Our Government and the Prevent Policies are Extremist
Meet Steven Saxby, vicar of Saint Barnabas in Walthamstow.
Keep in mind that his patch of London is a terrorism hotspot, from the airliner bomb plot of 2006, where the aim was to murder thousands over the Atlantic in a single day, right up to Syria cases in our time, including Siddhartha Dar of Islamic State.
Saxby’s role in this worrying place is to defend extremists. Watch him at it in this clip, filmed at a Walthamstow mosque last December and posted on Saxby’s Youtube account. He knows what to talk about when it comes to extremism – our government and its anti-extremist Prevent policies.
I completely appreciate the need for us all to work together to tackle all forms of violent extremism in our world today.
But I think there are also other forms of extremism that we need to tackle. And these are the forms of extremism that are being practised by our own government. You know, I think it is extreme that we are bombing Syria at this time. I was very glad to be walking, marching with others to oppose the bombing of Syria.
…
I think it’s extreme that the Prevent agenda, as it works, is stigmatising Muslim children. An absolute disgrace, that we’ve had that questionnaire going out to children in this borough, asking questions which are trying to earmark children as potential extremists. You know, that is an absolute disgrace in our community.
Saxby did indeed join a rabble shouting about “bombing Syria” outside local MP Stella Creasy’s constituency office last December. His fellow speakers included Raza Nadim of MPAC, a notorious extremist outfit. Nadim went for crude blood talk and threats:
We are here today to make our voices heard clearly, but do not let this be the end. Make it clear to your MP how you feel. If she doesn’t listen then let her know she has blood on her hands. And at the next election – she is out.
More on Prevent later.
Naturally the USA too must be slated. In the mosque talk, Saxby says this:
How many Muslims are being prevented from flying to the United States just simply because they are Muslim. And that’s something we need to stand up against. It’s another form of extremism, practised by the US government.
As for US visa and flights decisions, I think it’s fair to say the American authorities can be heavy-handed. But one might, you know, expect that from a country that had suffered 9/11 and faced another massive threat to its aviation interests from, er, Walthamstow. And claiming that Muslims are banned from flights simply because they are Muslim is plainly untrue and stupidly incendiary.
By the way, on this issue Saxby has also spoken up for his “friend” Ajmal Masroor. Masroor is perfect for Saxby – he is a loony tunes conspiracy nut and a Hamas supporter.
Joining a Rally for Extremists
With this background, it is no surprise to see that Saxby is due to join up with far left and Islamist agitators trying to disrupt Prevent at a rally this Wednesday. It is bluntly titled “Waltham Forest Against Prevent”.
Today the Sunday Telegraph ran a report on some of Saxby’s scheduled fellow speakers at this rally.
Ifhat Smith is lovely:
Investigations by the Telegraph reveal that several widely reported recent stories about Prevent are false or exaggerated – and many of the supposedly “ordinary Muslim” victims are in fact activists in the campaign, known as Prevent Watch. The stories include a claim which became a cause célèbre for Prevent’s opponents – that a Muslim schoolboy from London was “interrogated like a criminal” for using the phrase “ecoterrorism” in class.
The boy’s mother, Ifhat Smith, who took the story to the media, presented herself as a traumatised ordinary Londoner. She is in fact an activist in the Prevent Watch campaign and a key figure in the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which believes in replacing secular democratic government with Islamic government.
In a “scathing” court judgment to be published shortly, Mrs Smith’s legal claim against her son’s school and the Government has been dismissed as baseless and she has been ordered to pay £1,000 for wasting court time.
Haras Ahmed has been outed too:
In November, the BBC reported that the east London council of Waltham Forest had mistakenly released the first names of some primary school pupils thought at risk of radicalisation.
The release came as the result of a parent’s Freedom of Information Act request for correspondence about Prevent. The parent concerned, Haras Ahmed, described Prevent as “a disaster from start to finish”, and said he was “appalled [that] children’s data, such sensitive data, are released.”
However, a council spokesman said that the names had been blocked out in the release sent to Mr Ahmed but that the information sent had been “manipulated by a third party to reveal the blocked-out names.”
In the coverage, Mr Ahmed presented himself as merely an ordinary parent. However, he is also an activist in Prevent Watch. An online search would have revealed that he was listed to speak at a meeting with the group only four days after the story aired.
Jahangir Mohammed is another scheduled speaker alongside Saxby. In comes Cage, the terrorist support group. Mohammed is:
…a Cage activist, regular speaker at its events and co-author of at least three reports for Cage, one of which described Prevent as a “cradle-to-grave police state.”
Mr Mohammed wrote an article in the Socialist Worker for Cage, blaming the security services for the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby and saying that “if anyone radicalised [the killer Michael Adebolajo], it was them.”
For a sense of Mohammed’s insane scaremongering, see this tape from a Cage rally, where he warns Muslims that the British government is as bad as Pharaoh in Moses’s time. Mind your male babies!
Weymann Bennett of the SWP and Alex Kenny will be at the rally for the far left:
Another speaker at Wednesday’s rally will be Weyman Bennett, a hard-Left activist who has falsely claimed that Prevent criminalises any opponent of the Government, stating that “if you question Cameron, you are a non-violent extremist.” Alex Kenny, a member of the NUT’s ruling national executive, will also speak.
As The Telegraph revealed last week, Mr Kenny and other NUT leaders and activists in east London are working with Cage and Mend to undermine Prevent, even though teachers have a legal duty to safeguard pupils from extremism. Rob Ferguson, an NUT activist, orchestrated a statement which falsely claimed that Prevent has caused attempts to ban school prayers and targeted young people “for the views they hold on issues such as government foreign policy.” The NUT has refused to take action against him.
How to be Crass on Holocaust Memorial Day
This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was another occasion for Saxby to show his character. He had precious little to say about the Nazis. He did think it would be an excellent opportunity to bring up disagreeing with a Jewish teacher about Israel-Palestine and then have a go at her school, Hasmonean. When asked if they know about Srebrenica, he claims few Hasmonean students raised their hands. For shame, going on and on about their own genocide!
There’s a community that’s very focused every year on a whole week programme for thinking about the genocide in the second world war. And yet they were not aware of something that had happened 20 years ago.
A Proud Corbynista
Saxby is a keen Corbynista, just as one might expect. Here he is (right) welcoming John MCDonnell to Walthamstow last Friday, bearing some sad T-shirts as an offering to the great leader.
Perhaps they had a chat about Christian activities like, oh, spitting in the managers’ tea or hurling fire extinguishers at police officers from a great height?
Saxby is very interested in Labour politics. I think it’s a fairly safe bet that he could go far in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. Indeed, with any luck he will help to destroy it.
Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Walthamstow lad and airline bomb plotter
