Bartholomew's Notes

From Islamophobia Watch:

Peter Tatchell has announced that he will be joining a demonstration against Hizb ut-Tahrir’s International Khilafah Conference at the Water Lily Centre in Tower Hamlets on Saturday.

The demonstration has been organised by a new group called the Anti-Extremism Alliance, which has already issued an Open letter to Tower Hamlets Council and East London Advertiser demanding that the Water Lily cancel the booking.

…And who, you might ask, are the Anti-Extremism Alliance whose protest Tatchell is backing? Well, along with people like Faizal Gazi of The Spittoon blog and Tehmina Kazi of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, the signatories to their Open Letter also include Charlie Flowers of the Cheerleaders group of Islamophobic cyber-bullies. And given that several other signatories are associates of Flowers you’d be inclined to suspect that he’s behind this initiative.

Flowers’ supposed opposition to extremism hasn’t prevented him from establishing friendly relations with leading members of the English Defence League, as Talk Islam and Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion have shown…

Although I’m cited in the post, the above doesn’t reflect my views on the subject of Flowers and his associates. In particular, I don’t believe that he’s Islamophobic, and it’s clear that his association with the EDL is in the past: he apparently hoped that the EDL would focus on Islamic extremism rather than opposing all Muslims, and he disapproves of the direction that the EDL has taken.

He is, though, a bully and a thug who uses the internet to smear people and to make threats of violence: his boasts include the claim that his friends will “slap” me “upside the cheek” should they ever see me, and he’s also threatened that they would “stab” another critic “in the face”. In 2009 he disseminated the blogger Tim Ireland’s home address around the internet, and sent threats that included an expression of malice against Tim’s family (this was after Tim and I exposed lies by the director of “VIGIL”, a defunct “terror-tracker” organisation with which Flowers was formerly associated; background here). His motivation is primarily psychological rather than political: by latching onto anti-extremist activism he can enjoy the self-righteous thrill of the vigilante as he dishes out abuse and lies. And he’s not even really anti-extremist: his attacks on me have included promoting an abusive website created by some Nigerian Pentecostals who hate me for opposing the idea that children can be witches.

Alongside the “Open Letter” to Tower Hamlets Council, a letter was published a few days ago in the East London Advertiser, signed by “Harry Burns, NiceOnes UK Anti-Extremism Group, Redbridge”; he appears as “Harry Burn” in an accompanying article:

Representatives from several organisations including anti-extremism body Quilliam Foundation and pro-integration group Muslim Voices are calling on Tower Hamlets Council to step in over the matter.

Harry Burn, leading the organisations, said: “I thought that we’d seen the back of these groups in Tower Hamlets. They portray a horrible message and most Muslims I know despise them. We are trying to get Muslims and non-Muslims to say no to any sort of extremism.”

Ghaffar Hussain, head of Quilliam’s outreach and training unit, called the hosting of the group in Tower Hamlets “very worrying”.

The NiceOnesUK Facebook page (currently removed from view) identifies Harry Burns as a poster there using the name “Arry Bo”; this person also left some goading messages on my blog last October, and seems to be the same person as a former EDL activist named “Arry Ajamali”. Given that Hussain and Kazi have public profiles and some professional standing, it seems very strange that they should be willing for this individual to present himself as “leading the organisations”. According to the “Anti-Extremism Alliance” website, the protest is in fact being organised by “Adam Barnett – Alliance Against Extremism”; Barnett is with the anti-Sharia organisation “One Law for All“.

One NiceOnesUK Facebook administrator has been keen to downplay Flowers’ role within the group, although given the obvious cross-over with Flowers’ “Cheerleaders” group I haven’t been particularly impressed by this; according to a report in the Guardian in April, NiceOnes was formed by the “Cheerleaders” working with Kazi’s British Muslims for Secular Democracy. Kazi, whose activism I broadly support, has taken a “see no evil” attitude to Flowers; however, it’s clear that the association will be discrediting should anyone look in any detail into Flowers’ behaviour and character.

Islamophobia Watch also notes that the Casuals United blog, which is run by pro-EDL football supporters, reported Tatchell’s involvement with the protest under the headline “Peter Tatchell joins the EDL”. The headline is certainly inaccurate, and was obviously a crude attempt to appropriate Tatchell because he’s opposing Islamists. Whether this attempt was based on any particular knowledge of the “Anti-Extremism Alliance” remains unknown – the whole Casuals United blog has disappeared in the last 24 words.

