The Transnational Institute

Why is the EU funding a researcher who called an ISIS executioner "beautiful"?

Introduction

In early 2020 the Transnational Institute’s War & Pacification programme published a report called “Stranger than Fiction”, alleging that the governments of Britain, France, and Holland were institutionalising “Islamophobia” through their countering violent extremism (CVE) programmes. In particular, it focused on “pre-crime”; the attempt by governments to intervene against extremism before a crime is committed.

The argument made in the report is highly specious, making allegations like “‘spotting signs of radicalisation’ is invariably racialised” on the basis of one anecdote from the Dutch CVE experience (p.15). This is then expanded to cover the British and French experience, without providing supporting evidence. Similarly, it warns that “Muslims are discursively and politically constructed as a threat” by CVE programmes without mentioning the very real threat of Islamist terrorism (p.16). Throughout, Islamist terror and Muslims are conflated, in order to be able to accuse CVE programmes of being anti-Muslim. Conspiratorial claims are even made about CVE programmes being a “pilot” for greater government control of society, without the proof to back this up (p.17). Instead, the report suggests analysis should focus on “centring the role of the state in fostering political violence” (p.28); in other words, blaming the governments rather than the terrorists.

The report was written by two researchers from the British organisation CAGE: Azfar Shafi and Asim Qureshi. Although CAGE claim they are an “independent grassroots organisation striving for a world free of injustice and oppression”, they are best known in Britain for a 2015 scandal when CAGE’s research director Asim Qureshi (one of the authors of the report) called the ISIS executioner Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John”, a “beautiful young man” at a press conference. This came after the revelation that Emwazi had come to CAGE as a “client”, before joining ISIS.

So why are the EU and Stichting Democratie & Media, a Dutch foundation, funding a report by researchers from such a dubious group?

Who are the TNI?

The Transnational Institute was founded in 1974 in Holland as part of the Washington DC-based Institute for Policy Studies. Amongst those invited to discuss its founding was Michel Foucault. Its first director was Eqbal Ahmed, a Pakistani academic who had joined the FLN (the socialist armed movement which forced the French to leave Algeria, then ruled as a one-party state) in Algiers. Their first conference was on the coup in Chile, which attracted Herbert Marcuse and Ralph Miliband among others. One of Allende’s ministers, Orlando Letelier, joined the TNI and was assassinated by agents of Pinochet. Letelier had persuaded the Zimbabwean intellectual Basker Vashee to take the position of TNI resident director. Vashee was a member of ZAPU, which was the pro-Maoist China party in Zimbabwe, whilst their rival ZANU was pro-Soviet Union; Robert Mugabe was a senior member of both at different times.

Vashee was also the head of Counter-Information Services, an “anti-capitalist” journal which published “anti-reports” in Britain through the 70s and 80s. CIS was described as an “affiliate” of the TNI at the time and at least one of their reports was written in collaboration with Britain’s Institute of Race Relations. CIS relied on funding from the World Council of Churches (which was heavily infiltrated by the KGB), the TNI, and the Rowntree Social Services Trust (now the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust). The TNI also had a close relationship with the Institute of Race Relations, which included a fellowship for A. Sivanandan. The TNI later sheltered Philip Agee, who claimed he was a CIA whistleblower but who appears to have provided secrets to Soviet and Cuban intelligence in return for money.

As a non-profit, the TNI relies on grants. By far their largest source of income is the Dutch government, which provided them with over 2.1 million euros. The EU also gave them over 300,000 euros, with other governments and foundations providing the rest. These include money from the Swiss, Swedish, and Irish governments. Most of their foundation funding appears to come from the Open Society and the Rockefeller Bros Fund. Other contributions, which constitute 1% of their funding, come from sub-contracts. There is no evidence of any grassroots funding from personal donations.

The two TNI staffers involved in the report are Arun Kundnani, an academic who was an editor of the Institute of Race Relations’ journal Race & Class as well as an Open Society Fellow, and Niamh Ni Bhrian, who is the coordinator in charge of the TNI’s War & Pacification programme.

Kundnani has long been a critic of the government’s PREVENT strategy, which he has called on the Labour party to end. Previously he’s described the vote for Brexit as “the first time in British political history that the far Right have won a national poll”, posed in a t-shirt with “Make America Brown Again” written on it, and encouraged support for the campaign to free Imam Jamil. Formerly called H Rap Brown, he is an ex-Black Panther who is in prison for shooting two sheriff’s deputies, killing one of them (both were black). Brown’s supporters claim that he didn’t match the accused shooter of the deputies but fail to account for why he’d fled the state, why the murder weapons were found near his hideout, and why his car had bullet holes from the shootout in it. He’d previously been convicted for a robbery, which ended in a shootout with police.

Ni Bhrian is an activist from Ireland, who demanded Frontex be abolished, argued for “bringing down borders”, and complained that some nations had closed their borders to reduce the spread of coronavirus (even though it worked and prevented deaths). In the latter article she proposed “abolishing borders” and that “freedom of movement be guaranteed to all”, before making the conspiratorial claim that coronavirus tracking apps have “been rolled out and downloaded around the world under the pretext of keeping us safe” but might be used for “pacifying populations” and “preempting and curbing dissent”.

When it comes to Irish politics she is a supporter of Sinn Fein, voting for them in 2020 and complaining when an RTE journalist asked its leader Mary Lou McDonald tough questions. Ni Bhrian wrote that her response was “excellently done as usual”; although it can’t be proven that this is exactly what she was referring to, during that interview McDonald had said that she would’ve joined the IRA in the 1970s. Sinn Fein remains under the command of the IRA Army Council, which decides party policy, which its democratically-elected politicians are then compelled to follow.

