Lyrical la-la lemmingland
A Conservative councillor, Tony Sharp, is understandably aghast at the comments made by the Secretary-General of the Muslim Council of Britain, Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, about the conviction under the Terrorism Act of Samina Malik — the self-styled ‘lyrical terrorist’ — for ‘possessing documents likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism'. Dr Bari complained that police and prosecutors were criminalising young Muslims for harbouring
silly thoughtsand that Samina's so-called poetry was
certainly offensive but I don't believe this case should really have been a criminal matter.But she was not convicted of writing poetry. As Sharp rightly observes:
Is it really normal behaviour not just to possess,
- the al-Qaeda Manual
- the Terrorist’s Handbook
- the Mujahidin Poisons Handbook
- a manual for a Dragunov sniper rifle
- a firearms and RPG handbook
- a document entitled “How to Win Hand-to-Hand Fighting
but to sit at work at Heathrow Airport - where she may have had security clearance to work in 'airside' retail outlets beyond the Customs area - and scribble on a till roll that ‘The desire within me increases everyday to go for martyrdom. The need to go increases by the second.’ It is quite bizarre that any rational person could have a problem with the prosecution and conviction of someone who did such things.
However, what is even more disturbing than Abdul Bari’s observations, which are in keeping with his own often-demonstrated extremism, is the fact that they merely echoed similar sentiments by ostensibly rational people in the wider community. Malik received only a suspended jail sentence after the judge in the case, the Recorder of London Judge Peter Beaumont QC, said Malik's offence was on the margin of what this crime concerns
.But as a Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said: Ms Malik was convicted of collecting information, without reasonable excuse, of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. This information included terrorism and poison handbooks as well as military manuals and other material likely to be useful to someone planning terrorist activity.
Yet the Recorder of London, no less, thinks that possession of such material is only ‘on the margin’ of a law designed to protect this country — and sets the criminal free. Nor is he alone. In the past few days, a clamour has arisen that the prosecution was criminalising a silly young woman for writing silly things. The Guardian reported:
Lisa Appignanesi, deputy president of English PEN, said: ‘To make a felon of a girl dreaming and writing behind a bookshop counter would have Byron and Shelley turning in their graves.’In the Times, Shirley Dent protested that Malik had been convicted
on account of some embarrassing and juvenile fantasies about jihad and beheadings, laid bare to the world.Ignoring the fact that, as she recorded in her first paragraph,
The evidence against Malik boiled down to various documents harvested from websites, including weapons manuals and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook,Dent constructed her entire piece around the complaint that Malik had been prosecuted because
This Government wants to climb inside your head, see what's going on and tell you what's right.And also in the Times Matthew Parris also claimed Malik had been convicted for writing stupid poems, and went on:
It's about thought crime, isn't it?No, it’s not. It’s about evidence that a young woman was equipping herself with information that was germane to the perpetration of terrorism, to which she admitted she had a desire that was increasing by the second.