Text, Lies and Metadata — The Death Pangs of Quilliam
By J.Spooner & J.Stubbs
“When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woe befalls the state” — Euripides
This re-written introduction is going take on an unexpected and uncharacteristically personal tenor. Yesterday, a terrible injustice has occurred and we’re angry. In the course of the writing of this article, it became known that the Quilliam Foundation had responded to UCL lecturer, Dr Ella Cockbain’s clinical critique of their now infamous “grooming gangs” report.
It was a loathsome attempt to portray her as a ‘liar’ who associated with extremist Muslims and those from the far-left. The reality is that Dr Cockbain is a consummate professional (can anyone say what her politics or religious beliefs are?) who has devoted a great portion of her life to help tackle child sex exploitation (CSE) and her critique of Quilliam’s report has merely been an extension of this desire.
She is an incredible professional, an even better person and having to watch Haras Rafiq cynically attempt to destroy her career has been sickening to watch.
Especially deplorable was the pathetic attempt to link her with stoning, wife beating, FGM and terrorism for politely responding “thanks for your support” to Cage. Irregardless of your views on Cage, Dr Cockbain was not familiar at all with them. She merely thanked them for a compliment. Oh! But ignorance is not an excuse, I hear you say. OK, tell that to Haras Rafiq, co-author of the grooming-gangs report and sole-author of the hit-piece.
Rafiq was grilled by Home Affairs Committee for Quilliam’s links to anti-Muslim organisations and individuals. He pleaded ignorance and proffered a plausible deniability defense. You can see him sweat, for yourself here.
Worse, and according to the UK’s celebrity anti-Muslim extremist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson), both he and Quilliam had worked out an “I scratch your back. You scratch mine” deal with each other, wherein, Quilliam would pay Robinson’s household bills during the course of his incarceration, in exchange for the title of having ‘reformed’ him.
Quilliam, of all groups, don’t get to play the guilt-by-association game. Not when their Chairman, Maajid Nawaz is doing events with Douglas Murray, co-authoring books with Sam Harris, endorsing Ayaan Hirsi Ali, giving interviews to UKIP’s Carl Benjamin, flirting online with white supremacist Milo, adding his name to campaigns by the Gatestone Institute who publish Robert Spencer and Fjordman; the two most cited individuals in Anders Breivik’s terror manifesto and even this is all before going into their collection of very large checks from very large ultra-conservative right-wing organisations in the US.
As for the Socialist Worker interview — Dr Cockbain, unlike Quilliam, doesn’t have reporters from the Times at her beck-and-call. She doesn’t have direct lines to newspaper editors. She gave an interview because she is desperate for the truth to be heard. Her interview is evidence of the power differential involved and is a testament to her reluctant heroism and her quest to see good policy to protect vulnerable children. Here again, we can turn back to the hypocrisy of Haras Rafiq, In 2010, Rafiq gave an interview to the Middle East Forum of Daniel Pipes, who according to the Southern Law Poverty Center (SLPC) “bankrolled the violent ‘Free Tommy’ rally” in London.
The flimsy but potentially very damaging personal attacks on Dr Cockbain were merely a more refined model of Maajid Nawaz’s earlier aggressive verbal assaults against her. The guilt by association attack is being made by those far guiltier of having far dirtier associations and similarly, an investigation in the accusation of “lying” placed against Dr Cockbain will expose who is really telling the truth and who is not.
Quilliam rejected (or more accurately, ignored) the evidence provided that showed that someone had surreptitiously doctored the Quilliam report. Their ‘proof’ was a letter, essentially a promise, that the document had never been altered. This counts for nothing as the text itself had been changed. Let me repeat that — the text of the report had been altered. It beggars belief that they thought they could get away with this and if we had words to describe the contempt we feel for a man who offers apparently very little to society, attempting to destroy the credibility of a young, hardworking and honest researcher who had the audacity and courage to stand alone against the combined might and wealth of the Quilliam Foundation, then we’d use them. We do not. In the meantime, we will instead demonstrate that Quilliam scrubbed their report to conceal their errors.
This is the first document that we purchased and downloaded, at the end of 2017. It shows that it was created on the 11th of December, 2017 by Muna Adil, Rafiq’s co-author.
And from the metadata, this is this version unique ID.
And here in the properties for the most recent edition of the report, we find a creation date of the 9th of August, 2018 and the creator, again, being Muna Adil.
The metadata for this later version, naturally, tells us that this document, with it being distinct from the original, has its own unique ID number.
And finally, having run both documents through Adobe Pro’s ‘compare’ function, we can demonstrate that the document that Haras Rafiq accused Dr Ella Cockbain of “lying” about having being altered; was in fact, altered. There were in total, three changes: one ‘replacement’ and two ‘deletions’.
Below, we can see these changes in a side-by-side comparison with the original and the new report.
Furthermore and as shown above, Quilliam’s defence that the “page/post” has not been changed is irrelevant, because it is the document that has changed, not the web page in which the URL of the document is embedded.
