Click HERE for Part One
Now we need to turn our attention across the Atlantic to the United Kingdom and the other Jewish organisation with which this article is concerned and that is the Community Security Trust (CST). The CST was set up in 1994 and was inspired by the various Jewish groups that fought against the fascists of Oswald Mosley in the 1930’s and also by the 43 Group that fought with Mosley’s political dregs that still abounded after World War II.
Despite this, the CST is not a street fighting group like those which existed in the 1930’s and in the immediate post-War period, even though it may have been originally inspired by some of those who fought against the Mosleyites. Instead it has concentrated on advising the management of Jewish communal property such as synagogues on how to improve their security and also provided training for and supplied security staff who guard Jewish property and Jewish events at other places. According to some histories of the organisation, one of the reasons for forming it was to help to remove a large degree of the burden that fell on the police in protecting British Jews from classic Jew-hating neo-Nazis and from Islamists.
The CST works closely with the police both in reporting crime aimed at Jews because they are Jews and in procuring training for the thousands of volunteers who do the actual security work. On the whole the CST volunteers that I’ve encountered have been as sound as a pound. These volunteers are both Jewish and non-Jewish and mostly do a sterling job. I’ve met some Jewish CST guards who are involved in the CST because they want to help their community, but don’t really want to get involved in Jewish worship. They seem to much prefer to be standing outside the synagogue guarding it than inside praying or listening to the Rabbi’s sermon, which in my view is fair enough; it’s a ‘horses for courses’ situation really. If there are any problems with the CST it does not, in my view, lie with the hard-working committed volunteers, but with the management of the organisation and the policies they have undertaken.
As with the ADL story told above, in the case of the CST we are also dealing with a situation where an organisation has blatantly squandered a hard won reputation by poor decisions and by engaging in questionable associations. There is also the matter of the behaviour of the CST and how transparent this organisation is, questions that have been asked by a much more famous writer than I, the noted historian and journalist Professor Geoffrey Alderman.
There have also been, according to an article by Professor Alderman in 201,1 communal criticism of some of the things that the CST has done in the past. This includes in one case allegedly intruding into the affairs of individual Jewish congregations by insisting that it is the CST that should always be consulted for security advice when planning communal events.
Despite these gripes the CST built itself a solid and respectable reputation as an organisation that was a ‘go to’ group for police officers and politicians who wanted to find out about and counter anti-Semitism. Its good reputation has steadily grown since the mid 1990’s but since 2012 it has made decisions and engaged in alliances that can only damage the reputation of the CST. Below are some details of one monstrous and ongoing mistake that the CST has made, which is their continual association with the Tell Mama ‘Islamophobia’ monitoring group.
Back in 2012 a man called Fiyaz Mughal founded the Tell Mama group. Previously, Fiyaz Mughal had done pretty well for his various Islam-related projects out of the British taxpayer. A freedom of information request put in by another writer and originally published on the Kafircrusader website and republished and commented on at this site here, revealed the enormous amount of public money that had gone to various Fiyaz Mughal projects via the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
Many of these projects, as you will see from the earlier links, were not just costly but appeared to have very little benefit to the public who had had taxation extorted out of them to pay for these various useless Islamic fripperies. Between the financial years 2008-09 and 2010-11, Fiyaz Mughal managed to get an enormous amount of taxpayers’ money to fund a ‘living Islam out loud’ project, a caring for Islamic converts’ project, a ‘woman’s mosque directory’ along with sundry other funds for equally seemingly socially useless endeavours. In total, between 2008 and 2011 Fiyaz Mughal managed to squeeze a total of £365,423. Many of us think this money could have been much better spent elsewhere.
As was previously stated, Fiyaz Mughal founded Tell Mama and used the CST as a template for Tell Mama, as was his right to do so. Fiyaz Mughal has also cultivated links with the British Jewish communal Establishment and at one state set up a now dead Facebook page called ‘Muslims against Anti-Semitism’. However it was claimed by the right wing Jewish Defence League UK group on another now defunct Facebook page, that this Muslims Against Anti-Semitism was nothing more than a ‘shell’ group and merely existed as a page in cyberspace and did nothing of any real concrete value. Fiyaz Mughal’s various organisations such as Tell Mama, Faith Matters, Religious Reader etc, have all benefited from the acquired respectability that association with respectable organisations like the CST and with other members of the Jewish communal Establishment gave them. Also I understand that Tell Mama were advised in the early stages of their formation by staff from the CST and it may have helped Mughal to set up Tell Mama.
With the formation of Tell Mama, Fiyaz Mughal hit paydirt with the DCLG dumping £397,000 into his lap in order to fund the Tell Mama organisation. Although Mughal had had dealings with the DCLG before and had managed to screw money out of them in the past, it’s possible that an association with a reputable organisation such as the CST may well have helped to persuade the grant makers at the DCLG to dish out the dosh. It’s certainly possible that it was CST contacts and influence that may have got Fiyaz Mughal and Tell Mama valuable introductions to the Home Office and various police forces. Now it needs to be said that I am not accusing Mughal of misappropriating any public money or anything like that, but many people may agree with me that spending money on a group like Tell Mama turned out not to be a wise thing to do, especially as the group was subsequently revealed to have significant problems with such things as basic honesty.
