Last week the poodley government of the UK of A extradited 5 Musalmen to the USA. I've not heard from them other than that (Kobi) Talha and Babar have pleaded non guilty in the US court they were hauled in front of.
Pre-trial detention is likely to be solitary confinement which is an extreme form of torture that leaves no visible scars. We realise that plea-bargaining is the modus operandi of this Empire's injustice system. This is why we resisted their extradition.
Observations
It could be anyone next, this is a stark warning for all activist communities. If all it boils down to is writing something on a website that is hosted on a US server, then we are pretty much all for the chop if they click their fingers.
These kinds of campaign are long and require endurance. Watch how the tyrant uses time.
The Home Office communications strategy seems to have worked, to connect all of the 5 detainees with the image of Abu Hamza the Muslim bogeyman, their inside man.
The judge giving the verdict did not even try to pronounce the name of Talha Ahsan correctly, the young Asperger's suffering poet that he was about to throw to the wolves. He said 'Ashan' on more than one occasion.
Institutional racism is certainly there, but what undergirds it is institutional epistemicide. Nothing we feel say or do counts as valid information to these pirates.
Anjem Choudhury is auditioning for Abu Hamza's spot. He showed up last week at the verdict to pose for cameras, complete with battery begums and hairy's..
These campaigns must join hands with the Irish community who know it all so well and the Black community which is suffering from so many killings in police custody. We must embody a Decolonial We.
Actions
Make sure you have seen the Extradition documentary, show it to families and friends. www.extraditionfilm.com [please overlook the PRESSTV tag]
Encourage your Islamic Society, community organisation or pimp to host film screenings, panel discussions et on Extradition. Suggest replacing depoliticizing Charity Weeks with Extradition week.
Zakat is due to free prisoners of war. Talha, Babar and others are victims of this phoney War on Terror.
Pay attention to the appallingness of the press coverage and feed comments and feedback into the echo chamber with grace and high frequency.
Wear a Free Talha badge. This is good for the shy because it can spark a normally unknowable interaction with a random human being.
Write to your MP asking them to hound the Foreign Minister William Hague about the people detained.
With legal systems and political systems weighed against them, Talha Ahsan, Babar Ahmad and families could really use some justice and consideration right now. Such extradition situations could very easily greet any British citizen.
The following documentary is based around one of Talha's poem and created by up and coming filmmaker Turab Shah. It features the families and lawyers of the Tooting Two and furnishes the viewer with detail and feeling that no dry text would be able to. Please watch this with your family and pass it round.
A long long time ago
I can still remember how
'Good' flashmobs used to make me smile
And I knew if we had our cause
That we might engineer a round of applause
And maybe feed the homeless for a while
But Repetition made me shiver
With every so-called Temporary Autonomous Zone The Man deliver
Commodified action on your doorstep
Ultimately there would not be one more step
I can't remember if I cried
When I read about Gangam contrived
Amongst Dhaka's westoxified
The day the flashmob died
The Trashmob is a spontaneous gathering and action of complete fuckwits who contrive to meet together and perform an action of immense idiocy, window dressing and neoliberalising enchantment.
Given the European Court of Human Rights decision to reject the appeal of five men (including Talha and Babar) to be given up to the US by the UK government, and private prosecution charge led by Karl Watkin its time to take stock and focus on what is going on. This is my attempt to make constructive, connected sense of the unfolding situation and highlight actions and resources that you dear reader might take.
The Abu Hamza Bogeyman Card
The Home Office strategy has been to camouflage the travesty of justice at the heart of this issue by playing the notorious Abu Hamza bogeyman card, even though Talha and Babar are amongst the longest detained without charge in UK legal history. They say 'Abu Hamza and the others'.
Abu Hamza's face has covered the UK paper's and confused public perception of the matters at hand, of the differentiation of the cases, the Home Office's power to stop these extraditions and our goal of British Justice for British citizens. It is really shocking how successful their misinformation campaign has been swallowed whole, and anger-making given that Abu Hamza was a MI5 informant. British spooks did not mind him so long as the focus of his bad mouth was overseas.
The Preachers of Hate framing is readily reproduced by our press, and sadly become well embedded in the public sphere. Given the political theatre of our times ( that doesnt seem to be going away), the British public tires of endless Muslim Terrorist-talk and no doubt switches off prematurely before receiving facts. The challenge before us is to cultivate the social techniques to communicate through the noise and veils between us. Every human is a potential feeler of and reflector on the injustice of this situation.