Incidentally, I do not share Islamophobia Watch‘s view that Tatchell is against free speech for supporting the protest. Hizb ut-Tahrir remains free to say what it likes, within the law, but there is no reason why the Water Lily Centre has to facilitate their socially-corrosive activities.

UPDATE: A press release from the Quilliam Foundation has details of an upcoming roundtable event, entitled “Former EDL Members Speak Out“:

Harry Burns was formerly a senior member of EDL’s London division. Within London he helped to mobilise members and organise transport for demonstrations outside of London. He was also involved in the group’s logistics and its online activism, helping to run their youth website. He was present at many of their early London meetings.

UPDATE 2: According to Casuals United (which has now reappeared, minus the piece on Tatchell), Burns and his fellow speaker Leighton Evans were “not high-ranking EDL”, and they “have been to a handful of demos”.

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From the website of the European Christian Political Movement:

On 23 June, the European Christian Political Movement organizes a conference on Liberty of Faith and Conscience.

…Speaking during the 23th of June will be Andrea Williams (Christian concern for our nation, UK), Ekaterina Smyslova (Lawyer, Russia)  and Roger Kiska (Alliance Defense Fund, Slovakia). 

Kiska, who is based in Bratislava, has represented the ADF on a number of issues in Europe, including highlighting religious persecution in Belarus; Williams (whose “Christian Concern” organisation works with Nadine Dorries MP) is also close to the ADF, as I’ve blogged here. Katya Smyslova, meanwhile, has just completed a term of service as Regional Representative of the Haggai Institute in Eurasia – this organisation promotes the evangelistic leadership philosophy of a certain John Edmund Haggai, described as “a visionary, a Christian world statesman, and an evangelist and a master of the pulpit”.

A follow-up piece has further details about the ECPM event:

Last Thursday, June 23, ECPM held a symposium on ‘Liberty of Faith and Conscience’ in the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, together with the Ecumenical Prayer Group of the Romanian Parliament. Participants from all over Europe attended the lectures that addressed the theme from theological, social and political perspectives.

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Here’s a very strange article from ASSIST Ministries:

One World, said by some to arguably be the best book ever on the New World Order, and until now a trade paperback, has just been released as an eBook and is available worldwide.

“Every important outcome that this book has predicted has come true,” said its author, Tal Brooke, President and Chairman of The Spiritual Counterfeits Project (also known as SCP, Inc.,) an Evangelical Para church organization located in Berkeley, California.

…According to the author, convenient and planned crises and costly wars of occupation have been key gateways to bringing in the New World Order.

…Brooke went on to say, “Consider this piece of shrouded history revealed in One World. Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith leaked the following – that banking insider Bernard Baruch walked Sir Winston Churchill out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the very morning of the Great Crash.

“Churchill was brought to witness the crash firsthand on October 24, 1929, because it was desired that he see the power of the banking system at work. This required timing only possible with insider knowledge. Churchill soon after became Prime Minister of Great Britain, having failed on numerous attempts before.”

ASSIST is a bit credulous when it comes to faith healers, and it has on one occasion lapsed into conspiracy-mongering, but this is the first time I’ve seen full-throttle tin-foil hat material on the site.

The main point is so obvious that it’s hardly worth making: Churchill did not become Prime Minister “soon after” 1929 – he became Prime Minister more ten years later, following a series of events that are completely explicable without recourse to a conspiracy theory about Bernard Baruch. Brooke has presumably got his information from Pat Riott’s 1994 book The Greatest Story Never Told: Winston Churchill and the Crash; according to Buckley Barry Barrett’s review in Churchill: a Concise Bibliography, “a great number of people across a wide swath of the political spectrum could consider the work akin to a tabloid and paranoid potboiler of libertarian fundamentalism”.