Who are CAGE?

CAGE was founded in 2003 as Cageprisoners, originally focused on the prisoners kept in Guantanamo Bay. They rebranded to CAGE in 2014, expanding their remit to cover the whole War on Terror. Throughout their history they have courted controversy, by campaigning on behalf of terrorists like Djamel Beghal, who was convicted for his part in a plot to bomb Paris. Whilst in prison he became the mentor to Amedy Coulibaly, who pledged allegiance to ISIS and attacked a Jewish supermarket. Another jihadi they supported was Jamal al-Harith, who was released from Guantanamo Bay and paid compensation by the British government, only to swiftly join ISIS as a suicide bomber. CAGE also invited the preacher Anwar al-Awlaki to several of their events, although he often attended via video-link as he was banned from entry into Britain; eventually he was revealed to be a member of AQAP and killed in a controversial US drone strike.

After the Emwazi scandal, the Charity Commission attempted to prevent the Roddick Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Trust from funding CAGE. Brazenly, Rowntree joined forces with CAGE to take the Charity Commission to court to maintain their right to fund them. CAGE attempted to support their case by commissioning an “external” inquiry into their handling of the Emwazi case by Jahangir Mohammed of Communica, which was undercut by the discovery that Mohammed had co-written one of CAGE’s policy documents and shared platforms with CAGE’s directors at events opposing counter-terrorism measures. For several years CAGE was based in the same building as the now-defunct Claystone think tank, both of which were on the same road at the Muslim Research and Development Foundation. The MRDF was run by Haitham al-Haddad at the time, who also collaborated with CAGE on a campaign against counter-terrorism legislation.

Asim Qureshi has been a researcher with CAGE for many years. He was the one who described Mohammed Emwazi as “extremely kind, extremely gentle, extremely soft spoken, the most humble young person that I knew”. Emwazi had at that point killed several foreign journalists and aid workers, as well as being filmed taking part in the beheadings of a number of Syrian soldiers. When asked who was responsible for the deaths, Qureshi said, “Every single person has agency in what they do but there are many different levels of accountability. We need to see proper accountability for the role the security services played”. Qureshi was the CAGE case officer who dealt with Emwazi in the UK; he said he was “horrified” by the activities of ISIS but also that “I can’t say that it is unethical for people to defend themselves in the countries that they are in when they are being invaded”.

Qureshi lives in a £700,000 house in Surrey with his wife, whose family’s business had £100 million in turnover when it was sold. When he was interviewed by US researchers at university he claimed that he was “effectively radicalised by Guantanamo” and that he did not feel “any kind of obligation or sense of thankfulness” towards Britain. In 2006 he spoke at a Hizb ut-Tahrir rally in London outside the US Embassy, where he told the crowd, “When we see the example of our brothers and sisters fighting in Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan then we know where the example lies. When we see Hezbollah defeating the armies of Israel, we know what the solution is and where the victory lies”. In 2007 he was invited to speak at UCL’s Islamic Society by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who joined AQAP and tried to blow up a plane with explosives hidden in his underwear two years later. Qureshi was also the CAGE case worker who dealt with Michael Adebolajo, one year before he took part in the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in Woolwich. When asked by Andrew Neil if he would condemn female genital mutilation, the right to take non-Muslim prisoners of war as slaves, or whether it was acceptable to stone adulterers to death, he refused to answer, saying that he was “not a theologian”.

In contrast, Azfar Shafi has managed to stay out of the limelight; all of his work seems to have been published in 2020. He’s written for a variety of left-leaning outlets like the Middle East Eye, OpenDemocracy, the Byline Times, and Ceasefire Magazine. The last of these articles, co-authored with activist Ilyas Nagdee, contains denunciations of the “bourgeois press”, says that capitalism must be “abolished”, calls on British activists to imitate the American “8 to Abolition” plan (which includes defunding the police and prison abolition), and condemns “the sustained media and legal assault to depose ex-Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman” (who was barred from politics for “corrupt and illegal practices”, falsely portraying his Labour opponent as a racist, “the allocation of grants in a manner that amounted to bribery”, and casting invalid votes).

Comment

CAGE are a controversial organisation, whose activities have been widely publicised in the British and foreign press. They have a record of advocating on behalf of people who later go on to commit terrorist acts or who are revealed to have been members of terrorist organisations. Whilst they never advocate Islamist violence themselves, they rarely condemn it without making some form of excuse; a hesitancy which they don’t extend towards government violence. To commission them to write a report in 2020, when all of this has been extensively covered in the press, shows a remarkable lack of judgement. It is clear that the TNI employs people whose opinions are on the radical part of the left, whose willingness to make common cause with CAGE demonstrates the moral bankruptcy of their convictions.

This is a road which has already been well travelled; in 2010 Amnesty International suspended Gita Saghal, head of their gender unit, after she criticised their willingness to work with CAGE. She left Amnesty over the issue and in 2015, after the Emwazi press conference, Amnesty announced that they would no longer work with CAGE.

That this report has been funded by the EU, presumably with part of the 300,000 euros they gave the TNI, is a scandal. As Britain is still in the transition period of Brexit, this means that Britain has still been financially contributing to the EU; therefore British taxpayer money may well have been used to fund this CAGE report. The Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has said he is against “extremism and radicalism”; perhaps it is time for him to look close to home and deal with the Dutch government funded TNI.