Tim Burton vs. Fiyaz Mughal

Press release from Liberty GB:

Fiyaz Mughal

On Monday 30 January 2017, one of the most important political show trials of the century is taking place at Southwark Crown Court in London. One of our Liberty GB Executive Council members, Tim Burton, is being prosecuted for the heinous crime of sending a handful of humorous and satirical emails, employing mockery and ridicule, to Tell Mama UK, an organisation run by a prominent Muslim, Fiyaz Mughal OBE.

Fiyaz Mughal has declared himself to be harassed, alarmed, threatened, distressed and allegedly generally discombobulated, not to mention offended and insulted, by the veritable flood of the said humorous and satirical emails emanating from the email account of the “far-right, bigoted, racist and Islamophobic” Tim Burton, as a result of Tell Mama advertising a job vacancy for a caseworker on its website in April 2016.

At one point in these emails, Tim Burton referred to Mr Mughal as “the Mendacious, Grievance-Mongering Taqiyya-Artist-In-Chief of Tell Mama UK.” (Taqiyya is part of the Islamic doctrine of deceit – divinely sanctioned in Islam’s “holy book”, the Quran – a doctrine that tells Muslims that they may deceive non-Muslims if the goal is to advance the cause of Islam or to prevent the denigration of Islam in the eyes of non-Muslims.)

At the last count, there were no less than four of these emails – five if you count the email where Tim Burton is enquiring after the status of his job application – and this has evidently been enough to inspire Mr Mughal to complain bitterly to the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, who complied with alacrity to his request to have Tim Burton charged and prosecuted for Religiously Aggravated Harassment – a charge which upon conviction can result in a substantial fine, not to mention a long prison sentence.

Unremarkable enough, one might think, were it not for the fact that Fiyaz Mughal sits on a panel that advises the Crown Prosecution Service on how to prosecute cases of so-called “Islamophobia” and whose organisation Tell Mama UK works closely with the Metropolitan Police to ensure than no stone is left unturned to deal robustly with the wave of “Islamophobia” that is sweeping the country and terrorising the Muslim community.

One does not want to invoke any suggestion of conflict of interest, but it might be worth considering how a non-Muslim might be treated were he to go into a police station or a courtroom and complain that a Muslim had been mean to him via email, or had had a Muslim cast aspersions on the honesty and integrity of his organisation. We venture to suggest that a non-Muslim in such circumstances would have been laughed out of the police station or the courtroom, or at the very least told to go away and stop wasting police time.

It might be worth recalling at this point how Fiyaz Mughal was called out by Andrew Gilligan of the Daily Telegraph in June 2013 for (allegedly) fraudulently manipulating the so-called “hate crime” figures of Tell Mama UK in the wake of the Lee Rigby murder in order to maintain his enormous six-figure taxpayer grant. (Following this exposure in the press, Tell Mama UK was investigated and temporarily had its funding withdrawn. Strangely, no charges of fraud were ever brought about by the Metropolitan Police or the CPS.)

Since then, Tell Mama UK has had its funding quietly reinstated and is carrying on its activities much as before, with Fiyaz Mughal frequently hitting the headlines with stories concerning the mythical “Islamophobic” backlash against the Muslim community (which never actually materialises) in the wake of the numerous terrorist atrocities such as the truck attack in France which killed 84 people and injured 120  more in July, or the truck attack on the German Christmas market which killed 12 people and injured 56 more in December.

In the opinion of all of us here at Liberty GB, this prosecution embodies everything that is wrong with the criminal justice system when it comes to the double standard with which Muslims and non-Muslims are treated. We think it is time for a review into the preferential status that Islam currently enjoys under UK law.

Here is a link to the circumstances surrounding the trial – http://www.libertygb.org.uk/news/tim-burton-show-trial-latest-181216-islam-religion