This is a cross-post from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens
Both on this blog and Harry’s Place, Moazzam Begg’s CagePrisoners (CP) group has featured fairly regularly – especially since one of their favourite ‘Sheikhs’, Anwar al-Awlaki, turned out to be an al-Qaeda supporter.
Although CP claims to campaign for raising ‘awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror’, much of its website is dedicated to individuals convicted of terrorism offences in the UK. These people are not ‘detainees’ who are ‘held’, they are prisoners who are guilty of either trying to kill civilians, or encouraging others to do so.
In the website’s ‘From Behind Bars’ section, there are pages of letters from convicted Islamist terrorists, and in the case of Mohamed Hamid (aka Osama bin London), some stratospherically awful poetry.
Of course, there is no attempt by CP to remind us that they are reproducing the words of murderous fascists, and it all feels very sympathetic.
The latest in the series of letters provided by CP is this one from Abdul Muhid, where he thanks them for their help:
Thank you for passing my details to the Ummah who have sent comforting words of advice to me, in the form of letters and cards for Eid-ul-Fitr. There are many people who wrote to me but did not give me a return address to write to and thank them, a group of children from a playgroup sent me a Eid Card and signed it with the names Maryam, Sulaymaan, Mustapha Ibraheem & Abdullah, if you know who they are please thank them on my behalf.
Considering that this is a letter ‘from behind bars’, this is likely to be the same Abdul Muhid who was jailed in 2007 after reportedly leading the Mohammed cartoon protests in central London during which, according to the BBC, he ‘chanted "Bomb, bomb the UK" and waved placards with slogans such as "Annihilate those who insult Islam".’ What is a group that purports to be a human rights organisation doing facilitating contact between a bloodthirsty maniac and young children?
If an organisation that was sympathetic to the far-right was found to be putting kids in touch with violent white supremacists behind bars, they would be rightly shut down and investigated. Make no mistake about it: Abdul Muhid is no different to the most vile far-right fascists. The fact that his middlemen at CP held an event in Parliament only last month suggests that many people have yet to understand this.
HP adds: on 22 February Moazzam Begg will be welcomed at SOAS by the university’s Islamic society. He will give a lecture titled “Justice in Islam”.
