But long before its whitewashing of Jihadi John, Cage was also, quite clearly, a terrorism advocacy group. It campaigns for actual terrorists convicted not by kangaroo courts but by juries, on strong evidence, in properly conducted trials. It even campaigns for some terrorists who actually pleaded guilty — such as Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, two friends from Birmingham sentenced to more than 12 years each last December after travelling to Syria.
Moazzam Begg, Cage’s outreach director, said that the pair “never joined Islamic State nor expressed intention to do so”, unfortunately neglecting to mention that they had joined a group affiliated to those well-known moderates, al-Qaeda. Begg also said Ahmed and Sarwar had “no intention of harming anyone” — not a view shared by the police, who found traces of military-grade explosives on their clothes, or the trial judge, who declared them “clearly dangerous”.
Mohammed Nahin Ahmed (L) and Yusuf Zubair Sarwar, both 22, who have admitted preparing to carry out terrorist acts after they travelled to Syria from the UK to join rebel fighters
Cage, however, has used the case of the two men to bang its drum that “there is a dual system of law” for Muslims and non-Muslims in the UK, since “even what Muslims regard as legitimate jihad abroad… now constitutes ‘terrorism’”, while “non-Muslim Britons going to fight in Syria for private security companies… are untouched by current terrorism legislation”. This is untrue and in any case no non-Muslim Britons have gone to fight in Syria (a few have gone to Iraqi Kurdistan).
On Sept 25, a few months before protesting about the treatment of Ahmed and Sarwar, Cage issued a press release attacking that day’s “cynically timed police raids” against “a group that is well known for its outspoken views on UK foreign policy”. It said the raids were part of a “coordinated campaign orchestrated by the government” to promote its “hawkish stance” on Syria.
It unfortunately forgot to mention the name of the “outspoken” group which had been raided. It was al-Muhajiroun — a banned organisation formerly headed in the UK by Anjem Choudary and now linked to about a fifth of all terrorism convictions in Britain, including the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby. On Remembrance Sunday, Cage’s patron, Yvonne Ridley, wrote a touching piece for its website about how she’d be setting aside time to commemorate “those Brits who have sacrificed their lives, not for their country but for the plight of the oppressed. I really can’t think of anything nobler.” These fallen soldiers were Abdullah and Jaffar Deghayes, teenage al-Qaeda recruits from Brighton who died in Syria, she said, “as heroes”.
Other Cage favourites include Abu Qatada, the al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki — linked to at least a dozen terrorist attacks — and Boko Haram, the Nigerian Islamist group which abducted 275 schoolgirls (the Bring Back Our Girls campaign is a “colonial trope” and criticism of Boko Haram is about “demonising Islam”, according to the Cage website.)
Last week, as well as claiming that Mohammed Emwazi had been “radicalised by Britain”, the Jihadi John story gave the group what it saw as an ideal chance to push its inflammatory broader agenda. “The UK has multiplied its military intervention in Muslim countries,” it claimed.
The number of British troops in Muslim countries is in fact nil, compared with more than 30,000 at the peak. “The culture of abuse [of Muslims] now runs so deep in the UK that there are virtually entire communities which, due to security services acting outside the rule of law, no longer have access to due process,” Cage claimed.
“Individuals are… in the worst cases tortured, rendered or killed, seemingly on the whim of security agents.” The Telegraph asked Cage for the names of those individuals in the UK who have been tortured, rendered or killed on the whim of security agents. It has been unable to come up with any since there is none.
We also asked for the names of anyone in the UK jailed without due process, again drawing a blank. Far from “deepening”, anti-terrorism powers have in fact been cut in the past five years with the abolition of control orders, the end of blanket stop-and-search and the halving of the pre-charge detention period from 28 days to 14.
In his notorious press conference, Mr Qureshi claimed that Britain had “created an environment where the security agencies can destroy the lives of young people without any recourse”.
Cerie Bullivant, spokesman for Cage
This claim is disproved by the cases of the group’s own leaders. Mr Qureshi himself can have little complaint about the hand dealt him by Britain. He is a public-school jihadist, educated at the elite fee-paying Whitgift School in Croydon, a squash fanatic who once played for Surrey and the proud owner of a £530,000 home in that comfortable county. “I was extremely fortunate growing up,” he once confessed.
Both Mr Begg, Cage’s head of outreach, and Cerie Bullivant, its spokesman, had slightly rougher rides. They suffered from security service overreach — but they did have recourse, and they successfully used it.
