Bartholomew's Notes

At the Westminster Journal, Dominic Whiteman clarifies his connections to Glen Jenvey:

I met Glen Jenvey  summer of 2006. I have met him in person on five occasions in my life. We worked part-time together (mostly using telecommunication) only on the recording of Omar Bakri Mohammed’s Paltalk lectures – giving the recordings to Scotland Yard in November 2006 and passing some recordings to the media -between the summer of 2006 and March 2007 (notably contributing together to the BBC Newsnight programme of November 14th, 2006). We’ve not collaborated on any projects together since – Glen is more into internet and video research while my team and I tend to use physical sources to collect pointers. Glen works mostly for himself – I work as part of an investigative team… Amongst the cyber mosque lecturers were the (now both jailed) Abu Izzadeen (Trevor Brooks) and Mizanur Rahman. The project was a spoke…of a hub collectively known by the name VIGIL. Glen initiated the Paltalk project and saw it through to its end. Glen and the nameless others comprised this particular spoke but were never part of the VIGIL  hub. VIGIL’s other spokes were comprised of a variety of individuals – ranging from retired military and intelligence personnel through to linguistics and legal experts.

This “VIGIL” organisation came to public attention late in 2006, when it was featured as the main source for a Newsnight investigation into Islamic extremism, particularly Hizb ut-Tahrir.

I’ve always tried to be fair-minded about this kind of investigative work – obviously there are Islamic extremists out there, and if someone wants to poke around in their business looking to expose what they’re up to, good luck to them. Indeed, I wrote a positive blog post about Jeremy Reynalds’ efforts in this regard back in 2005, and when in 2007 I wrote critically about Denis MacEoin’s report for Policy Exchange on extremist materials for sale at British mosques I was careful to add that I considered the report to be “temperate in tone” and of some real use  (unfortunately when a specific problem was highlighted by another Newsnight report, MacEoin was very poorly served by PE’s Dean Godson, who gave a repellent and blustering performance on the show).

However, it’s also obvious that the field is going attract a fair number of cranks, self-aggrandizers, fantasists, and those more interesting in stirring up anti-Muslim feeling than contributing sensibly to a subject of urgent public concern. I’ve written about some of these characters on this blog over the years, and that’s also why I cast a sceptical eye over VIGIL  following the 2006 Newsnight piece; I found the website graphics to be overdone, some of the rhetoric to be rather weird, and some of the links disturbing. I asked the question “who invigilates VIGIL?“; Whiteman appears to answer directly:

VIGIL projects were always made clear to the respective authorities, who we were set up to aid – so, yes, we were invigilated, whether by the police, OFCOM orothers…

He adds that VIGIL has no “Zionist” agenda; Jenvey’s support for Israel (“If the Philistines don’t like it, they should just find somewhere else to live”) was highlighted by Hizb ut-Tahrir. Whiteman also explains that he is no longer a “hub director” of VIGIL, and that he has had only occasional contact with Jenvey since then, via email. He also tells us that he is not “Richard Tims”, that a Wikipedia account using his name has nothing to do with him, and that a story claiming he and Jenvey are lovers is a concoction (Whiteman in fact is married). And as for the “abuislam” story:

On collecting hidden videos off jihadi websites Glen’s skills were second to none. I have no idea with whom he is in contact nowadays. Whatever the result of the PCC investigation I look back on the excellent work we did those years ago together with considerable pride and satisfaction, knowing it was solid and waterproof – that it caused Bakri and his ragtag benefits claimants some considerable (and merited) strife.

This is rather less than a statement of confidence in Jenvey; indeed, Whiteman appears to be distancing himself from him, while being careful to assert that their past involvement does not discredit the work they did together. And of course, a jihadi video remains a jihadi video, even though the person who finds it might be questionable.

It’s nice finally to see some openness – cryptic websites, it seems to me, look rather silly and simply raise questions about credibility.

Whiteman also tells us what he’s up to nowadays:

My role is to organise fieldwork – on a private contractual basis – for investigations into particular subjects. Some of these subjects happen to involve extreme Islamism; some do not. In the last two years these subjects have included investigations as diverse as exposing terror fundraising networks in London and Islamist hate literature stocked in Britain’s libraries. Most of the UK team I work with are Muslim.

(The Westminster Journal article has some minor formatting problems with word spacing, which I’ve fixed in the quotes above)

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Audio evidence concerning “Richard Tims” revealed

Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads has received a strange email from Jeremy Reynalds, associate of Glen Jenvey:

Hello Tim,

I have been in contact with Mr. Jenvey. He says that he is not Richard Tims, that law enforcement officers are looking into your site’s “hate comments” about him, and that he will be in touch with you soon.