All was going swimmingly for Mr Mughal and his Tell Mama organisation until late May and early June 2013. Following the brutal Islamic murder of Fusileer Lee Rigby in South Woolwich on May 23rd of that year, Mughal became a familiar face to TV viewers and newspaper readers, as he flogged the idea that the murder had precipitated an ‘unprecedented’ wave of ‘Islamophobia’. But when reputable journalists, most notably Andrew Gilligan of the Daily Telegraph did some digging, they found that Mughal’s organisation had been claiming that negative comments about Islam were ‘attacks’ and were therefore an equivalent to someone being unjustly punched in the face merely because they were Muslim. Mughal was highly embarrassed by the revelation that his organisation had been peddling complete bullshit and so was the government. They promised solemnly that they would cut funding for Tell Mama because of the outrageous lies this organisation had told following the Rigby murder. Sadly the government uttered an untruth about the funding cut, and Tell Mama’s funding was quietly reinstated when the fuss over the Gilligan revelations died down, that’s if the DCLG really had any intention of permanently cutting their funding in the first place.
I will not rehash too much of this part of the story as it has been covered in depth in a number of posts on the Fahrenheit211 blog. If you wish to find these posts, please enter the search terms ‘Tell Mama’, ‘Fiyaz Mughal’ and ‘mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya artists’ into this blog’s search box.
Following on from the furore of the post Rigby murder when Tell Mama got out caught out being ‘economical with the truth’, sources say the CST again advised Tell Mama on such matters as record keeping. Unfortunately, Tell Mama continue to be a byword for dishonesty and spin and even this year they were forced to take down from their site a provably dishonest story about an ‘Islamophobic attack’ that never happened and they only did that after an internet campaign to get them to do so.
CST should have just given Tell Mama advice on record keeping and walked away. The ongoing concerns about Tell Mama, such as spin, dishonesty, the use of patently biased and ideological academic reports to back their cause and their association with anti free speech organisations have not gone away. Even though Fiyaz Mughal is no longer associated with Tell Mama, he stepped down from the board of Tell Mama a while back. and it is chaired by another Islamic grievance monger, this organisation is indelibly tainted and distrusted by many of us.
Sadly, the CST did not do the right thing and walk away from Tell Mama. The CST have continued to cleave to this organisation and are sticking to it like a limpet to a rock. The CST have inexplicably continued to back an organisation that will not bring either the CST or the Jewish community any benefit whatsoever.
Because the CST didn’t distance themselves from Tell Mama when they really should have done then the only group that is being damaged by this association is the CST itself. I have Jewish friends and associates who are shaking their heads in disbelief that the organisation that was set up to protect them is squandering their reputation by their rather too close relationship with Tell Mama.
I tend to agree with those Jewish critics of the links between Tell Mama and the CST. Not only does it increase the distrust that some Jews, most notably some Jews of the political Right, now have for the CST but it is also going to lose the CST their hard-won good reputation.
This distrust will only grow more deep-seated now that the relationship between the CST and Tell Mama appears to be getting closer and closer. So also will this association continue to tarnish the reputation of the CST.
I feel really really sorry for the security volunteers who provide the front line service that the CST is tasked with providing. They are committed, loyal and work damned hard to ensure the security of Jewish communal events and property. These decent people are being soundly let down by their management who, like the ADL, seemed to have lost sight of what they should be doing and have swallowed the social justice kool-aid in massive amounts. They should get back to protecting Jews and not assisting Muslim groups, especially at a time when the main threat to Jewish security is coming from the followers of Islam.
It’s a sad fact of life that sometimes we are judged adversely by the company that we keep. There are a growing number of us who are coming to a negative judgement about the CST, not only because there may be organisational transparency issues but also because the organisation has chosen to associate itself with such a bunch of censorious, shifty, low-rent liars as Tell Mama have been proven to be over the years.
I can’t help but wonder whether the CST’s time is now up, if they cannot deal with their management problems? Its had a good run and has done very good things but it may have become far too big for its boots. Its allegedly extensive contacts with the police and the Home Office and other agencies may have gone to their heads. The CST has also, as we can see with regards to Tell Mama, seemed to assume arrogantly that they can make whatever deal they want, no matter how distasteful a group that they are dealing with may be. Their attitude seems to be that its a case of ‘their way or the highway’.
Maybe it’s time that the CST had some competition in the field of protecting British Jews? Maybe Jewish groups in different areas could form their own local security guarding groups and negotiate their own hot-lines to the police rather than relying on this expensive and increasingly arrogant monolith called the CST? Would not security groups drawn from the local Jewish communities and from non-Jewish allies, many of whom may know these areas better than CST people may do, be a better and more efficient way of ensuring our security? Time and a willingness to challenge the status quo will tell.
This close association by the CST with a group that I have a profound distrust of unfortunately makes me distrust the CST. Because of that I would not feel comfortable engaging the CST to undertake security at any event I was in charge of, their association with Tell Mama has morally compromised the CST in my opinion. I would much rather ensure the security of my family and friends at any such event by privately engaging those who are British or Israeli ex-service people rather than the CST. This is because the CST has continued to consort with a group like Tell Mama which has put out the most monstrous lies about the extent and nature of ‘Islamophobia’, which has exploited a vulnerable mentally ill transsexual for political gain and which has uttered monstrous libels about Tell Mama’s opponents in a variety of forums including by using Parliamentary Privilege to do so. I will not trust security matters to those groups like the CST that I now find I cannot trust to do the right thing, maybe others should start thinking in a similar way?
Links
Ari Lieberman article on the ADL and their hiring of someone who has had extensive contacts with the Hamas fans of CAIR
ADL website
ADL Wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Defamation_League
Inside Fiyaz Mughal’s money making machine
Original expose of DCLG wasting money on Fiyaz Mughal projects from Kafircrusader
Gilligan expose of Tell Mama
Wiki page on CST
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Security_Trust
CST Home Page
Tell Mama home page
Tell Mama use vulnerable mentally ill transsexual to promote their cause to state agencies
Tell Mama leave fake ‘Islamophobia’ story up for over a year with no corrections
