There are some people who are appointed to positions in government, business or the third sector, that make the observer draw a sharp intake of breath. Especially when the person concerned is so obviously inappropriate to occupy that position. We wouldn’t for example want a racist hypocrite with all the intellectual capacity of a slug as a Minister but then we have to realise that Jeremy Corbyn thought that Dianne Abbot would make a good Shadow Home Secretary
Unfortunately I and others who may have thought that this was as bad as things could get were profoundly wrong. Things can get worse and an example of just how inappropriate some appointments can be can be found by perusing the names on the board of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. The HMD is responsible for organising the national governmental commemoration of the Nazi Holocaust and other genocides which happens on the 27th January which is the date when the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz was liberated in 1945.
One particular and highly inappropriate name stands out when it comes to the board members of HMD and that is the name of one Fiyaz Mughal. Fiyaz Mughal, for those who don’t know, is the founder and leader of the disgraced and dishonest Tell Mama ‘Islamophobia’ monitoring organisation. Mughal’s Tell Mama organisation came to prominence following the Islamic murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich, South East London in May 2013. After the brutal murder of Mr Rigby, Fiyaz Mughal took to the airwaves where he was given a considerable amount of time to tell the world that there was a ‘massive’ amount of Islamophobia following the murder and that Muslims in Britain were at terrible risk. Unfortunately Mughal’s statements turned out not merely to be mistaken but were outright lies. Following revelations by the Telegraph journalist Andrew Gilligan that Mughal had told outrageous lies about the levels of ‘Islamophobia’ Mughal went to court to sue Gilligan but lost. Mughal has also lost cases in the civil courts and a case in the old Press Complaints Commission tribunal. Since then Mughal’s Tell Mama organisation has become a byword for exaggeration and dishonesty but is still sadly being indulged and funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government a department headed up by the minister Sajid Javid.
Page from Holocaust Memorial Day Trust page showing Fiyaz Mughal as a member of their board.
Mughal’s proven and long term record for exaggeration and his organisations habit of quoting dubious and easily debunked ‘academic’ studies on ‘Islamophobia’ to back up their dishonest claims should have made him a pariah in government circles. Sadly that has not happened.
This record of Mughal’s hyperbole and his other questionable activities should have made him persona non grata with an organisation such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. HMD should have been very wary of Mughal, mainly because associating with someone like Mughal and his dubious reputation could damage that organisations credibility.
Unfortunately the HMDT didn’t take the correct path and treat Mughal as something to avoid, like someone with brand new shoes would avoid a freshly laid ‘dog’s egg’ on the pavement and appointed him to their board.
But, the situation regarding Mughal and this seriously troubling appointment is far worse than one might imagine. Mughal’s record of running an organisation that is mired in dishonesty is bad enough but information has come to light that, if correct, shows that Mughal has worked closely with known Holocaust deniers in order to attack critics and advance his organisation. If the HMDT had not kept a sensible distance from Mughal because of the dishonesty of his organisations then they really should have done so because of Mughal’s close association with the high profile Holocaust denier Alison Chabloz.
Information has come into my possession that shows that Mughal and Chabloz had a quite close association over several years that only ended when Chabloz was caught out and was pictured doing a neo-Nazi ‘quenelle’ salute.
Picture of Alison Chabloz making Neo-Nazi ‘Quenelle’ salute in Edinburgh
In effect Mughal was quite happy to associate with Holocaust deniers up until the point when it became politically expedient to not do so. In fact Chabloz herself claims that Mughal helped her in a number of ways including offering her assistance when Chabloz lost her job on a cruise line when Chabloz’s Holocaust denial activities were exposed. Chabloz is alleging that Mughal was feeding her information that she would then use to attack Mughal’s critics.
In her own blog Chabloz says of Fiyaz Mughal:
I first became aware of the work of Tell Mama UK in 2013. Back then, with several ongoing and costly court cases (notably against The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan), Tell Mama’s director, Fiyaz Mughal, was understandably happy to have support from ethnic white Brits like myself. Mughal sent me a Facebook message to this effect and even used my Storify blogs as evidence of the smear campaign against his organisation. He also offered his assistance in 2014 when I was sacked from my job with AIDA cruises following a defamatory letter sent by one of Tell Mama’s principal detractors who Mughal had also threatened to sue.
