The bouncing Czech’ Maxwell had treated his staff very poorly, and how he had used the Daily Mirror like a personal playground* so I, and others, liked the idea of a newspaper that was free of political party and proprietor influence. However, the Independent has recently published an article that shows that when it comes to dealing with Islamic organisations, this newspaper is independent in name only. Now it appears quite happy to publish information from organisations of highly questionable probity, namely the ‘hate-crime monitor’ Tell Mama, despite there being a wealth of evidence that Tell Mama has behaved dishonestly with regards to ‘hate crime’ figures.

The Independent article, based on a Press Association story, started off with a tone of breathless ‘shock-horror’ at what it said was a failure by Facebook and Twitter to deal with accounts whose owners are anti-Islamic. The newspaper then went on to quote one post that called for the deaths of Muslims but failed to point out that the majority of anti-Islamic accounts on Twitter that I’ve seen merely question Islam as an ideology, or express opinions that Muslims do not like.

The tone and spin of the article immediately struck me from the first paragraph as some sort of public relations ‘puff-piece’ put together by an Islamic activist, and it turned out when reading deeper into the article, that my initial assumption was correct. It appears that the majority of this article has come from the pen of everybody’s least favourite mendacious grievance-mongering Taqiyya artist, Fiyaz Mughal, or from one of his minions.

I really don’t know what the Independent is playing at here? What has gone wrong with the Independent’s fact-checking? Do they not have a cuttings library or access to one, for if they did then they would have seen Andrew Gilligan of the Daily Telegraph skilfully and accurately filleting Fiyaz Mughal and Tell Mama’s fake hate crime scam. For those who do not know the backstory, Tell Mama with the help of Liberal Democrat MP’s among others managed to get their hands on over £300k of British taxpayers’ money in order to monitor crimes carried out against Muslims. Tell Mama stayed under the radar of many Britons until the Islamic murder of Lee Rigby in May 2013. Following this Jihad attack Fiyaz Mughal made many media appearances where he whined that there was a backlash against Muslims following the murder and claimed that the rise in attacks was ‘unprecedented’. This claim, following investigations of Tell Mama by Mr Gilligan and others, was proved to be, if you pardon the expression, complete and utter bollocks. Tell Mama were claiming that people saying nasty, but often true, things about the ideology of Islam were ‘attacks’ and lumped them in with the very small number of genuine physical attacks on Muslims that occurred following the jihad murder of Lee Rigby.

Anyway, back to the present and Fiyaz Mughal’s latest attempt to shut down public debate about Islam, which contains some pretty outrageous misrepresentations about what is going on.

Here’s the article from the Independent in italics with my comments in plain text.

“Twitter and Facebook are refusing to take down hundreds of inflammatory Islamophobic postings from across their sites despite being alerted to the content by anti-racism groups, an investigation by The Independent has established.

It’s not often that you can find an article from a so-called serious newspaper, with an error in the first sentence. That error is to refer to Islam as a ‘race’. The Tell Mama group are not an ‘anti-racist’ group, they are a toxic group dedicated to shutting down and curtailing debate on Islam.

The number of postings, some of which accuse Muslims of being rapists, paedophiles and comparable to cancer, has increased significantly in recent months in the aftermath of the Rotherham sex-abuse scandal and the murder of British hostages held by Isis.

Well if Muslim communities didn’t produce so many rapists, terrorists and those fanning sedition, then there probably would not be so much objection to Islam.

The most extreme call for the execution of British Muslims – but in most cases those behind the abuse have not had their accounts suspended or the posts removed.

I spend a lot of time in the counterjihadist twittersphere and the posts calling for execution of British Muslims are rarer than the impression that this article appears to portray. This sentence seems to show that TM and their fans at the Independent are lumping in comments from those who dislike Islam with those who are advocating murder. This appears to be yet more dishonesty from TM and crew.

Facebook said it had to “strike the right balance” between freedom of expression and maintaining “a safe and trusted environment” but would remove any content reported to it that “directly attacks others based on their race”. Twitter said it reviews all content that is reported for breaking its rules which prohibit specific threats of violence.