Brooke is famous for being an ex-follower of Sathya Sai Baba, against whom he went on to write an exposé in 1970s – other works include Harvest, with Chuck Smith. As with Walid Shoebat, it seems that once the novelty value that had brought him to prominence wore off, he maintained his audience with ever-expansive claims to expertise. According to an author blurb on Amazon:

Tal Brooke, today, is the President & Chairman of SCP, Inc, a Berkeley-based research organization and think-tank. A member of the Society of the Cincinnati, he has authored nine books and his work has been recognized in Marquis Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in America as well as The International Who’s Who of Authors. He has won three first place EPA awards in a nationwide contest. A graduate of the University of Virginia and Princeton, Tal Brooke has spoken at Cambridge (8 times), Oxford (4 times), Princeton, Sorbonne, Berkeley, the University of Virginia, and the University of Edinburgh.

As a rule, someone who goes on about memberships and entries in directories in lieu of any real academic recognition is a crank.

Brooke is not just a promoter of conspiracies: he’s also the subject of a conspiracy theory himself, concocted by Hindus annoyed by his anti-Sai Baba polemics. It is claimed that his father was a diplomat named Edgar Duffield Brooke, who worked for the US Information Agency in the 1960s, and that this explains Tal Brooke’s writings.

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An anti-EDL Twitter feed (@everythingedl) has a screen-capture of cyber-bully and pseudo-activist Charlie Flowers railing against him and against a Facebook group called “Exposing Racism and Intolerance Online”. As ever, it doesn’t take long before Flowers turns the subject to me, and he and a crony (both middle-aged men, by the way) are quick to turn to some feel-good schoolyard abuse:

Flowers complains that “Exposing Racism” unfairly accuses him and his associated Facebook groups (the “Cheerleaders” and “NiceOnesUK”) of being EDL front groups – I don’t think they are, although Flowers’ objection is somewhat hypocritical given his insistence that I’m an “SWP operative” (I’m not).

Flowers, as I’ve written previously, claims to be an activist against Islamic extremism, and he’s managed to persuade a few people who should know better that he’s on the level. However, he’s really a vigilante rather than an activist, using the internet to act out a self-righteous fantasy of self-empowerment through cyber-harassment and abuse. Back in 2009 he began a campaign of harassment against Tim Ireland at the behest of bogus “terror-tracker” Dominic Wightman; when he belatedly realised that Wightman had manipulated him, he then claimed instead that his inspiration had in fact been Nadine Dorries MP’s complaints against Tim – Flowers continues to insist on this, despite the fact that Dorries has in the meantime been discredited (The full background is here). Flowers’ need to find a self-justification for acts of cyber-harassment is pathological: for a while in 2010 he made an alliance with Farah Damji, sending abusive and threatening messages to individuals (particularly women) who had made complaints to the police about her.

Flowers objects to me because I stood up for Tim, and his claim that I’m a left-wing extremist is the explanation he gives to his friends for why I deserve his abusive attention. It also in his mind justifies the creation of around a dozen anonymous abusive blogs, which have appeared over the past few months and which he has spammed around Twitter in the middle of the night. One struggles to imagine the thought process: here is a mature adult, the wrong side of 40, using sockpuppets to disseminate abuse and lies through the internet, and he somehow thinks that isn’t a shameful and debasing way to carry on.

Particularly unpleasantly, Flowers has also sought to make links with some Nigerian neo-Pentecostals who believe that children can be witches. The plight of “child-witches” is another subject that I’ve written about, and as a result a church in Nigeria has created a website dedicated to abusing me and other activists on the issue. Given that Flowers claims to be against religious extremists (and falsely claims I’m in cahoots with MPACUK), one would have thought he would have given this church a wide berth  – however, the temptation proved too great, and he duly created a sockpuppet Facebook account with a Nigerian name and visited the church’s website to advertise his abusive blogs. I was genuinely surprised he was willing to go that low.

Flowers also created a Twitter feed in the name of the church and used it to spam-advertise the blogs, but he gave himself away by adding abusive comments about some other people and by making reference to the “Exposing Racism” Facebook page (background here). Any lingering doubts about his authorship were removed a few days ago, when the same Tweets appeared on his @BlackEyedGirls Twitter feed, although he deleted them the morning afterwards (perhaps he’d logged into the wrong account by mistake).

One unknown factor is whether Flowers maintains any association with Dominic Wightman. Like Flowers, Wightman also sees the internet as a place of self-empowerment through fantasy, and like Flowers he also uses sockpuppets to create abusive websites – this was proven recently when I asked a friend of Wightman about an abusive song posted anonymously to YouTube in the autumn of 2009; Wightman (who appears in the song affecting a very poor fake Northern accent to disguise his voice) quickly removed it after I made contact. Publicly, Wightman and Flowers purport to dislike each other, but there’s a mutual interest, and a mutual willingness to engage in behaviour that most people grow out of at the age of fourteen or so.