The experience of campaigning on these extraditions is that people support UK trials for Talha and Babar once they get a fuller human picture of their ordeals, the flimsiness of the accusations and evidence, the behaviour of the Met Police and CPS and the ridiculous outsourcing of British judicial sovereignty to the USA. This is about encouraging the justice within us to surface.
Babar is a British citizen who has been locked up for 8 years and was beaten black and blue upon his first arrest, winning damages but no apology from the Met Police. Talha is also a British citizen, a Koestler Platinum Award winning poet diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome, who has been detained for 6 years.
If extradited both face torturous Supermax detention for years before their cases come to trial in a strange country that is not a great place for justice right now, as witnessed by Noam Chomsky here.
What now?
Earlier this month activists, poets, artists, discussants and performers congregated in East London's RichMix for an evening entitled Extradite Me, I'm British. Over a hundred people attended, became informed and joined the campaigns to negotiate a way out of this grave injustice, that pits powerful governments against families that are multiply marginalised.
Several people have been asking what they can do to become more involved, and their are three specifics I will address here: the private prosecution, the postcard call-out and the press/public sphere.
Firstly
Karl Watkin's private prosecution bid seeks to address the justice gap by trying the 'Tooting Two' in the UK, before a jury of peers. I guess this is trying to compel Keir Starmer QC, Director of Public Prosecutions at the Crown Prosecution Service to show some spine and initiate a public prosecution.
Please email him on keir.starmer 'at'cps.gsi.gov.uk to support Karl's initiative.
Please visit their site and circulate it around your creative pals, even have a go yourself.
Thirdly
The media are obscuring the issues by uncritically repeating the Home Office mantra of 'Abu Hamza and the others'. This is sadly enough to push the others beyond the pale. We have had clueless counsels for the American Embassy and hideously biased, uninformed academics (prof Glees) hogging vital airtime. The British press isn't having a particularly deep and challenging time these days, despite the wake up call of the Leveson Inquiry. Fahad Ansari from the Free Babar Ahmad campaign and Hamja Ahsan from the Free Talha campaign are very able to address such assaults of our intelligence when given the microphone, but more needs to be done.
Please become informed with the particulars of the cases, examine press artefacts and be active citizens through the letters pages of newspapers, blogs, facebook and twitter ( #freetalha and #freebabarahmad ). Corresponding with elected and unelected authorities, in formal and informal fora is critical for the next days and weeks.
Contact details and articles covering the extraditions are given below for some of the major UK papers. Please write into them in reference to a specifically dated article, with your full name, address and telephone number, stressing as some of the talking points below in a kind/crisp manner.
Babar and Talha are British citizens who were born, educated and paid tax in the UK
They are accused of running websites hosted on servers in dozens of countries but operated from the UK.
The UK has the oldest criminal justice system in the world and is capable of successfully prosecuting them both here. There a need to outsource our justice.
Almost 150,000 members of the British public signed a government e-petition last year calling for Babar to be put on trial in the UK.
Together they have spent over 14 years detained without trial in the UK,
serving the equivalent of a 30 year sentence between them, arguably more
than they would have even received if convicted.
The CPS admitted last year that it had not viewed the bulk of the
material seized from Babar's home which was sent directly by the police
to their US counterparts and which forms the basis of the indictment
against Babar and Talha
The DPP has now been in possession of that material for several months
and is reviewing it to decide whether Babar and Talha can be prosecuted
in the UK.
Support of Karl Watkin's private prosecution
The freezing of the extraditions until the DPP has fully
reviewed the material and made a decision as to whether or not to
prosecute them in the UK.
In 2005, Judge Timothy Workman said about the case: "This is a
difficult and troubling case. The defendant is a British citizen who is
alleged to have committed offences which, if the evidence were
available, could have been prosecuted in this country." That evidence
was secretly hidden from the CPS and Judge Workman for 8 years but is
now available.
Talha has been clinically diagnosed as suffering from
Aspergers, the same illness afflicting computer hacker Gary McKinnon.
Theresa May continues to postpone her decision on McKinnon's extradition
case on account of his Aspergers - why should a vulnerable individual
like Talha be treated in a far more brutal manner?
The actor and musician Riz Ahmed (or Rix MC) from 'Four Lions' and the upcoming adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's 'Reluctant Fundamentalist' recorded this message of solidarity, the government should be protecting its citizens.
Robert King, who suffered Supermax detention and was part of the Angola 3 offers his message of support.
