NAUSEATING!
An odious press conference, apologists for terror and the do-gooders who fund them
Held at an ‘art gallery’ near london’s euston station, it was one of the most extraordinary and nauseating press conferences of recent times. It had been convened at 3pm on Thursday by the ‘human rights’ organisation Cage following the i dentification of masked killer Jihadi John as the Kuwaitiborn londoner Mohammed emwazi.
For three years, the campaign group had been in close contact with and offered support to emwazi before he left Britain to fight in Syria in 2012.
But rather than express an apology – or even a smidgen of regret – for having failed to turn him away from the path to barbarism, what we witnessed was almost an hour of excuses, accusation and invective against Britain, British society and the British state.
Broadcast live for 52 minutes on the BBC and 58 on Sky News, the men from Cage described Jihadi John as an ‘extremely kind’ and ‘ beautiful young man’. The lachrymose assessment of his character was made by the organisation’s ‘research director’ Asim Qureshi, who spoke uninterrupted for 18 minutes about the iniquities of British policy on the ‘war on terror’ and the unfair ‘harassment’ that men such as Jihadi John experience.
The heavily-bearded Qureshi is a very middle class radical, who lives with his partner in a £500,000 house in suburban Surrey. despite these trappings of infidel decadence, he has advocated jihad and the creation of an 8th Century- style Islamic Caliphate in Britain, similar to that which has been imposed in Syria and Iraq by the terror group Isis.
In 2006, Qureshi was filmed outside the US embassy in london addressing a rally organised by the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir. He said: ‘When we see the example of our brothers and sisters fighting in Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan, then we know where the example lies. We know that it is incumbent upon all of us, to support the jihad of our brothers and sisters in these countries when they are facing the oppression of the West. Allahu Akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!’
In a subsequent interview with the pro-Putin broadcaster Russia Today, Qureshi supported the imposition of Sharia law, including the stoning to death of adulterers and other brutal capital punishments. This week, his opening harangue at the press conference was followed by Cage’s ‘media officer’ Cerie Bullivant, a British convert to Islam.
He railed for another eight minutes about the treatment he had received at the hands of the security services ‘in very similar circumstances’ to those of emwazi.
Bullivant, a 32-year- old f ormer mental health nurse once married to a Kuwaiti- born woman, went on the run for two months in 2006 after being placed under a control order when it was suspected he was planning to go to Iraq to fight for insurgents.
He was later cleared of breaching the condition by a j ury which accepted he had a ‘ reasonable excuse’ for flouting the order because it was making his life miserable. The civil rights organisation liberty was sufficiently ‘impressed’ by his subsequent campaigning to award him a ‘human rights young person of the year’ award in 2011.
The third member and ‘ moderator’ of the press conference panel was John Rees, a former leading activist of the Socialist Workers’ Party. His position is a good example of how the hard-left has aligned itself with radical Islam. Rees is national officer of the Stop the War Coalition and presenter on the Islam Channel, through which he fostered close links with Cage.
The group first appeared in 2003, when it was known as Cage-Prisoners. It was founded to oppose official Western policy on the ‘war on terror’ and to stand up for Muslims who were arrested, captured or killed in security operations.
Critics say it was – as we witnessed on Thursday – a sophisticated organisation that knows how to exploit a democratic system which enshrines free speech and human rights in order to support terrorists.
This is not a view, though, taken by two of Britain’s largest left- ofcentre charitable foundations, which saw Cage-Prisoners as a human rights cause worth supporting and donating hundreds of thousands of pounds to.
Some £120,000 was given by the Anita Roddick Foundation, which is run by the late Body Shop owner’s husband and their children.
Funds from her estimated £100million estate have been given to a range of bodies that ‘want to change the world.’ This definition would seem to include an organisation that wants Britain to become a medieval caliphate.
A further £305,000 was given to CagePrisoners/Cage over a period of six years by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a Quaker-run fund set up by the York-based chocolate maker and philanthropist. Quite why the trustees support such a body is a question for their consciences. Probably, it is also a question for the Charity Commission to look into.
Sources at the Commission believe officials at the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust may have been ‘duped’ when they agreed to make donations to Cage. One said: ‘They were conned after it re-branded itself as a human rights group.’
He said Cage (and its previous entity CagePrisoners) had been wellknown to the security services for some years because of its support for terrorists.
Cage has also worked closely with two other UK-based organisations that have reported ties to Islamic extremists – the Cordoba Foundation and the emirates Centre for Human Rights (eCHR).
Following the Cage press conference, eCHR’s media spokesman Rori donaghy – who has given lectures on media handling to Hamas officials in Gaza – tweeted support for his ‘measured and intelligent’ Cage counterpart Cerie Bullivant after he called Sky Tv’s Kay Burley an ‘Islamophobe’ and stormed out of an interview with her. Cage came to wider attention in 2006 when Birmingham- born Moazzam Begg joined it as ‘outreach director’. He had been arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and spent three years at Guantanamo Bay where he claimed to have been interrogated 300 times.
He admitted having visited terror training camps in Afghanistan but was awarded £1million compensation by the British Government. After his release without charge, he has since become a columnist for the Guardian.
Through Begg, Cage developed links with the radical preacher and Al- Qaeda cheerleader Anwar al-Awlaki and campaigned for his release from detention in Yemen. He was later killed in an American drone strike. In 2010, Begg also spoke of his desire for a Caliphate-style regime in Britain.
AS for Cage, it is a mystery why it has escaped scrutiny for so long. Significantly in 2010, a director of the campaign group Amnesty International was suspended by the organisation for talking out of turn.
Gita Sahgal had criticising its close ties with Cage – which she described as ‘jihadis’ – and with Begg, who she called ‘Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban’.
last year Begg was arrested over alleged links to terrorism training and funding in Syria, to which he had previously travelled.
As a result, Cage’s bank accounts were frozen after intervention from the Treasury. Although the charges against Begg were later dropped, it seems from the organisation’s website that its accounts are still frozen. In the meantime, Cage asks for donors to send money online to a website more often used for receiving charitable sponsorship – or to send cash by recorded delivery to an address in Bloomsbury, central london. It also advises: ‘We can arrange for someone to pick up the cash donation from you.’
Cage continues to have a phlegmatic view of British jihadis fighting in Syria.
One article posted on its website last year was headed ‘British fighters in Syria should not concern us’, which undoubtedly could be seen as encouraging or justifying terrorism.
Indeed, the ‘human rights’ outfit described the first British suicide bomber in Syria, Abdul Waheed Majeed, from Crawley, as ‘giving his life for a just cause, and it would be shameful of us were we to tarnish him and other Syrian fighters as terrorists for doing that’.
Omar deghayes, a libyan citizen who was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, has also been listed as a director of Cage.
Two of his nephews were killed after travelling from their Sussex homes to fight in Syria. For their part, British security services fear the rise of an Islamic State terrorist threat in Britain is helped by the sympathetic campaigning of ‘human rights’ groups such as Cage.
As an eminent former counter terrorism officer says: ‘The outlook is very, very gloomy – far worse than it was after 9/11. And it is not helped by organisations such as Cage being basically apologists for slaughter.’