Best regards,

Jeremy Reynalds

This is all quite a saga, as I have blogged a number of times recently: Jenvey – a self-styled “anti-terror” expert and pundit in the controversial Obsession DVD – claims to have found evidence on a Muslim website of a plot to target British Jews, and this formed the basis for a Sun frontpage in January. The owners of the Muslim website, however, claimed that the author of the militant postings – a certain “Abuislam”-  had posted previously as “Richard Tims”. “Richard Tims” had spammed the site some months before to promote a website which Tim Ireland discovered turns out to have been owned by Jenvey. The Sun has removed the story from its website, the Press Complaints Commission is investigating, and Sir Alan Sugar – subject of the Sun headline “Terror Target Sugar” – is planning to sue the paper.

Jenvey’s response to all this has been quite extraordinary. He appears to believe that the Muslim forum is a front for al-Qaeda, and therefore that anyone who questions his “discovery” must therefore support terrorism. In particular has claimed that the PCC is guilty of “hate crime” because it is investigating the complaint, and he has alleged that the Guardian ran a short report on the investigation in its media section because the paper’s editor secretly knows that “Abuislam” is a former Guardian columnist. Tim tells us that Jenvey has indeed lodged a complaint with the police. But despite weaving these bizarre conspiracy theories, Jenvey has been silent about who Richard Tims actually  is – until now.

However, the plot thickens, and Tim has also exclusively revealed an audio recording which purports to be an interview between Jenvey and an unknown journalist. In the recording, a voice which purports to be that of Jenvey explicitly admits to using “Richard Tims” as a “false name”. The voice also boasts of links with “a university professor whose cousin, Sherard, is the British Ambassador to Afghanistan” (that would be, as Tim notes, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles), whom he claims to take evidence to when “I  don’t think the cops are taking me seriously”. He also tells the interviewer that he had arranged for someone called “Mike” to “go and visit MI5 and hand over tapes”. One can’t help thinking that this unwelcome scrutiny is going to end up embarrassing a lot of people…

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Florida Today reports that Walid Shoebat is due to make a couple of appearances at Brevard County, Florida:

He will speak 10 a.m. Saturday at Kol Mashiach synagogue in Melbourne and 10 a.m. March 8 at Church of Christ and 1:30 p.m. at a conference held at the Central Community Church in Cocoa.

“His topic will be more geared toward the Bible, Islam and prophecy,” said Kathy Mardirosian, a spokeswoman for Project Restoration, a Brevard-based group. “Walid is an expert at this topic and has an understanding that most in the western world doesn’t have. It gives him a unique insight into terrorism.”

Indeed, and I’ve chronicled his “expertise” at some length: his gems include the observations that Obama is definitely a Muslim who is using abortion as a plot to kill off Americans, and that Arabs and Nazis both like to use horses. As regards “Islam and prophecy”, he takes the view that “666” in the Book of Revelation is in fact a misreading of the Arabic for “In the Name of Allah”; he tells us that he discovered this after consulting ancient manuscripts, although one that he has cited – the Codex Vaticanus – in fact does not include the Book of Revelation. His “unique insight into terrorism”, meanwhile, is based on some supposed (and challenged) dabblings with the PLO in the 1970s, before – although having been “brainwashed” to hate the West – he moved to the USA and married a Roman Catholic.

“Kol Mashiach synagogue” is a Messianic place of worship, while “Project Restoration” promotes a “Hebrew Roots” form of Christianity that appropriates Jewish culture in its worship practices (a trend I wrote about here). Mardirosian is prominent local Christian Zionist, and she was apprently in large part responsible for the town of Cocoa twinning with Beit Shemesh in Israel. She is also a member of the local chapter of Brigitte Gabriel’s “American Congress for Truth” organisation, through which she recently held a “Terrorism Preparation & Disaster Relief” seminar in conjunction with Brevard Citizens Against Terror, at which Lee Boyland was a keynote speaker (Boyland is apparently a nuclear engineer and former member of the Defense Atomic Support Agency’s Nuclear Emergency Team, and he is the author of The Rings of Allah: Usuma bin Laden’s 14 Year Master Plan! He also has links with Paul Williams, whom I blogged on here).

Shoebat’s had a busy few weeks – recently he was at the Oxford Union, and after that he gave a talk at the Humboldt State University, which is close to where his American great grandfather was apparently mayor (Shoebat hasn’t told us this person’s name, although he assures us he was a great friend of Winston Churchill, no less). This talk was apparently not well received; the local Times-Standard carries a letter from one attendee:

To my dismay, the crowd at HSU was incredibly rude and disrespectful. They were not objecting to the fact that Shoebat was once a terrorist, but that he was defending Israel and pointing out the negative aspects of Islamic fundamentalism. While the protests in front of the Van Duzer Theater were not surprising, the students entered the theater and despite requests for civility, they chose to continuously yell insulting remarks at the speaker throughout his speech. Instead of giving his speech as planned, Shoebat was frequently distracted and responded to the shouts and demonstrations. At one point, a group of five or six went in front of the stage, holding up banners and shouting down the speaker.

