Well, it doesn’t get more explicit than this, does it?
On Facebook, on-line vigilante thug Charlie Flowers discusses an e-book he’s self-published:
…the book portrays everyone who’s pissed me off in the last two years as dirty paedophile child molesters. Oh dear, Darcy Jones and Rosie Geefe and all your blogger friends, didn’t see that coming did you? You will now forever come up on Google searches as nonces. Oh deary me!
“Darcy Jones” and “Rosie Geefe” are both involved with on-line anti-EDL monitoring on Facebook and Twitter (Darcy also has a blog).
However, “everyone who’s pissed me off” also includes the blogger Tim Ireland and me. Tim was subjected to an anonymous paedo-smear attack on Wikipedia back in April; we don’t yet know for sure who did it, but Flowers sent an abusive message to this blog twenty minutes later. Last week, Flowers posted an on-line gun massacre fantasy in which Tim and I appear with our names changed; Flowers describes Tim being shot to death, and supposedly finding child pornography on my phone. Flowers’ hostility dates back to 2009, when he was involved in harassment against former associates of Dominic Wightman who had come to realise that Wightman was dishonest; Flowers turned on Tim and me after Wightman’s attempts to mislead us about one of these associates backfired.
It should be blindingly obvious from the above that Flowers is a sick and vicious individual, more than willing to trivialise the foulest of crimes if it means he can encourage others to harm those whom he dislikes.
However, Flowers is not just some random troll – he presents himself as an activist against Islamic extremism, and he has built up relationships with various individuals involved with high-profile moderate Muslim groups. Shortly after announcing his paedo-smear plan on his Facebook “Cheerleaders Against Everything” page, he followed up with a more generalised threat:
Attention rest of of world. You do NOT mess, or go up against, the Sisters of La Vida Loca. It’s not worth it. It just… isn’t. This includes bloggers, and people on Facebook walls. Don’t. There really isn’t any point. G’night. My sisters are my sisters for a reason, try them and you’ll get lit up.
As he’s sometimes done before, Flowers is here presenting the threat as coming from others rather than from himself – but it’s obvious that he’s the prime mover.
Astonishingly, this second Facebook post comes with several “Likes” – including from Tehmina Kazi of British Muslims for Secular Democracy and Michelle Brooks of Inspire (tagline: “empowering women, strengthening societies”). Both of these individuals enjoy mainstream respectability and access to the media, as does a third person who has added “Likes” to Flowers’ threats: this is Allegra Mostyn-Owen, who was formerly married to Boris Johnson and who recently claimed to have been appointed to a London mayoral “Muslim Engagement Task Force” on account of being married to a Muslim. Perhaps they didn’t see the paedo-smear threat posted a little further down the page; but even if so, it’s clear what sort of a person they’re dealing with.
Flowers likes the idea of having links with moderate Muslim women and their allies, since he can then paint critics as being hostile to moderate Islam and the empowerment of Muslim women; hence he continues to make McCarthyist assertions that I’m a left-wing extremist in league with Islamists for my own purposes, when in fact I’m broadly supportive of what groups such as BMSD and Inspire are attempting to achieve. Flowers has been playing this game for a long time; in 2009 he co-opted Gina Khan of One Law for All into an implied endorsement (Khan eventually saw fit to contradict him two years later).
However, Flowers also has links with men: Flowers’ e-book, which he has now explicitly stated exists to spread paedo-smears, comes with a jokey endorsement from Mubin Shaikh, who was in the news in 2005 after infiltrating an extremist group in Canada and exposing a terror plot; he now presents himself as a “National Security Consultant”. Flowers is also involved with the Quilliam Foundation, and last year he helped to organise an abortive event involving two ex-EDL activists; the event fell through when one of the planned speakers accused Quilliam of misrepresenting him, but Quilliam decided to tell the press that he had backed down due to threats from the EDL. When I asked Ghaffar Hussain at Quilliam to put the record straight – not least because Flowers was also trying to appease his ex-EDL friends by suggesting that Quilliam’s statement to the press was somehow my fault – Hussain simply forwarded my email to Flowers, who then posted to Twitter that I had “harassed” Quilliam and that I was a “cunt”.
