As a taxpayer and a citizen I, like a great many others, have a vested interest in seeing that money extorted from the public via taxation is spent wisely, efficiently and correctly. When we hand over our hard earned cash to the Government we have a right to expect that these funds are not wasted and the Government in turn has a duty to steward this money carefully. Unfortunately ‘careful stewarding’ is not how I would describe the Government’s ongoing funding of the disgraced ‘Islamophobia’ monitor Tell Mama. This year we have funded Tell Mama to the tune of £182,000 and if what I’m seeing on social media is anything to go by, there are a growing number of people out there who would rather see that money spent on something better.
One of the things that we the people are paying Tell Mama to do, via grants from the Department of Communities and Local Government, is for Tell Mama to whine about ‘offensive’ doormats and assist them in bullying retailers into removing them from sale. The doormat in question is an ‘Allah’ doormat which was on sale on Amazon but after interventions by a Muslim local councillor and the Tell Mama organisation Amazon withdrew the item from sale.
Now I personally would not buy an ‘Allah’ doormat and put it in my home, it’s not my style. Besides that I would no more want a manifestation, even a humorous one like this, of the bloodthirsty deity ‘Allah’ in my house and therefore defiling it, than I would want a Nazi flag doormat.
However, my decision not to have an ‘Allah’ doormat is my choice, just as it’s my choice what books to have on my bookshelves or what newspapers to buy or what music to listen to. Others may make different choices and that’s also acceptable to me. Different people have different views and make different purchase choices. It should not be down to a bunch of mendacious grievance mongers like Tell Mama, or an individual like their founder Fiyaz Mughal, whose groups and projects incidentally have managed to screw a total of £980k out of the public purse since 2008, to advise on people’s style choices. They should certainly not be restricting people’s choices and engaging in acts of censorship like this and they should definitely not be doing this on our tax pounds.
It’s sick-making to see this bunch of clowns and mountebanks using our money to intrude into people’s rights to purchase what they damn well want. Of course there are some things that are restricted for reasons of public safety and this is the reason that there are no ‘Do it yourself gas installation’ books at your local library, but the number of such restrictions should be both small and should be able to be justified. To stop people buying an ”Allah’ doormat should be seen in any society that likes to call itself free and unjustified act of censorship. The bullying of a retailer by Tell Mama in this way cannot be condoned and is yet another example of how Tell Mama favour censorship of words and images that are critical of Islam.
Here’s a piece from the Tell Mama site about the saga of the ‘offensive’ doormat. As is usual policy for this blog the original text from the mountebanks of Tell Mama are in italics whereas my comments are in plain text.
Tell Mama said:
Amazon has removed a number of offensive products from its American store. This includes products which demean Islam and belief in God. Twitter user @mariamkhan29 made us aware of the items.
In a free society it should be everyone’s right to demean any religious belief and belief in god itself. Those of us with religious beliefs may not like that very much but it’s a price worth paying to live in a free society. Unfortunately the sort of societies that Islam creates or the kind of societies that Islam influences are often the very opposite of ‘free’. There’s a bloody good reason why most Islamic countries are oppressive hellholes and that reason is Islam itself. Another thing that gets me is that this was on sale in Amazon’s American store, a country with a long and distinguished history of free speech. It’s a bad sign that dubious publicly funded grievance mongers in the UK can interfere like this in a US business. Amazon should have told Tell Mama to: ‘sod off we have this thing called ‘the first amendment’. It’s disgraceful that they have not done so.
Before we move on it’s probably a good idea to take a closer look at Mariam Khan who is a Labour Party (what else) councillor for Washwood Heath in Birmingham and who is pictured below. She also has some very ‘odd’ ideas which are outlined in one of the links at the bottom of this piece.
Cllr Mariam Khan of Washwood Heath in Birmingham. Censorious and a purveyor of conspiracy theories about 9/11
This person seems to have played a large part in drumming up complaints about the ‘Allah’ doormat and has worked with Tell Mama to get the items banned. Mariam Khan is just what the world doesn’t need at the moment, which is yet another censorious Muslim. A brief glance at her Twitter timeline tells me all I need to know about her and her politics and it doesn’t endear me to her one bit. There are whines about President-elect Trump, puff pieces about internal Labour party activities, stories about litter cleaning by local mosque attenders and of course there’s the usual blocking of critics of Islam. However I do hope she gets her missing cats back though, although I despise Islam, cats on the other hand are OK.
