Spying is morally acceptable, says Sunny Hundal

Sunny Hundal of Pickled Politics and Liberal Conspiracy is a “journalist” who fancies himself as a champion of civil liberties. This was his last evidence-free and appallingly unresearched piece on Abdulmutallab’s radicalism at UCL in CiF:

Singling out universities as potential conveyor belts for terrorists is an old talking point for neocons. The most notorious example in recent times was American commentator Daniel Pipes’s project Campus Watch, which created dossiers on professors and universities that did “not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon”, according to one critic. Anthony Glees, professor of security and intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham, told the Telegraph: “UCL boasts on its website that it has 8,000 staff for 22,000 students, which is an enviable staff/student ratio. What have they been doing?” Their jobs, perhaps?

There are two issues here. The first is about academic freedom of speech and civil liberties, which have been completely sidelined in the debate. Abdulmutallab was at UCL from 2005 to 2008 and was president of the student Islamic Society in 2006-07. The charge against UCL is that he was allowed to organise a week of debates around the US “war on terror”. It included debates on Guantánamo Bay and terrorism. Fancy that. There’s no evidence that he was radicalised at this point – almost every university in the country holds several such debates every year.

Where to start with this muddle-headed nonsense?

Well first of all, evidence of Abdulmutallab’s contact with Anwar al-Awlaki while studying at UCL was confirmed almost a week before Sunny wrote this article, but he wilfully chose to ignore it.

Hundal denies the fact individuals who lionise Anwar al-Awlaki can be identified as jihadists. Well he would, he shares platform with some of them. UCL is certainly not primarily to blame for the Islamic radicalism of its ISOC. But neither is he willing to address those primary culprits of radicalisation at UCL. So instead he draws a straw man and states Universities should not be blamed. Classic smoke and mirrors.

In Feb 2008, the radicalised students of UCL ISOC held “Islamic Awareness Week” in which Abu Mujahid incited Muslims to condemn homosexuals because, he said, Allah “hates” homosexuality. Then there is Abu Usamah ad Thahabee of Birmingham’s Green Lane Mosque, who was secretly filmed by the Channel Four documentary praising Osama bin Laden and saying

“If I were to call homosexuals perverted, dirty, filthy dogs who should be murdered, that’s my freedom of speech isn’t it?”.

The same Abu Usamah ad Thahabee was invited to speak at the UCL ISOC in November but the event was cancelled at the last minute after pressure from campaign groups, such as the CSC. He ended up delivering his diatribe at East London Mosque.

Hundal carefully chooses to make no mention of the clerical fascists and jihadi activists who have spoken at UCL. In fact, he flatly denies that there is even a problem of radicalisation at UCL or indeed at other universities.

His comparison to the public demands of UCL to address the radicalisation problem to Daniel Pipes’ Campus Watch is patently dishonest. Campus Watch was a campaign to identify and vilify Muslim academics at Universities in the USA. But Student Unions in the UK do not operate under University control and the Islamist clerics who are invited by ISOCs are external speakers, not academics working within universities. Identifying and criticising ISOCs which associate with jihadist and clerical fascists who have a record of inciting hatred of homosexuals, Jews and heterodox Muslims can not be compared to Campus Watch.

Hundal thinks the demands for UCL to be made accountable is an assault of “freedom of speech and civil liberties”. But his own approach to civil rights is curiously inconsistent. What he fails to mention is that he has previously made a statement in which he openly stated spying on citizens as morally acceptable.

Last October, the director of the Quilliam Foundation, Ed Husain, stated that it was morally acceptable for the State to spy on Muslims as part of the Prevent initiative. It turned out that Prevent has nothing to do with applying Security (that would be another initiative called Pursue). Furthermore, Ed Husain did not specify extremists were the only ones applicable but rather “British Muslims” as a whole were acceptable subjects. For this inexplicable statement, Husain was severely reprimanded both in public and behind closed doors by senior government sponsors of Prevent. Husain was then forced to make a hurried retraction but Hundal supported Quilliam on the question of spying to the hilt. In fact, these were his words:

I think all of that makes sense. All this hysteria about spying is frankly overblown, as if people were unaware it didn’t already happen to some extent.

When I asked him to clarify why spying on Muslims was acceptable, Hundal came up with this:

I said in my post I have no problems with agencies spying on radicalised British Muslims. That is what Ed was talking about. The Guardian spun it as a story saying he was for spying on all Brit Muslims. I hope that clears it up for you.

Yes, quite right, Sunny. Blame your support for spying on the Guardian, not on your own intellectual and ethical breakdown on the minor point of civil rights. Where do you want to start, phone-tapping, bank account and credit card snooping?

If there is one thing that can be said about Hundal, it is that he is consistently inconsistent. Hundal shares platforms with jihadist who openly support Anwar al-Awlaki, while supporting State spying on Muslims!

It is amusing to see him flail himself into a spittle-flecked apoplexy over the BNP speaking at Universities, going as far as supporting the NUS No-Platform ban of the BNP. But he has no such principle of No-Platform when it comes to clerical fascists or Islamist jihadis who call for the murder of Jews, homosexuals and Muslim citizens.

Why is this?

It could be because he has shared platform with them but I suspect that Hundal views radical Islamist clerics and activists through the subjective prism of “brown” and “white”. And with this binary firmly in place, Hundal regards “brown” clerical fascists as underdogs, worthy of support or, at least, morally acceptable.

But worryingly unacceptable is his pretence of support of civil liberties on the pages of CiF while at the same time defending spying on Muslims on the pages of Pickled Politics.

On the question of whether Sunny Hundal is an Islamist supporter, a confused civil rights campaigner, a racist “race specialist” or simply an opportunist, the jury is still out.