Some months ago I received emails from a third party, in which I was told that Flowers’ friends help to calm him down (by his own account, he’s bi-polar), and that there have been private criticisms of his behaviour. I believe the person who sent me these emails did so in good faith, but it’s clear from the above that his “friends” are in fact giving him validation and goading him on to further excesses. This is particularly the case as regards Kazi; despite telling me that Flowers’ behaviour towards me was none of her business, when I spoke privately about Flowers to a journalist and this journalist then blabbed to Kazi, the first thing she did was to pass the information on to Flowers (this was explained to me by the newspaper for which the journalist works after I made a formal complaint).
Another group with which Flowers has some involvement is Hope Not Hate; HnH recently split acrimoniously from Searchlight magazine, and Kazi is a trustee of the Searchlight Educational Trust, which, despite its name, is affiliated with HnH rather than Searchlight. It seems that there has been a dispute about money; the first information about this to enter the public domain came via an accusation of embezzlement from Flowers. Searchlight went on to write a critical piece about Flowers in the magazine; true to form, Flowers responded by posting a home address on-line (presented, as usual, as a kind of prank), although he took it down again shortly afterwards.
Flowers may also have influenced HnH reporting into Alan Lake, who was formerly associated with the the EDL and who is a friend of Flowers. The latest issue of Notes from the Borderland magazine (number 10, 2012) has an in-depth and polemical account of the Searchlight/HnH split (criticising both sides), including the following detail:
It did seem, as Searchlight claim, that prior to their “Counter-Jihadist Report” of April 2012, HNH “failed properly to investigate the English Defence League and its financial backers”…. Alan Lake is actually Alan Ayling, first revealed on Paul Ray’s lionheart blog in October 2011, and splashed all over the Sunday Times in December 2011. This story featured in HNH news that day, but no reference subsequently until the pamphlet… HNH never mentioned Ayling’s suspension from his job… first reported on the UAF website 31/1/12. Something is going on here: and through Charlie Flowers’ friendship with Matthew Collins HNH knew, or should have known, Lake was Ayling far earlier than reported. (p. 71)
UPDATE (10pm): Flowers has deleted his original paedo-smear threat quoted above, but he has started a new thread in which he has reposted his massacre fantasy and added further threats of the same kind:
Hopefully Expose and SWP are watching this as I immortalise them all as child molesters :)
…In which we kill all the hard-left bloggers and expose them as dirty paedophile scum. Because they are.
….Should have thought about that when you started blogging about me, shouldn’t you, paedo scum? I’m a registered author now, and you scumbags are fodder.
… I’m a published author, and I am going to grind your fascist SWP faces into the tarmac.
I think commentary here is superfluous.
He also links to his Goodreads author page, where he describes himself as
an adviser on terrorism and extremism to certain departments and think tanks.
Presumably this is a reference to his appearance a source in a report produced by Demos last November; I discussed this here.
UPDATE 2 (26 July): Flowers has now deleted the above thread, too. The text can be seen here.
UPDATE 3 (27 July): Flowers has now back-pedalled from his threat: he claims that are in fact no paedo-smears in the book – his boasts were just a “trap” to get me to talk about his book. He’s also created another thread, where he and a few cronies (mostly middle-aged men) are engaging in some self-justifying school-yard abuse in my direction.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’d just like to pick up one point here, relating to HnH. I find the argument advanced in the ‘Notes from the Borderland’ article rather unconvincing. I don’t see that it is particularly damning that HnH, after clearly running the piece about Ayling in December 2011, ran no further piece until April 2012.
I wouldn’t EVER define BMSD as “moderate”. It is self-evidently liberal, given its links to proudly self-declared wine swigger Yasmin Alibi-Brain and hadith denier and self-declared Imam (actually he has a PhD in Islamic history) Taj Hargey. The moderates are people like City Circle and the Radical Middle Way. The latter actually includes Muslims who have a genuine Ahl-as Sunnah wa Jama’at madrassa education and who engage seriously with traditional Muslim forms of piety and ethics. Hardly a minor distinction, IMHO. Describing Tehmina Kazi as “moderate” Muslim is a bit like calling George Tyrrell a mainstream Catholic.
[…] also: Strange bedfellows by Sonia Gable of Searchlight; Charlie Flowers Makes New Paedo-Smear Threat – Bart’s Notes on […]