This disgraceful attack on Dr Cockbain has been the culmination of what is now almost a year’s worth of ever-increasing pressure on the authors of the report.
January 25th: Yours truly first publish our critique of Quilliam’s report, Grooming Gangs: Quilliam & the Myth of the 84 Percent.
March 18th: After igniting some awareness of these criticisms within a small corner of the Twitter world and still being ignored by Quilliam, we post our follow up article, A Challenge To Quilliam: Publish Your Evidence For Your Mythical “84%”.
July 22nd: Luke ‘The Threadbomber’ Collins then compliments our research well by compacting his own, similar critique of the report nicely into a Twitter thread. This thread also helps to turn more social media heads, attracting further attention to the error-strewn report.
July 28th, 5:12pm: LBC’s Matthew Stadlen becomes the first significant major media figure to begin to demand answers from Quilliam, citing our ‘sometimes offensive’ report:
July 28th, 5:45pm: Half an hour later, Stadlen first makes contact with Collins, his curiosity further heightened by the young man’s thread:
July 28th: Following these enquiries from Stadlen, Maajid Nawaz avoids answering, passing the buck to Haras Rafiq, who subsequently then passes it on to Muna Adil. This nervous avoidance was better detailed in a later article, see here.
July 30th: Dr Ella Cockbain, CSE expert and one of the original researchers into the ‘group based CSE’ phenomenon, now joins in the questioning, adding some serious authority to the voices calling for answers from Quilliam:
August 1st: BBC presenter Nomia Iqbal now also speaks up, revealing that she had been pursuing Rafiq over these same issues and claiming that she too was met with a wall of silence.
August 3rd: Another follow up article by ourselves, Sajid Javid, Maajid Nawaz & “Quite Probably the Worst Piece of Research I’ve Ever Read.” reheats the fire under Quilliam, highlighting the heavy amount of criticism from CSE experts the report is now getting. This same day Matthew Stadlen now officially confirms he has sent his list of questions of to Adil as per the instruction of Rafiq.
*6 days pass*
August 9th, 2:49pm: Like many others, Twitter account ‘Bibah114’ reminds those involved that the public are still awaiting answers to Stadlen’s questions:
August 9th, 4:18pm: Less than two hours later, Stadlen replies to Bibah114, reassuring them that Adil will get back to him.
August 9th, 08:37pm, * four hours later*: That same day, Muna Adil now edits her report and uploads it as a new pdf. What she edits exactly on this occasion we cannot say for sure. However, the only changes to the report since it’s publication noted by us have been explored by Dr Cockbain here and highlighted above. Dr Cockbain carefully shows how key words and phrases have been changed in the report in what appears to be an attempt to retreat from it’s initial cocksure conclusivity regarding the findings. This editing of the report’s claims was not recorded anywhere by the authors and still to this date has not been documented anywhere. We speculate that following her realisation that Matthew Stadlen and the attention around her report is not going away any time soon, Adil goes into panic mode, frantically editing it’s more ambitious claims to assist in her soon to come defence of it. To reinforce what was stated above, further photo’s below show the date/time/author of the creation of the latest document as well as the changes in the original:
October 22nd: Matthew Stadlen replies to more Twitter accounts still demanding answers. He states that Adil has replied to him. He implies that Adil has not given any specific answers to his questions, and rather just accepts the Quilliam answer that they ‘stand by’ their now-modified report.
October 27th: Lily Allen and Dr Cockbain spark a Twitter meltdown from Maajid Nawaz and Muna Adil. The pair then break their silence to begin falsely accusing the reports critics of racism, succeeding in creating a big enough cloud of smoke to hide behind which allows critiques of the report to remain unanswered. For further elaboration on this petulant display, read here.
October 31st: Days later, in the aftermath of the Quilliam pair’s Twitter-tantrum, Matthew Stadlen, tweets to Maajid Nawaz, appearing to hint at his own disappointment in the response he received from Adil over her report:
October 31st: Nawaz responds by telling Stadlen that the reason Adil gave no significant reply to him was that they did not see fit to answer his concerns given they were based on our very article (ignoring the thread by Collins, the appeals from Iqbal and the criticism from experts):
November 6th: Dr Cockbain then stops the clocks with her mammoth, evidence-based critique of the Quilliam report. This incredibly precise and comprehensive 98-tweet, 4-part thread highlights the many errors in the Quilliam report and the dangers of the discourse it enables:
November 8th: Dr Cockbain then drops her second bombshell within as many days, claiming Quilliam is now “in retreat” and, along with Collins, exposes the now not so secretive editing of the report.
“Still, Quilliam remain silent” is what we had originally written here; just 24 hours ago. Of course, that all changed in an instant. But now Quilliam must really, really wished they had ‘stayed silent’. We demand that Quilliam immediately retract their falsehoods and issue Dr Cockbain an apology. Its really is the very least they must do.