Since my quenelle in Edinburgh last year, Mughal has been obliged to distance himself (although this process had begun as early as summer 2014 when he withdrew his promised support regards my professional situation).
As you can see the contact between Mughal and Chabloz doesn’t exactly seem to be fleeting or inconsequential, it seems to have been of a close and relatively long term nature. The relationship between this gruesome twosome only appears to have broken down when Chabloz’s Holocaust denying lunacy became too public for Mughal to ignore any more. You can find a link to this blog at the bottom of this article and I’ve also pasted a full copy of this article below as an Appendix just in case it mysteriously disappears down the internet memory hole.
This evidence of a close and friendly association between Mughal and the Holocaust denier Chabloz is bad enough but there is more. According to a tweet from Chabloz Mughal was using her to gather evidence for a court case between Mughal and some of his more vociferous and determined opponents. In the tweet Chabloz said:
Screenshot showing that Chabloz was seemingly assisting Mughal in helping to silence opponents
Chabloz and those associated with her also seem to have been quite readily tolerated on the Tell Mama Twitter feed as can be seen by the tweet reproduced below:
Another set of tweets showing that Chabloz was actively assisting Tell Mama to attack Tell Mama’s opponents
Neither the post from Chabloz’s blog nor the two tweets quoted above strike me as showing that Mughal has any problem whatsoever with associating with people like Chabloz. These associations sit badly with the public statements made by Tell Mama or by their supporters that Tell Mama is ‘against all hate’. It seems that Mughal and his organisation have a pretty relaxed attitude towards Holocaust deniers like Chabloz and this makes it even more inexplicable why organisations such as the Community Security Trust, the voluntary group responsible for providing security for Britain’s synagogues and other Jewish communal property, and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust would have anything to do with Mughal or any of his organisations?
The list of connections between Mughal, so called ‘anti-Zionists’, Holocaust deniers and various Tell Mama associated trolls who harass those who criticise Tell Mama should have been a red light to anybody thinking of working with Mughal in the Holocaust memorial field. Many of these associations with dodgy characters are not at all casual and in one case Mughal/Tell Mama have even shared a Knightsbridge PO Box with a man called Jason Schumann, a person who has a long reputation for attacking critics of Tell Mama online. Evidence of this particular association can be found via the screen shot below.
Image shows Knightsbrige PO box shared by Jason Schumann and Tell Mama
For the HMDT to allow someone with Mughal’s record and Mughal’s dodgy associations to be appointed to a senior position within that organisation, looks to me very much like putting the fox in charge of the hen house when the farmer has gone to sleep. It’s utter madness. In the UK we as a society quite rightly take significant steps to prevent paedophiles from becoming teachers in schools yet the HMDT seems more than happy to allow someone with close links to a known Holocaust denier to be on their board. Do the HMDT not care about the public relations damage this appointment will undoubtedly bring? Do they not care that the appointment of a man who is more than a little friendly with Holocaust deniers to their board is an insult to the memory of those who were murdered by the Nazis and those who survived the Shoah? It seems that they don’t give a toss about either the insults given or the damage that it will do to the reputation of the HMDT.
To appoint Mughal to such a position when a large number of people from across a wide range of political views have valid criticism of Mughal and his various organisations, smacks of both extreme stupidity and arrogance. Those from the HMDT and civil servants from within the DCLG who support HMD and who fund Mughal’s organisations, cannot realistically be said to be unaware of either Mughal’s long standing questionable reputation for honesty or his association with Holocaust deniers. After all if it didn’t take long for either myself or those associated with this blog to find out this information about Mughal then surely the HMDT and the DCLG who must have access to far more detailed information than I and other citizens do, should have also discovered Mughal’s dodgy associations and even dodgier reputation much earlier than the average citizen can do.
If the DCLG and the HMDT trust didn’t know about Mughal’s reputation for running groups mired in credible allegations of dishonesty then it shows them to be lacking in the ability to make sensible judgements about who they should be working with which is bad enough indictment against both the department and the HMDT. However, if this department and the HMDT knew about Mughal and his close association with Chalboz then it makes them complicit in the Holocaust and genocide denial that they, and more particular the HMDT Chief Executive Olivia Marks-Woldman, claim to be fighting against.