Facebook has got it right on this one. There is a balance to be struck, expressing pungent opinions is a whole lot different from calling for people to be killed. The first I think most people would support, the second only a few would support. A direct and specific threat of violence, which would trigger a Twitter ban, is one thing; being hostile to an ideology is another. However, as to be expected, the reality of the situation is at odds with Tell Mama’s statement to the Independent. Anyone familiar with the counterjihad twittersphere will know that there have been loads of bannings of posters for things as simple as quoting from the more violent passages of the Koran, pointing out the problem with Islamic Rape Gangs in Rotherham and comedy accounts that take the rise out of Islam. There have also been bans on pro-Israel tweeters and even Jewish groups that are opposed to Islamic anti-Semitism. These bans are often the result of organised complaint campaigns from Muslim groups or individuals associated with them. If anything Muslims and Islamic groups get treated less harshly by Twitter than those opposed to them. This is another occasion when Mendacious Mughal and his vehicles have been caught out speaking faeces unto nation again.

Over the past four months Muslim groups have been attempting to compile details of online abuse and report it to Twitter and Facebook. They have brought dozens of accounts and hundreds of messages to the attention of the social-media companies.

Which groups? Can we have some names of these groups please or is it mostly just Fiyaz Mughal and his Sockpuppet Show?

But despite this most of the accounts reported are still easily accessible. On New Year’s Eve the author of one of the accounts reported wrote: “If whites had groomed only paki girls 1 It would be a race hate crime. 2 There would be riots from all Muslim dogs.”

Other examples of extremist postings on Twitter include:

*A user posted an image of a girl with a noose around her neck with the caption: “6 per cent of white British girls will become sex slaves to the Islamic slave trade in Britain”.

*A tweet which reads: “Should have lost World War Two. Your daughters would be getting impregnated by handsome blond Germans instead of Pakistani goat herders. Good job Britain.”

*On Facebook a posting in response to the beheading of Westerners in Syria is also still easily accessible despite being reported to the company weeks ago. It reads: “For every person beheaded by these sick savages we should drag 10 off the streets and behead them, film it and put it online. For every child they cut in half … we cut one of their children in half. An eye for an eye.”

When the comments were reported, Facebook said that they did not breach the organisation’s guidelines.

I’m not too keen on the opinions expressed in these articles either as they are not words that I personally would use, but they are just that, opinions. I’ve seen a whole lot worse on Twitter from Muslims about non-Muslims and from retarded neo-Nazi jackboot lickers who believe that everything wrong can be blamed on the Rothschilds. These posts although not to some people’s taste, are mostly not calling for violence and it is right for Facebook to say that many counterjihad posts do not breach their guidelines. All decent people would agree that promoting violence is wrong, but having an opinion, even if expressed in fruity language is not.

Fiyaz Mughal, director of Faith Matters, an interfaith organisation which runs a helpline called Tell MAMA, for victims of anti-Muslim violence, said he was disappointed by the attitude of both firms. “It is morally unacceptable that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are vast profit-making companies, socially engineer what is right and wrong to say in our society when they leave up inflammatory, highly socially divisive and openly bigoted views,” he said.

Notice how Mr Mendacious is using his ‘Faith Matters’ vehicle to launch his whine. Tell Mama, Faith Matters and Religious Reader are all entities that have been created by or provide a platform for Fiyaz Mughal’s own point of view.

“These platforms have inserted themselves into our social fabric to make profit and cannot sit idly by and shape our futures based on ‘terms and conditions’ that are not fit for purpose.”

Wrong, Mr Mughal. The terms and conditions are fit for purpose because they accept free speech but not the right to shout ‘kill the bastard’ at people.

Mr Mughal said that Tell MAMA regularly received reports of anti-Muslim rhetoric and hate from concerned Facebook and Twitter users.

There must be a lot of awfully thin-skinned Muslims and Lefties out there if that is the case. Do we really want to base policy on what is merely a bunch of self appointed ‘offend-o-trons’?

He added that the far-right group Britain First relied on Facebook to organise, campaign and misinform followers about Islam and Muslims.

I’m no fan of Britain First, I don’t think I could bring myself to vote for them or support them as their politics is not my politics. However it’s fair to point out that Tell Mama and Fiyaz Mughal have been running an online campaign against Britain First for a while now. Well, not so much a campaign but a vendetta. I disagree with Britain First but I support their right for their point of view to be heard.