The long-time anti-war leader, psychotherapist and mother just quit the Respect Party. Its a bit sad how it came about, but its coming about isnt my focus for now. The thought of the Birmingham-based Salma Yaqoob joining the Green Party does joyous things to me. I like to speculate and project my political demands onto others, so please forgive and understand any commodifying of humans-as-my-pawns here.
The UK Green Party just elected a new leadership, choosing Australian expat Natalie Bennett as their number 1 and Dudley-based Will Duckworth as deputy leader. On a purely regional level, there are potential synergies in the midlands. It would also contest the scary neomalthusianism that
underpins several flavours of environmentalism (thats you Jonathan Porritt), the technocratic aspects of Brighton's Green-led council (allowed an 80 year old pensioner to be jailed for not paying her council tax) and might broaden the political constituency beyond the over-representation of the white middle classes.
Looking generationally I feel the politics of Decolonisation, Alterity and Life converging. Silly little NGOs and the governmentalisation of Environment and Diversity arent really helpful in realising these political demands. Hence the image below.
Black Power, Verdant Knuckles
The Superposition of Green Wavefronts
For as long as I've been paying attention, Caroline Lucas has been a principled friend to Muslims, whether on hijab protection or the case of our dear Talha Ahsan, and interesting principled deshi candidates have stood for the party in national elections. I'm thinking of Farid Bakht for Bethnal Green and Bow and Dr Shahrar Ali for Brent. I won't forget Shahrar's rendition of If you Tolerate this then your children will be next at Bush house in protest at the BBC's evilness during the Israeli siege on Gaza.
Firm, committed, educated and of-the-future, a lot of current Green people tend to provoke accusations of over-middleclassedness. However this need not necessarily a fatal flaw. With the Occupy and other assemblages out there, including folks like Bread and Circuses and Space Hijackers, its not like we are in a time of low inspiration and monoculture.
The Green's political values seem to include: Palestinian Freedom, Climate Justice, Civil Liberties, Deconsumerisations, Welfare, Humans as part of Nature, as well as Deimperialisation at home and abroad. It seems to be a space where we might breathe in our own skins.
But there is something still more tantalisingly nonsecular about planting our political seeds in this trough, and this relates to some of the projects you see linked to on the left. Its about realising the nonsecular political selves that we are and honouring and eco-akhlaq (practical ethics) and creative ideology of Qur'anic readings, into a politics of life.
Salma Yaqoob shifting into a green political space might enable the following to unfold more fully,
Transformation of our diet and food system to something more just, tayeb and nuronic.
Rejection of fake Muslim environmental NGOisms
Rejection of greenwash
Development of khalqi politics of ummah.
Derudeboyification.
Decoloniality
Farming revolution, revalourisation and localisation of food systems.
More Trees in and around Masjids, more Masjids in and around Trees.
This is what as one level, Adil Ray's community leader character is trying to delegitimise, and we've all seen them, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arabian, Indian, Secular, Islamist, self promotist.
The trick now is to address them as our Misrepresentative Leaders whenever they open their big fat stupid gobs. Our every day acts of recognition are key to this.
Misrepresentivity amplifies up the political food chain, like heavy metal but with no way as much ummahtic gain.
Urban, immigrant life estranges us from the rest of creation. We are becoming part of the problem. So let us alter the relations between the built, lived environment and the (mal)functionings of the urban ummah which we see being stripped away from soulfulness and plunged into consumerism.
Khutbas from the Kitchen is an idea, potentially an institution,that intervenes practically in our lives to help embody Islamic principles in our relations with creation, not least the food system, family and social relations. It is as simple as recording short educative videos from eachother’s kitchens about the ethics and values behind what we eat, warts, proverbial kitchen sink and all.
Competing with slow, unjust people over reclaiming the mimbar in the mosque is probably a useful expenditure of some people's energy. It need not distract us from the potential of networking and reimagining our existing networked ummahstuctures to overcome the cultural degradation arising from some of the activities of Islam Channel, PeaceTV, ISB, the Quilliam Foundation, Saudi Arabia/America.
Khutbas from our Kitchens rehonours the domestic, creative, hospitable space. For certain, it is not some kind of come dine with me/ready steady cook/diary of a bad man goes for chicken and chips venture. The objects around this vital room tell stories that are mostly hidden and unmarked. The packet of plain flour tells us of the history and politics of American grain surpluses. The dish rack, which bears a lot of the burden, tells us of steel, geometry and evaporation. Not to be funny or anything, but the kitchen plan itself speaks about the design and food values at the time of the building’s construction.