In a statement made on the subject of Holocaust denial by Ms Marks-Woldman she said:
Those who deny the Holocaust seek to promote antisemitic views, and/or seek to undermine the legitimacy of Israel. Those who trivialise the Genocide in Rwanda seek to minimise the numbers and undermine the experience of what happened. Deniers are often led by people who are sophisticated in their arguments and in their presentation to look legitimate and academic. –
See more at: http://hmd.org.uk/news/hmdt-chief-executive-delivers-speech-genocide-denial#sthash.XbuGPSnb.dpuf
By appointing Mughal to the board of HMDT they’ve made Ms Marks-Woldman’s words look empty and without any real substance whatsoever. The HMDT cannot credibly claim to be fighting against Holocaust and genocide denial whilst an individual like Fiyaz Mughal with dubious associations is linked with them. As I said earlier in this piece, Mughal’s reputation for dishonesty over the issue of ‘Islamophobia’ by playing up the levels of it alone should have disbarred him from being involved in the HMDT, but when you add in Mughal’s association with known Holocaust deniers then his appointment looks completely perverse. The only way that the HMDT could top this terrible decision to put Mughal on their board would be if they had put someone like Nick Griffin or David Irving into a similar position.
This appointment of Fiyaz Mughal, a known dissembler of ‘hate crime’ statistics and a friend and a person who has been revealed to be a close associate of Holocaust deniers, to such an important and sensitive position, makes a mockery of the otherwise good work that the HMDT does in remembering the victims of the Holocaust and other genocides. It’s an astoundingly stupid decision which will permanently damage the reputation of the HMDT if Mughal is allowed to continue being associated with the organisation.
The HMDT can recover from the faux pas of working with Fiyaz Mughal but they need to take action quickly in order avoid lasting damage to their organisation’s reputation. They should remove Mughal from their board, cease all contact with him and make public statements to the effect that Mughal will never again be allowed to serve the HMDT in any capacity whatsoever. There is no real benefit to be had for HMDT to continue to associate with Fiyaz Mughal and it is likely that Mughal is allied himself with the HMDT (as he allied himself with the CST) purely in order to shore up the crumbling reputation that he and his organisations have. The only person who benefits from associating with Mughal is Mughal himself, any organisation, like the HMDT that lets him in through the door and works with him will find themselves tainted by that association. The HMDT is too valuable an organisation to see it destroyed by allowing Mughal to remain on their board any longer. The HMDT need to get Mughal out and get him out quickly before he does any more damage than he’s done already to the reputation of the HMDT.
Links and Appendix
Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website
Fiyaz Mughal’s Tell Mama group still being funded by the DCLG despite promises that their funding would be cut when Tell Mama were caught out lying about ‘hate crime’ figures
Appendix
Full text of the article from Alison Chabloz bemoaning how Fiyaz Mughal promised to support her but didn’t. I’ve reposted the whole of Chabloz’s post from her blog just in case she deletes it following the publication of this article. It’s awful guff to be honest and the headspace where Chabloz lives seems to be one where there is a ‘Zionist plot’ around every corner and everyone she disagrees with is an ‘Islamophobe’. I’ve reproduced this so that people can see just what sort of headcases Fiyaz Mughal is happy to call ‘friend’. It should also be a wake up call to those Jewish organisations that still associate themselves with Mughal and his various entities. People like Dave Rich of the CST for example should be mightily ashamed that he and his organisation have helped to give Tell Mama a credibility that they do not deserve.
Below from https://alisonchabloz.wordpress.com/tag/tell-mama-uk/
I first became aware of the work of Tell Mama UK in 2013. Back then, with several ongoing and costly court cases (notably against The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan), Tell Mama’s director, Fiyaz Mughal, was understandably happy to have support from ethnic white Brits like myself. Mughal sent me a Facebook message to this effect and even used my Storify blogs as evidence of the smear campaign against his organisation. He also offered his assistance in 2014 when I was sacked from my job with AIDA cruises following a defamatory letter sent by one of Tell Mama’s principal detractors who Mughal had also threatened to sue.
Since my quenelle in Edinburgh last year, Mughal has been obliged to distance himself (although this process had begun as early as summer 2014 when he withdrew his promised support regards my professional situation). Moreover, Mughal along with another of his collaborators, Suzanne Fernandes of Ealing, have now embarked on a smear campaign against me.
On her Twitter profile, Fernandes claims to be on the advisory board of Tell Mama. Why is her name not on the official list?