The rise in online abuse would appear to mirror a rise in hate attacks during the past year. In October the Metropolitan Police released figures to show hate crime against Muslims in London had risen by 65 per cent over the previous 12 months. Latest figures also suggest that, nationally, anti-Muslim hate crime has risen sharply following the murder of Lee Rigby in 2013.

Oh not this old dishonest chestnut again? As stated earlier, Andrew Gilligan and others trounced this claim ages ago. A quick bit of advice to Mr Mughal: Speaking the same rubbish over and over again doesn’t magically make said rubbish true.

One man, Eric King, was recently given a suspended sentence for sending a local mosque a picture smeared with dog excrement depicting Mohamed having sex with a pig. However his Facebook account, which he used to send abusive messages to the same mosque, is still active and promoting anti-Muslim hatred.

If Mr King’s comments are solely concerned with criticising or expressing antipathy to a religion or an ideology and is not fomenting violence, then he hasn’t even broken the free speech clause in the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act. There would be in this case no grounds to shut down Mr King’s point of view.

Mr Mughal added that social media platforms needed to make their content management procedures stricter.

Now we get to the heart of what Mendacious Mughal really wants. He and his organisations, along with other Islamist groups, want to shut down debate on Islam. They want an online environment where only nice but untrue things can be said about Islam. If Mughal had his way the only thing that could be said about Islam would be to repeat the phrase ‘Islam is a religion of peace, Islam is a religion of peace’ There is enough censorship in media and society already, we don’t need any more.

“If users were to express such unacceptable opinions about ‘shooting’ Black British citizens or discussed Jews as a ‘cancer’, their speech would not be legal. The same protections should be forwarded to references to the Muslim community,” he said.

Whine, whine whine. It’s what Mughal does best. He needs to get it into his head that Islam is an ideology not a race. An extension of protections that currently cover race to the members of the ideology of Islam could mean that criticism of Anjem Choudary for instance could be classified as ‘racism’. We really do not need to go down that road for down that road lies a nightmare of dictatorship.

In a statement Facebook said it had a clear policy for deciding what was and what was not acceptable freedom of speech. “We take hate speech seriously and remove any content reported to us that directly attacks others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition,” said a spokeswoman. “With a diverse global community of more than a billion people, we occasionally see people post content which, whilst not against our rules, some people may find offensive. By working with community groups like Faith Matters, we aim to show people the power of counter speech and, in doing so, strike the right balance between giving people the freedom to express themselves and maintaining a safe and trusted environment.”

A Twitter spokesman said: “We review all reported content against our rules, which prohibit targeted abuse and direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

Groups like Faith Matters should have no place deciding, or even helping to decide what can and cannot be said. However, as the Facebook spokesperson seems to say the antidote to ‘hate speech’ is free speech and using said free speech to counter with facts, the point of view that a person disagrees with.

This is an appalling and shameful article from the Independent that fails to mention all the numerous criticisms that have been aimed at Tell Mama and at Fiyaz Mughal. My advice to the writer of the quoted piece, Oliver Wright, the Independent’s Whitehall Editor, is this: The next time you are contacted by controversial organisations like Tell Mama/Faith Matters/Religious Reader, do some fact checking before you publish these groups opinions as objective truth. The Independent used to be a good newspaper, now it seems that it just takes any old press release and mindlessly runs with it.

To conclude, if Mr Wright wants to speak to me personally about this article and the glaring defects contained within it, then he is more than welcome to contact me at the following email address: editor@fahrenheit211.net I can assure him that I will be polite, use facts and I’m not the scary racist that grievance-mongers like Fiyaz Mughal would like to think those of us on the counterjihad side are. I can provide articles based on facts and evidence, unlike the Tell Mama organisation, and will be happy to do so.

Link

Original Independent article about ‘rise in online Islamophobia’

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/twitter-and-facebookallowing-islamophobia-to-flourish-as-antimuslim-comments-proliferate-9954940.html

* Note for readers: I saw how bad it was working for Robert Maxwell when Maxwell’s Mirror made a retiring correspondent, who had covered the Second World War often in the front line, purchase from the company, the obsolete journalistic equipment that was a souvenir of his wartime days. Maxwell was a lying, vindictive paranoid man who brought heartache to thousands of Mirror pensioners and treated his staff like scum. I’m pleased and relieved that I only supplied stuff for the Mirror on a freelance basis and wasn’t directly employed by him.