Tonight CAGE is scheduled to hold an event titled ‘Citizens not Subjects: Empowering Communities’. The publicity refers to their ‘recent victory over the Charity Commission in the High Court.’
In fact what happened is that the judges urged both parties to come to an agreement, although it is true that in the agreed statement the Charity Commission retreated from its earlier insistence that the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) undertake never to fund CAGE again under any circumstances:
“The commission recognises that it has no power to require trustees to fetter the future exercise of their fiduciary duties under its general power to give advice and guidance. In consequence, there is no obligation on the trustees of the JRCT to fetter the proper and lawful exercise of their discretion in the future.
The JRCT was ‘represented as an interested party’, apparently as keen as CAGE to defy the Charity Commission, and assert its right to continue awarding grants to CAGE.
The JRCT’s enthusiasm for CAGE seems bizarre. According to its website the Quaker trust
is committed to the creation of a world that guarantees equal treatment for all people.
CAGE’s own contemptuous disregard for this admirable goal could be evidenced in numerous ways. The inclusion, in tonight’s event, of a video message from Haitham Al Haddad will suffice. It would take too long to enumerate all his hateful views. Here’s a reminder of just one, via habibi:
Haitham Haddad wants a world where there is no escape from death for apostates from Islam. None at all.
Not even “private” apostates will be spared. They will be spotted when they stop praying or wearing the hijab. Execution will be their reward.
It is almost impossible to think of an analogy from the traditional far right or from countrjihadism which is any way equivalent to proudly advertising the presence of this ‘Sheikh’. Yet some people who would be up in arms about a group hosting say Douglas Murray (who is not far-right) seem incapable of perceiving a problem with unreconstructed Islamists.
Hayley Kemp offers a good example of this kind of highly selective outrage. She was shocked when Usama Hasan retweeted a cartoon satirising the Taliban’s treatment of women. Apparently it was ‘trivialising domestic violence’. (In fact, as Ophelia Benson, Tehmina Kazi and others tried to explain, it was using grim humour to condemn such violence.)
Here she is again, this time sternly informing readers that Maajid Nawaz’s brand of feminism is a ‘hollow parody of the women’s movement’.
So what about Haitham Al Haddad’s brand of feminism?
He refers to ‘so-called rape against your wife’, he warns wives not to answer back to their husbands and not to call the police in the event of domestic violence, he thinks girls should be married off at the first opportunity, ‘the younger the better’, and believes FGM is Sunnah.
But apparently these views are not to be compared with the truly awful crime of going to a lapdancing club on your stag night, for Kemp is giving tonight’s CAGE event her delighted support:
Oh too far for me to travel on a school night but wish you the best of luck with this. Bravo & keep up the great work. X