Kitchen media is interesting, televisions entered a lot of them in the late 80s, but now the direction of travel has reversed and one–to-many communications can be exchanged for more realistic many-to–many relationships. And perhaps the people in them have changed, less learned in some ways (humanity), more so in others (web search).
The kinds of impacts I would anticipate from this collective endeavour include a practical, shared space for learning, ensouling, deciding and creating more Creator-conscious and justice-based patterns of life and consumption.
As epitomised by the BBC's recent Citizen Khan*, a dated, lazy con subsidised by the UK taxpayer and characterised by an ethnic mediocrity previously known to have inspired the term Shit Lit.
When we know that Humza Badman can do similarly from his bedroom, and sigh as he is held up as a paragon of brotherly comedic virtue, this Goodness Gracious Me reproduct retards all that it touches.
*I watched about a minute of it on iPlayer to make this judgement.
I'm not a funny person, but wish to point you in the direction of Sami Shah a Pakistani stand up, and Imran JK's adorable Thank Allah its Jumma (where did you go bro?).
Most of the countries of the world imagine and work towards freedom and autonomy from the deathgrip of superpowers. At some level anyway. We do not see it more often because they are afraid.
The Non Aligned Movement (NAM) convenes in Tehran this week is what promises to be a gathering pregnant with decolonial possibilities. Held every 3 years, to mark the rotation of the organisation leadership, its fascinating that Iran are carrying the baton from that very different Egypt which held it's NAM summit in 2009, and will hand it over the Venezuela in 2015.
The next week will see a great deal of activity that we should follow carefully, and I wish I could be there. As PressTV was shunted of the UK airwaves a few months ago, and the western stance is hostile, insulting and disregarding decolonial actors, geeks and dreamers will have to try a little bit harder to know whats going on. The NAM News Network have provided the following link for the latest news from the summit. The clip below features opening remarks from the Foreign Secretary of Iran Ali Akbar Salehi and a practical account of the relevance of the NAM space today from the Foreign Secretary of Bangladesh Mohammed Quayes.
Formed in 1961 as an international institution to enable countries of the world to resist falling into the US-Soviet polarity, NAM holds relevance today as a way of creating unity between countries at the bum end of the United Nation's (in)security Council, resisting neoliberal western (NATO) hegemony and a space to simply be and develop positions outside the bullying US-Euro-Zionist political nexus.
Imagine that formative meeting in Belgrade, with Tito (Yugoslavia), Nasser (Egypt), Nkrumah (Ghana), Nehru (India) and Sukarno (Indonesia). What have we (un)learnt since?
It is reported that 150 countries will have representation at the summit, from top tier leaderships, to foreign ministers to less senior/serious delegations. It is worth watching the short video interview with author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World Vijay Prashad, where he mulls over the significance of the event simply taking place.
Egypt's President Mursi is due to attend, unlike Turkey who despite recent awesomnesses on the international front are having a frosty time with Iran given their involvement in Syria and maybe even something to do with NATO. We hope that they do find a way to get there. Even the Saudis are sending a deputy Foreign Minister.
Hasina and Zardari, PMs of Bangladesh and Pakistan respectively will attend too, along with UN Sec Gen Ban Ki Moon. Tunisia is sending its foreign minister, as is North Korea. The Palestinians are disunited ( appears that Abbas has won over Haniyeh). And of course the ALBA countries will be in there too.
The summit is awkward and intriguing depending on your politics. Unsurprisingly, Israel and its allies (ally?) have been acting to delegitimise the event and prevent UN attendance. And Iran itself is not feild of cornflowers. Prof Hamid Dabashi, author of Brown Skin White Masks, has an interesting analysis of this summit's interaction with Iranian politics, from Mosadegh to Mousavi.
To temporarily conclude, its heartening that more and more country groups are demonstrating disobedience to the terrorism and intimidation of the western powers. Decolonial Duas for this gathering, and its outcomes, tangible or otherwise. For updates, intrigues and explorations, you can follow the summit on the NAM News Network's pages.
Julian Assange, of WikiLeaks took the initiative on eid day this Sunday with the second of 2 eid presents, the first being Egyptian PM Mursi's decision to attend the Non Aligned Movement Summit in Tehran starting 26th August.
In his address from the balcony of the tiny Ecuadorian Embassy behind Harrods, the Gulf-owned temple of hyper consumerism he declared that Bradley Manning should be free, and that if he did what he is alleged to have done, he would be a hero.