Professor Neil Chakraborti
Paul Giannasi OBE
Professor Francis Davis
Baroness Uddin
Maqsood Ahmad OBE
Sayed Yousif al-Khoei
Dr Irene Zempi
Dr Tariq Abbasi MBE
Zoe
Varinder Singh
Dr. Imam Mamadou Bocoum
Julian Bond
Muhbeen Hussain
Tehmina Kazi
Vidhya Ramalingam
Dr Chris Allen
Dr Musharraf Hussain
Iqbal Bhana OBE, DL
Nathan Lean
Dr Imran Awan
Mark Wilson
Kim Sadique
Tufyal Choudhury
Dave Rich
According to her Twitter feed, Fernandes has reported me to police at least twice (her face is apparently a regular fixture at Ealing police station). Already last year, it would seem that Fernandes was being manipulated by my main abusers (both described as Islamophobes on Tell Mama’s blog, here and here) as seen from tweets by the troll account RTingBot, run by these same abusers :
No longer an activist, no. But for two years a firm supporter as shown in over 100 blog posts by me, as well as in emails sent to me by Mughal offering his assistance when I was stranded in Germany.
Earlier this year, Fernandes took exception to my revisionist songs. Nobody was forcing her to listen but she decided I should be reported to police for my musical mischief. To boot, Fernandes then decided to tweet Zionist extremist Dave Lange (aka Israellycool) who’d written yet another hate blog about me, with copies sent to Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London and Mark Regev, Israeli ambassador to the UK asking them both to assist in putting me behind bars!
Really? An advisory board member (but not according to the official list) of a pro-Muslim organisation tweeting a hard-line, pro-Israel propagandist – not to mention the abominable Regev – in order to score a few points? Clearly upset that I had the audacity to respond, Fernandes then changed tack, deciding to lump me in together with convicted Internet troll, John Nimmo, currently in custody and awaiting trial for having sent death threats to Labour MP, Luciana Berger.
As well as all the usual labels attached to pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist commentators, Fernandes is now claiming publicly that I have harassed her family – an outright lie – and that she has again reported me to police.
Oddly, Tell Mama’s unlisted advisory board member Fernandes seems to tweet regularly with pro-Israel extremists including über-Zionist ‘top lawyer’ Mark Lewis :
The above is a fairly typical overview of the way Lewis sometimes handles himself on Twitter. Unsurprisingly, our ‘top lawyer’ is now under investigation by the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority.
Maybe Fernandes needs to check a few facts before engaging with such types?
However, like Lewis, Fernandes supports Israel:
Does Fiyaz Mughal also support Israel? I’ve yet to see him criticise Israel. Indeed, former CST director Richard Benson was drafted on to the board of Tell Mama to assist Mughal run his org, presumably in light of astronomical costs of the aforementioned legal cases which were threatening Tell Mama’s continued existence.
My research of Mughal revealed several further worrying factors. Mughal’s wife claims to be a survivor of the London 7/7 tube bombings and, like her husband, runs an organisation for victims. An electoral roll search brought up Mrs Mughal’s address along with four other inhabitants all with the same surname. Three of the names are as follows:
Faiz A Mughal
Fayez Mughal
Fiyaz Mughal
Three different people or three different spellings?
Mughal’s business credentials can also be researched on CompanyCheck.co.uk. There are two active inscriptions under the name Fiyaz Mughal. The main page details his organisations as well as property and investment companies. More interesting is Mughal’s second page, seemingly set up to divert unnecessary attention from another of his appointments?
So, dear reader, there you have it. Tell Mama UK director is a Muslim who believes in and actively collaborates with holohoax fairy tales.
That Facebook message I mentioned above said something along the lines of ‘You’re amazing’.
What a creep!
No wonder so many British Muslims feel disappointed with Tell Mama and what it stands for. Its association with arch-Islamophobe elements such as Harry’s Place and indeed Quilliam F does little to reassure the Muslim community. Worse still – attacks against Muslims have increased ten-fold since Tell Mama came on the scene. Are anti-hate orgs actually spreading more hate, rather than trying to combat it?
Oh, and if you’re reading this, Suzanne, my advice would be to check out what’s happening to Mark Lewis. I’m sick of your lies and smears and if you wish to carry on defaming me and accusing me of harassing your family then please rest assured that there will be further consequences.
Wishing everyone a pleasant day.