An over-heated Indymedia report tells it like this:

One after another, Walid lashed out on the students who lined the walls to ask questions. Many people had already walked out on him in protest already, but those who stayed to hear the questions saw an unforgettable spectacle. Not one student’s question wasn’t evaded and twisted into a fallacy or a mundane and unnecessary attack on the character of the questioner…His response to many respectfully asked and well thought out questions was a consistently unsuccessful attempt to belittle and discredit the questioners. He called some questioners stupid, some uneducated, some nuts. Some he attacked on a personal level even before they spoke into the microphone, making it obvious that he was already lost to his ‘dark side’ and unable to regain any meaningful purpose to be on stage aside from maintaining a large scale argument, which he embraced.

One of the most gut wrenching responses he gave was when he personally attacked a questioner from the Philipines who politely greeted him and, in his Walid’s defense, asked him to express from his heart what he feels about Islam, virtually begging him to show a softer, rational side and giving him a much needed get out of jail free card. Walid took the breath out of the student and the audience when Walid accused him of not knowing Islam and being a fake.Walib’s heartless character really shined through as he let himself exhibit a passive aggressive tantrum on stage.

It was not Walid, but the Conservative’s Club members who directed the event that stepped in to call an end to the whole scene, turn off the mics, get Walid off the stage and get people out of their seats.

As the vibe was so vivid, many people stuck around the theater afterwords and were treated to a beautiful gathering of rational people who are awake to what just happened to our campus. Protesters formed a line of signs and lit candles as about a hundred or so people prayed before a courtyard staircase and stepped up, one by one, to voice what they felt in their hearts and to add their voice to our united desire for a free Palestine and an end to such attacks of propaganda on our campus…

Shoebat was planning to be at Western Michigan University on 10 March, but apparently there’s been a hitch:

A Speaking Event to be held at Western Michigan University on March 10th 2009, which includes two former terrorists Walid Shoebat and Kamal Saleem who speak regularly on University campuses about the threat of Islamic terrorism, has been threatened with cancellation due to the pulling of grants, which were allocated by the University…

The grant of $8311 was passed 4 to 1 by the appropriations committee of the WSA (student activities administration of Western Michigan University). The grant approval was also sent in writing and signed by the finance director of the WSA. On Thursday evening Feb 19, the organizers of the event on campus received an email from the WSA revoking the grant because of a technicality.

Based on the letter signed by the WSA committee of appropriations by default the University appears to be deliberately attempting to stifle the free speech both organizers – The International Conservatives, and the speakers…

Keith Davies, Shoebat’s handler, has responded thus in a letter to the university:

…I am very concerned about a meeting with International Conservatives leader Chris McCann which was held Thursday, the 26th of February with three members of your administrative departments. The meeting which took place I would regard as very troubling and tantamount to intimidation in its content if not its tone. It also reveals the tremendous bias based on the personal views of these particular administrators who overreached when it came to the issue of free speech. Based on case law there is no balance between sensitivity and free speech; free speech trumps sensitivity under the first amendment, so the members of the administration were treading on the side of inappropriate intimidation of a group’s right of free speech by even attempting to ask a student to consider his actions on the issue of content of a poster because of the”sensitivities”of others.

I would like to remind you that Martin Luther King’s views in his day were regarded as “hateful” by the actual haters. I would contend this to be exactly the case in this situation. Martin Luther King’s right of free speech had to be protected when he too came under pressure.

It is beyond belief that members of your administration would side with a group of students, probably representatives of the Muslim Student Association, as well as the radical “Peace Center” on campus who we know called Mr. Shoebat and Mr. Saleem “frauds” at an organizing meeting of the International conservatives for this event, and indicated directly by email that they oppose the March 10th event. Again, similar slurs were used against Martin Luther King, the same as against our speakers, when he was outspoken on civil rights. Former terrorists who are now willing to speak out for their former enemy obviously will evoke a response from those that might support terrorism. You might possibly consider that the people who expressed fear concerning the event might be supporters of terrorism and now use fear as a way of touching the nerves of your administrators which prompted them to call the meeting with Mr. McCann. Or, possibly even worse, is that some or all members of the administration who called this meeting might even side with the terrorist sympathizers, which is a position that could be construed from their personal view of the content of the posters. I do hope not…

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