Mr Begg was charged with terrorist offences — but had the case thrown out for lack of evidence. Mr Bullivant, Cage’s spokesman, spent two years on a control order — but was acquitted by a jury of breaching the order, which was itself later quashed by the High Court after the evidence behind it was revealed to be paper thin.
Justice should have been quicker in both their cases, but it was done. The problem, however, is that the facts — and the scorn of the mainstream media — matter little. Polling shows that Cage’s fantasies are widely believed among younger British Muslims. Most of Cage’s audience does not trust, or even read, the mainstream media. In Cage’s parallel universe, they are targeted online and through the group’s close links to many other extremist groups, above all some university Islamic societies.
Another Cage spokesman, Amandla Thomas-Johnson, was previously press officer for Fosis, the Federation of Student Islamic Societies. Fosis works closely with Cage, organising joint events, and is itself a highly problematic organisation, condemned by Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, for its “failure to fully challenge terrorist and extremist ideology”. It has hosted many of the Cage roster of favourites at its conferences, and a number of convicted terrorists have been officers of societies affiliated to Fosis.
Emwazi was a student at the University of Westminster – and it is there that he may have been radicalised. The university, a hotbed of Islamist extremism in the past, has hosted at least 50 radical speakers in the past eight years, including Awlaki and Begg.
Only last week, it was due to receive Haitham al-Haddad, one of the country’s most notorious non-violent extremists, with whom Cage also has links.
Haddad, who has called Jews the “brethren of swine and pigs”, runs the Muslim Research and Development Foundation, based in the same East London street as Cage. The two organisations recently ran a joint campaign against the new Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, now passed into law.
Other partners in the campaign are the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which believes that voting is forbidden, and the Islamic Education and Research Academy (IERA), which has links to some Syrian jihadis and sends extremist speakers around the country. Two weeks ago, IERA and Cage held a joint event on “the limits of free speech” at which large sections of the audience applauded a call for apostates to be executed, according to Dan Hodges, one of the participants.
Non-student young people are targeted, too. Cage’s managing director, Muhammad Rabbani, is a former senior activist in the extremist Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), based at the East London Mosque. Cage has held events at the mosque. Mr Rabbani was responsible for training young recruits to the IFE and told them: “Our goal is to create the True Believer, [and] to then mobilise these believers into an organised force for change who will carry out dawah [preaching], hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad. This will lead to social change and Iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social and political order].”
Mr Rabbani was also the gang outreach co-ordinator at the Osmani Trust, another IFE front which is accused of recruiting gang members to the IFE. Cage is based in the same building as Claystone, a new Islamist group closely linked to Haddad which pushes the same themes as Cage — that extremist Muslim organisations are unfairly demonised; that Muslims generally (rather than individuals holding extreme views) are under attack; that the authorities are acting without evidence; and that the threats of extremism and terrorism from non-Muslims are greater than the threats from Islamist extremism and terrorism.
But perhaps its most interesting links are with the mainstream liberal-left. Amnesty International, the human rights group, claims it has stopped working with Mr Begg after one of its key activists resigned in 2010 in protest at its links with Cage. But it is still working with Cage.
As recently as Oct 30, Amnesty, Liberty, Justice and five other mainstream human rights groups joined with Cage in a “collective” to make representations to the then inquiry into the treatment of British Army detainees. Amnesty’s director for Europe and central Asia, John Dalhuisen, and Liberty’s director, Shami Chakrabarti, signed the collective’s letter alongside Mr Rabbani. Cage also has close links with Universities UK (UUK), the collective body for British universities, which has taken a notably weak stance on campus extremism and strongly resisted attempts to ban Muslim bigots.
UUK also works closely with Fosis. After the Emwazi revelations, mainstream politics has settled into the usual groove, with calls for more powers for the security services. That would be a mistake. The security establishment already has more than enough powers. The issue, as case after case proves, is deciding which of the hundreds of potential suspects to apply them to.
What’s really lacking and badly needed is a counter-narrative to the story of victimisation and grievance peddled by Cage and its allies, a story that says Britain may not actually be that bad a place to be a Muslim.
Perhaps Mr Qureshi could be used as an example? The Government is supposed to be launching something like this in its new counter-extremism strategy, but any narrative that comes in an official wrapping is probably destined to fail.
Still, to the joy of some in the counter-terror world, Cage’s embrace of Jihadi John is a huge own goal. “They have finally stuffed themselves,” said one senior figure. “Making Emwazi their poster-boy of persecution is ridiculous and will show them up for what they really are.” Whether it’s a permanent problem for the terrorist lobby, or just a blip, remains to be seen.
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