The press in the UK are unusually hateful of him, and this is not helped by the foolish phlegminism emanating from usually sound people, often clustering around the comments of George Galloway, but forever skirting around the socio-sequential political context of the sexual assault allegations.
There is a documentary from Australia called Sex, Lies and Julian Assange that provides a sound 'noise' inoculation and discursive accelerant. The video keeps moving from youtube link to you tube link, so if the link below doesn't work please google it.
The two accusing ladies are not the same as each other, but they are represented by the same lawyer, Claes Borgstrom, who plays for a trial when the Australian journalist, who looks like he's stepped out of a 1980s time machine, asked about how much this looks like a stitch-up.
Theres a lot of Swedish Democratic Party politics entangled in this too, which is to be expected given the events of August 2010 depicted in the documentary. Borgstom is a member and gender spokesperson. Anna Ardin, Assange's chief accuser ( and bizarrely one time fixer and host) is a member, as is her friend Irmeli Krans, the police investigator and testimony fiddler of the less assertive accuser.
The liberal phlegminist toolkit deployed to occlude the imperative of deimperialisation is the same one that enables the whiteously indignant to bomb Afghani women to liberate them. I feel like we are moving backwards and haven't learnt to avoid catching the dust thrown in our eyes.
***
What is with the obsession with sex that it attracts more interest and concern than the revelations of US forces mowing down civilians with their guns from helicopters and all that wiki leaking has told us about the ugly face of US aggression?
What is is about the British press that makes them so superficial and gullible if not outright corrupt?
***
To my political instinct, what we have here is not an opportunity to booleanise human rights and freedom of speech, but to prosecute a deimperialising agenda and not be taken for feminist fools.
There is a spectrum of viewpoints on Distraction-gate, I'll only dwell on three women's perpectives, because you probably have had contact with the general crapola out there already and the male defences by Milne, Greenwald and Murray.
First up, two years ago prominent thirdwave feminist Naomi Wolf deconstructed the allegations in an interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow!
Laurie Penny reflects her own experience of rape as a teenager through the allegations against Assange and the weird statements of a US politician here. Its a lot more personal than her Independent article. Rape brings out primary political values and principles in a lot of young gender activists, many of whom have been busy pinning differently-informed-insertion-consent-survivors-know-best decision narratives on me.
Lindsay German puts a more mature left perspective on the matter. Most of the Respect party people (Salma Yaqoob, Kate Hudson) are distancing themselves from the Galloway unhelpful videocast which was seized by the gendustry and usual suspects to create further dust and distraction.
German also brings up something that I have got halal and tayeb beef with, even if its probably the case that both Lindsay and the post-Sunday phlegminists haven't seen the documentary.
We live in a highly sexualised culture where women are expected to be
sexually available - but at the same time are still treated as if they
in some way contributed to a rape or sexual assault when they dress or
behave in a certain way.
I don't expect sexual availability thank you very much, I find all this availing tiresome and degrading. Haya is the value of inherent modesty, an internal moral compass, which I will use it instead of chastity. Haya is to be promoted in all manners, with dignity. modern left, and right leaders, and hackers disappoint, but haya isn't their point.
We live in a multifaceted hypocrisy where men and women get away with different wrongs at a social level and laws written to protect the dignity of women are often used by men to take out grudges. Haya is still a socio-ethical goal, so if you ask me about sex crime, id have to say they are pretty widespread and have been declassified as off limits for a while in the west.
Promiscuous people and adult starstruck political roadies have rights that are hard to discern in the midst of the sexual rites they play. Rape is Rape is Rape is an atomising, time slicing , disempowering stubborn slogan. Consider this, that if you are in someone's bed so fleetingly, throwing them crayfish parties after allegedly being raped by them and seemingly collaborating with copartners to create criminal facts on the ground with your pal the copper, it is difficult to to consider you a noncontributer.
Look at me, not even four witnesses and already down the rabbit hole. Knowing social realities, prevention is better than legal recourse hence the social shariah's discouragement from even approaching such relations. and speculations.
***
Other resources: Seamus Milne (Tuesday) on Don't lose sight of why the US is out to get Julian Assange Craig Murray (Tuesday/Wednesday) on Naming Ardin on Newsnight and the BBC's opposite policies on this case and that of DSK Glenn Greenwald (Wednesday) on The bizarre, unhealthy blinding media contempt for Julian Assange George Galloway (Saturday, oddly) a webcast that has been chopped and recruited by the Anti Wikileaks brigades