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French report claims organisers lied to secure venue

A couple of days ago I noted a “summit” which was supposed to take place in Strasbourg today; according to the conference blurb:

The human rights organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) will hold their first-ever transatlantic summit in Strasbourg, France, on July 2.

…The confirmed list of speakers at the summit includes Pamela Geller, the popular blogger and columnist who publishes the acclaimed AtlasShrugs.com blog… Robert Spencer, a bestselling author and internationally renowned Islamic expert; the noted activist SIOE Director Anders Gravers; Roberta Moore of the Jewish Division — EDL; Conny Meier of the German human rights group Pax Europa; frontrunning Bulgarian presidential candidate Pavel Chernev; and others to be announced soon.

That was before Moore announced her resignation from the English Defence League, and Pamela Geller came under fire for agreeing with Moore’s claim that the EDL has been “hijacked” by “Nazis” (Geller has since reaffirmed her support for the EDL, while also denouncing those who dared to criticise her).

However, potential awkwardness has been avoided, as the conference has been now cancelled. According to French news site 20 Minutes, the organisers had secured the venue, the Foyer de l’Etudiant Catholique (FEC), by claiming that they were holding a literary conference; once it was discovered that this was a lie, access was barred:

L’extrême droite a renoncé à parader samedi à Strasbourg, peut-on lire sur des blogs. Des organisations européennes et américaines appelaient à « un premier sommet transatlantique anti-islamisation ». Après une manif place de la République, un meeting était prévu en présence, notamment, de membres du mouvement Résistance républicaine et du Bloc identitaire. Prétextant une conférence littéraire, ses instigateurs avaient réservé une salle au Foyer de l’étudiant catholique. La supercherie démasquée, l’accès leur a été interdit.

According to a site called L’Islam en France, in a post dated to 26 June, the subject of the supposed “literary conference” was Danish poetry:

Les organisateurs en question avançaient masqués, prétendant qu’il s’agissait d’une soirée consacrée à la poésie danoise!

L’Islam en France also claims that FEC cancelled the booking six hours afterL’Islam en France had publicised the event.

20 Minutes, however, quotes Pierre Cassen, one of the scheduled speakers – according to his account, the event was cancelled because the police could not provide sufficient security. But if that were the case, surely Geller would have treated us all to a thundering denunciation of the French police by now?

UPDATE: My mistake: because the SIOA website hadn’t been updated I had assumed Geller had nothing to say on the subject. In fact, though, had I loaded up her site and waded through her tirades I would have seen a posting she’d made on the subject on 28 June, in which she claims that the conference was closed down by “the EU”. No mention of a bogus “Danish poetry” booking, though.

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From the website of Sheffield Cathedral:

An exhibition by the University of Sheffield’s Department of Biblical Studies is set to throw new light on the King James Bible.

Telling Tales of King James’ Bible opens Tuesday 3 May 2011 in Sheffield Cathedral and will be open to the public until the end of June. The exhibition is part of a series of events organised by the University to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, which will include free open lectures from the former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, MP Frank Field, and other prominent cultural commentators.

…Telling Tales of King James’ Bible will run from Tuesday 3 May 2011 until 30 June 2011, before moving to Westminster Abbey…

The date for the move to Westminster Abbey coincides with an international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), due to take place in London.

However, Jim West, Adjunct Professor of Biblical Studies at the Quartz Hill School of Theology and an SBL member, now reports that:

Though the Abbey had agreed to host the Sheffield KJV Project display during the upcoming International meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, they have now, virtually at the last minute, backed out!  Leaving the Project in the lurch and desperately seeking an alternative.

And why have they backed out?  To allow pictures of the Royal Wedding to remain on display a bit longer…  Sad.  Outrageous really!…

In an update, Jim explains that St Bride’s off Fleet Street may be an alternative venue. It’s certainly an appropriate choice – the church is known as the “church of the press, printing, journalism”, and there’s an exhibition in the crypt which includes (if I recall correctly) a Breeches Bible.

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