Maajid Nawaz’s Duplicity Feeds The Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories Against Him
The honeymoon period between Maajid Nawaz and the nativist section of his base has inevitably ground to a halt. With this demographic, Nawaz had been celebrated in spite of him being an ethnically Asian Muslim. He was always going to be discarded as soon as he’d served his usefulness. While Quilliam’s relationship with Government had been parasitic, the relationship with the nationalists and white liberal Islamophobes had been symbiotic. The Islamophobes gave Nawaz an audience and therefore a qualified relevance and in return, Nawaz offered them a “some of my best friends are Muslim” Muslim token who validated their xenophobic ignorance, a panacea for guilt reflexes.
The rise of the Alt-Right and Trumpism and it’s unapolegetic white supremacy has rendered ethnic shields such as Nawaz almost redundant. The “Islam isn’t a race” mob had mutated into “For Britain” and they were gunning for the Muslim gateway who had helped facilitate their rise.
There is a beautiful irony in the tipping-point being an incident involving the far-right cult leader Tommy Robinson. In 2013, both Robinson and Quilliam were destined to wither into a well deserved obscurity but together they engineered a PR stunt where Robinson will have become reformed through a Quilliam intercession and through this their respective continuity was preserved. All was going well until Quilliam’s Julia Ebner authored an analysis in The Guardian of the far-right in May of this year, in which she rightly alluded to Robinson being a white supremacist. In response, Robinson barged into Quilliam’s London offices flanked by pseudo-news Rebel TV staff demanding retribution and intimidating staff.
Quilliam’s response was predictably pathetic. Nawaz disassociated Quilliam from his colleague while Quilliam’s MD, a prostate Haras Rafiq, scolded Ebner in front of a national TV audience and denied that Robinson was a white supremacist, but the damage had been done. Quilliam were now an enemy and their collective ‘Muslimness’ would now come to the fore.
Quilliam have the unenviable task of appearing liberal (their propaganda currency) whilst pleasing their right-wing financiers. It’s a complicated balancing act full of spin and sleight-of-hand. They must create a progressive facade from where they can punch left, ostensibly from the left, to create fractures and divisions. It is this duplicity and hypocrisy which the right and the far-right have misdiagnosed as evidence of Nawaz being a Taqiyya-peddling stealth Islamist. The most recent of these attacks against Quilliam was an especially poor effort by ex Muslim Shazia Hobbs on the anti-Islam hate site Jihadwatch. She inanely uses the Quilliam Foundation’s choice of title as the smoking-gun of Quilliam’s secret Islamist plot. The conspiracy itself is ludicrous but Quilliam’s habit of talking out of both sides of their mouth and Nawaz’s embroidered backstory lends credibility.
The official story goes that Maajid Nawaz was awakened to the error of his ‘radical’ ways whilst serving his prison sentence in Egypt. It’s even printed on the synopsis of his auto-biography. Nawaz explains his Egyptian ‘transformation’ from Islamist extremist to liberal democrat.
“Not everyone reacted that way to the brutal conditions we were held in, but it did kind of lead to my own maturity so that by the time I was released, I found that I could no longer subscribe to the ideology,”
His conversion is crucial to his identity but it’s simply not true. Nawaz was released in February 2006, yet many months later in October of that year he was screaming at the top of his lungs outside the American Embassy in London for Israel’s destruction and replacement with an ‘Islamic State’.
“We want to replace the state of Israel. We wan’t to change the status quo. We want to bring in a solution, which is universal, which accepts the right of man to live like human beings, and this state has been tried and tested in the history. We have seen historically that Muslims, Jews and Christians have lived side-by-side in the Middle East. They lived together in a state which recognised their rights to be who they are. They did not call for the elimination, for the annihilation, but recognised their rights for who they were. This state that existed in history, it brought an golden age to Spain. It brought a golden age to Baghdad. This state, this is the Islamic state to replace the Zionist apartheid state of Israel.”
Another episiode which could pad the ‘stealth Islamist’ theory is Quilliam’s shameful involvement in the UK’s Libyan disaster of 2011 and the mere existence of Libyan “proud”ex-jihadist Noman Benotman as Quilliam’s President who believes Bin Laden was once “in the right”.
In 2007, the same year as Quilliam’s founding, Benotman gave evidence before a Special Immigrations Appeal. He was accused in court by a UK security official of dishonesty, minimising the jihadist LIFG group and to not rejecting the 9/11 attacks on ‘moral grounds’.
The by then President of Quillam, Benotman was to later come to the aid of the LIFG. He helped broker a deal with Saif Gadaffi to have hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood and LIFG Islamists released from Abu Selim prison in Libya. Some were to spearhead the 2011 jihadist revolt while others would plan the Benghazi terror attack that killed Ambassador Stevens.
As a symbol of reconciliation Muanmar Gadaffi’s son Saif initiated dialogue between the state and the imprisoned jihadist leaders, with Quilliam’s Benotman and the Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Ali al-Sallabi acting as intermediaries.
To much fanfare the jihadists, while not renouncing violence did ostensibly revise their jihad “code” and were released in stages. All three parties, Quilliam, al-Sallabi and the MB/LIFG jihadists were to stab Saif Gadaffi in the back metaphorically and his father literally. Al-Sallabi was to be the conduit for the Qatari’s 2 Billion dollar regime-change investment, the jihadists were to fight on the front-lines while Benotman was in London portraying the jihadists as liberators and lobbying intensively for UK intervention in the media. As Quilliam founder Maajid Nawaz explains in his auto-biography, Radical:
Quilliam were “exposing crimes” that weren’t happening; as a subsequent House of Commons investigation made clear.
The proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence.
While Quilliam’s list of “deradicalised” radicals includes Islamist extremists such as the LIFG’s Emir Belhadj, the elder brother of Abu Yahya al-Libi, a leading Al Qaeda figure and the LIFG’s spiritual leader Shaykh Abu al-Mundhir who currently issues “deradicalised” fatwas on topics as diverse as if it’s “permissable to blow up Synagogues in European countries”, “The investigation into the sanctity of burning” and “What is the ruling on a pregnant woman doing a martyrdom operation” arguably its most catastrophic “deradicalisation” was the case of Sufyan Ben Qumu/Sofiane Ibrahim Gammu — Bin Laden’s former driver and current leader of the Islamic terrorist organisation Ansar-al-Sharia.
Reuters reported the Al Qaeda trained Bin Qumu’s release through the Saif Gadaffi/Quilliam initiative on August 31, 2010. Less than two years later, four Americans were to brutally murdered in Benghazi by Ansar al-Sharia — A group Benotman would have us believe doesn’t exist
The US State Department disagreed. On January 10, 2014 it registered Ansar-al-Sharia and its leader Bin Qumu as specially designated global terrorists for its role in the Benghazi attacks.
Incompetence, opportunistic pandering to David Cameron’s Imperialist fantasies or stealth jihadism? Quilliam’s President was involved in the release from prison of a literal “friend” of Bin Laden but through his words in front of the Gadaffis, you see the duplicity at the heart of everything Quilliam do. While Nawaz was on the BBC castigating the “regressive left” his President was in Libya exemplifying “regressive leftism”.
Perhaps worse and from the same 2010 report Benotman calls the man who he demanded the UK attack in 2011 a “hero” whilst lavishing him with praise.