Tell Mama continued:
The seller identified as ‘Dargon One’ lists “Allah Islam Symbols Doormat And Dog Mat” which it lists as a ‘funny dog mat’.
The product has received more than 800 one star reviews calling for its removal. One review reads: “This is an act of great irresponsibilty on the part of Amazon to sell such a product. It is highly offensive and hurtful to billions of muslims around the world.
I wonder how many of these 800 reviews were the result of an organised campaign by Mariam Khan and the Tell Mama group? It would be interesting to know. Personally I don’t give a toss that this item is ‘offensive and hurtful’ to Muslims all over the world. Many people in civilised lands find Islamic theology and culture offensive but those of us who fee that way are not indulged in the way that the followers of Islam are.
The creator of such a product has no respect for the religion of Islam which deserves recognition and respect as do all other faiths.” The user pleads with others to make legitimate complaints to Amazon to have the product removed.
Islam doesn’t deserve respect. Individual Muslims who obey the law, follow our customs and do good things deserve respect, but no respect at all is due to an ideology started by a desert dwelling paedophile warlord called Mohammed. Islam is an idea and ideas do not have rights. Like it or not, and Muslims won’t like this, the fact is that based on evidence, Islam is a death cult and no amount of bleating by Muslims about ‘hurt feelings’ will change this fact. To quote Ben Shapiro ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’.
The page was soon removed following complaints. The ‘Dargon One’ seller lists ‘Infidel’ related products. Such imagery and rhetoric is common among far-right and anti-Muslim groups. Our complaint to Amazon has been escalated with other Amazon departments.
Amazon’s policy on offensive items is clear – if a little difficult to find online. It states that products “that promote or glorify hatred, violence, racial, sexual or religious intolerance or promote organizations with such views” are prohibited from sale. Amazon adds that it “reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of listings on its site, and remove any listing at any time.” We have reported the offending content and raised our concerns further.
This case is a prime example of how seemingly good ideas such as having a policy of not promoting violence etc end up getting abused by Islamic groups in order to censor views, comments and products that these Islamic groups don’t like. The same applies to ‘hate crime’ and ‘hate speech’ laws which might have seemed to politicians like a good idea at the time, but have ended up being used to suppress opinions about Islam that some Muslims and Islamic groups disagree with. My view is that there are a shed-load of things I see and hear out there every day that I find offensive and disturbing or hateful, but I have choices when it comes to them. I can ignore them or argue with those who say them. As always the answer to bad speech is not restrictions on speech but even more free speech. For example: I find Holocaust denial disgusting and I wish it didn’t exist, but I’d far rather those nut cases who promulgate such twisted ideas were out in the open where I can keep an eye on them and argue against them, than they be driven underground and out of sight where they can exist unchallenged. Sunlight it is said, is a great disinfectant and maybe this is why so many Islamic groups are so much in favour of not letting this sunlight in on Islamic theology and on Islamic culture?
If there is one glimmer of light from this case it is this. It shows that for those living in free speech zones such as the United States there is a business opportunity here. That opportunity is for someone to produce the items that Amazon has chosen not to sell and which they have removed from sale at the partial instigation of the mendacious censors of Tell Mama. This shows how free markets can be an ally of freedom of speech.
To conclude: It’s obvious to me that Amazon has been hit by an organised campaign from Tell Mama, Cllr Khan and others to get this and similar items removed from sale. However two can play at the organised complaint game and if you are as offended as I am at Tell Mama’s involvement in this act of censorship and if you think that such activities are not a suitable use of taxpayers money then why not contact them and tell them on info@tellmamauk.org Of course if you do contact Tell Mama then please keep your communications with them legal, decent, honest, truthful, polite and without any hint of threat. By acting in this way not only will you be making yourself less liable to arrest by Britain’s Islam appeasing police officers, but you will also be behaving better than the way that Tell Mama and its staff have behaved themselves.
Links
Tell Mama article about the ‘offensive’ doormats
http://tellmamauk.org/amazon-removes-third-party-allah-doormats-sale/
The complete and utter waste of taxpayers money that is the Tell Mama organisation
Mariam Khan has form with various lunatic ideas including appearing with Scientology types claiming that the 9/11 hijackers were ‘hypnotised’ by psychiatrists
http://theapolloseries.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/labour-councillor-mariam-khan-opens.html
and
Mariam Khan Twitter feed
@mariamkhan29
If you are as angry as I am about the utter waste of money that is being expended on Tell Mama then why not write to your Member of Parliament and complain. See form letter via the link below
