Bartholomew's Notes

The above headline – “Terror Target Sugar” – provided a front page splash for the Sun in January. The story explained that Muslims were plotting on an on-line forum to attack British Jews over Israel’s actions in Gaza; the paper’s evidence was postings made by a certain “Abu Islam” and brought to the attention of the newspaper by Glen Jenvey, an “anti-terrorist” expert who had previously appeared on BBC Newsnight discussing extremist Muslims and as a pundit for the American Obsession documentary. However, Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads found evidence strongly suggestive that Jenvey himself was Abu Islam, and that he had made the postings which he then “exposed” for the Sun. The story was removed from the internet, and Sugar’s lawyers announced plans to sue.

Since then, a lot has happened – and the most unexpected development has been Jenvey’s own conversion to radical Islam. Jenvey has now confessed his authorship of the “Abu Islam” posts in a message to a moderator at Ummah.com, the forum where this all began. I have had some private correspondence with Jenvey myself, and I can confirm the authenticity of this message:

Brother i’m sorry for the Allan Sugar story plant. I’m retired now from spying on Muslims. I saw a chance to install fear back in Jews who were killing Muslims.I was wrong to use you and your site.If you need any thing to help you in any way in the name of Allah just ask.

But yes the Sun did not know who posted it.I say sorry to you from my heart. if you want show the police and get me arrested. but with the first ramadaam coming i want to clear my past sin’s before i start my fasting and pray.

I would write this on your forum but im blocked out. may Allah reward you for your good work you do.Ameen

Omar Hamza Jenvey

aka

Glen Jenvey

This is extraordinary: Jenvey admits to being “Abu Islam”, and he tells us that his deliberate purpose was to cause Alan Sugar and other Jews to fear fear and distress. And that he was able to get the Sun to oblige with a front page story that spread rapidly across the media.

However, it is also rather weird: Jenvey announced his intention to convert to Islam only in June. This followed a Daily Mail article which mentioned him in passing in a story about football hooligans in Luton (Jenvey was an associate of Paul Ray, the Luton-based anti-Muslim blogger known as “Lionheart”. Ray dismissed the claim that Jenvey was Abu Islam as “propaganda!“, and after the Sun article was published Ray appeared on No Compromise, a right-wing American internet radio programme, to explain that Jenvey was now in hiding from Muslim extremists who had vowed to behead him). Jenvey found the Mail article very offensive, and this was the apparent catalyst for his conversion. He was not a Muslim when he wrote the “Abu Islam” posts – at the time, causing Jews to feal fear was just a means to an end, the end of course being to generate general public fear and disgust against Muslims for targeting Jews.

But there are also some bigger questions: how can the media be manipulated so easily in this way? The reality and dangers of Islamic fundamentalism of course must not be underestimated, but now we have to ask: what other information about radical Islam which has come through the media is of dubious provenance? We know there was a channel by which material “discovered” by Jenvey made its way to the desk of Patrick Mercer MP, the former Conservative Shadow Minister for Homeland Security. Mercer, and those who generated this channel, are now in rather embarrassing situation, it seems to me. Are court cases involving extremists now really in jeopardy, as Jenvey claims is the case as regards Abu Hamza?

And what about the credibility (as if it ever had any) of Obsession, which was distributed as a free DVD to 28 million American homes in 2008, and which featured Jenvey along with the likes of Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, and Brigitte Gabriel?

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WorldNetDaily strikes yet again:

Obviously, this is meant to imply that something fishy is going on, and it should be seen in the context of the attacks on Obama’s late mother which WND editor Joseph Farah is now focusing his energies on – recently, Farah put forward the idea that Dunham was in fact Obama’s sister, and that she only pretended to be his mother to disguise an adulterous union by Obama’s grandmother. This comes on the tail of various irrelevant insinuations  from Jerome Corsi: that Obama’s parents did not live at their supposed address in Hawaii (unless they lived in a “small cottage behind the house”, he anti-climactically concedes) or that Dunham was enrolled at university at a suspiciously short time after giving birth. It’s easy to see why Farah and Corsi do this – as well as generally promoting the idea that Obama’s family background means that he is somehow uniquely mysterious and questionable, Farah knows that the last thread of hope for the “birther” movement is that Dunham somehow managed to have a false place of birth recorded on Obama’s birth certificate. There’s no evidence that she did this, or even any credible speculation as to how this could have been achieved in theory, but  if Obama’s mother’s character can be blackened it might bring out a few more screaming gun-toting nutjobs at town hall meetings.

In fact, as expected, the headline refers to a posthumous “baptism” performed in Dunham’s name by the Mormon Church, which has a well-known and controversial history of “baptising” dead people without the consent or knowledge of living relatives. Following complaints (especially from Jewish groups), the practice now undertaken more cautiously, and the Church is “investigating” Dunham’s baptism because it may have breached its own guidelines. The original Politico story makes this clear with the headline “Mormon Church investigates baptism of Obama’s mother”.

Various stories on WND that involve Mormonism all identify the Mormon Church as such specifically – so why did Farah scrub the word “Mormon” from his link on WND? The answer is obvious – Farah, a man devoid of shame, decency, or even dignity, has seen a chance to misled a few of his readers into thinking that someone is generating bogus documentation about Dunham’s life. It would therefore follow that documents about Obama might also be bogus, and that there must be some dark secret behind it all; Farah’s redacted headline further hints at an attempt to create a false religious affiliation, making a subtle play for the “Obama is a Muslim” conspiracy theory.

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