So the identity of ‘Jihadi John’ appears to have come out. And surprise surprise he is a man associated with the group Cage (formerly Cage Prisoners). The leaders of this group – Asim Qureshi and Cerie Bullivant – have been filling the airwaves ever since the naming of their friend Mohammed Emwazi. Qureshi even appeared to shed a tear as he talked about what a ‘beautiful young man’ his friend Jihadi John is.
I wonder if any scales have fallen from any eyes in the last 24 hours? I do hope so. Cage is, after all, a group which has for years been introduced on the BBC, Channel 4 and so on as ‘the human rights group Cage’. Or if you were Peter Oborne writing in the Telegraph last summer, the ‘organisation’ which ‘has done more than any other to stand up for alleged terrorists’.
Peter has been a long-time supporter of Cage. Yet as I wrote in the Telegraph in a reply to Peter’s love letter last summer, Cage ‘does not just “stand up for alleged terrorists”. It also stands up for actual, convicted terrorists’.
‘For example, Cage is animated about the case of Aafia Siddiqui, jailed for 86 years in the US for attempting to murder US officials in Afghanistan and assaulting those who tried to stop her. Siddiqui had wide-ranging links to al-Qaeda and was married to a key plotter behind the 9/11 attacks. At the beginning of her trial she said that jurors should be “subject to genetic testing” to see if they were Zionist or Israeli. She is no terror suspect – her guilt was proved in a court of law. Yet Cage’s profile on Siddiqui – which misses literally all this out – says it has “dedicated itself” to freeing her.
‘Others that Cage support include Djamel Beghal, who, following allegations of a plot to blow up the US embassy in Paris, was jailed in France in 2005 for “belonging to a criminal association in relation to preparing an act of terrorism”; and Nizar Trabelsi, convicted in Belgium as part of an al-Qaeda plot to carry out a suicide attack against a military base there holding US soldiers.’
The list goes on.
In his piece last year Peter was particularly exercised that Cage was one of a number of Muslim groups to have had their bank accounts and assets frozen or to have become a subject of focus to the Charity Commission. Peter wrote that this was ‘alien to the way we do things in Britain.’ It is of course no such thing. As I wrote in conclusion: ‘Cage is a pro-terrorist group, not a human rights group.’ They deserve all the scrutiny that the relevant authorities can muster. And they deserve contempt and hatred rather than sympathy and support from mainstream society.
I hope that those who did not believe this after the considerable evidence of recent years might perhaps realise it in the wake of the last twenty-four hours.
Comments