Nafeez Ahmed, a researcher who has labeled counter-Islamist voices—conservatives especially—as “extremists,” is well-positioned to influence the U.K. government’s new initiative to define anti-Muslim hatred. Two of the four members of the government’s Anti-Muslim Hatred/Islamophobia Definition Working Group established earlier this year have links to Ahmed.
To suggest that their views are discredited by virtue of alleged alignment with mine constitutes defamation by innuendo.
One member of the working group, Akeela Ahmed, is Nafeez’s wife. Another member, Baroness Gohir, has relied on Ahmed’s research in her public pronouncements about Tell MAMA, an anti-hate group with which Ahmed has feuded in the past.
All this raises concerns about whether the panel—expected to report to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner in August—will issue a document that reflects Ahmed’s worldview which casts critics of Islamism and defenders of Israel as threats to democracy.
Tell MAMA Feud
Baroness Gohir, a non-party-affiliated peer who serves on the anti-“Islamophobia” working group, cited Ahmed’s research in a July 2024 speech in the House of Lords in which she assailed Tell MAMA, the government-backed anti-Muslim hate crime monitoring and support service run by Faith Matters, an interfaith and counter-extremism forum.
In her speech, Gohir declared that Tell MAMA does not enjoy “the trust and confidence” of Muslim communities in the U.K. because of concerns over “transparency, governance,” funding, and the quality of the organization’s work.
Gohir reported that Ahmed tried to write articles about her concerns, which prompted Tell MAMA to hire a lawyer to block the publication of his articles, which were subsequently published at Byline Times. One of the main thrusts of the Ahmed’s reporting is that, in addition to wasting money, Tell MAMA underreported anti-Muslim hostility in the U.K. in its reports.
The Guardian reported that in response to the controversy, Tell MAMA stopped accepting public funds in April due to the stress caused to its staff by “malicious campaigns,” some of which “emanated from individuals and organisations.”
Tell MAMA’s law firm, Mishcon de Reya, described Gohir’s claims as potentially defamatory. In particular, Tell MAMA’s lawyers pushed back against Ahmed and Gohir’s claims that it did not fight aggressively enough against anti-Muslim hate in the U.K. by citing its 2023 report, “A Decade of Anti-Muslim Hate.”
This isn’t the first time Ahmed and Tell MAMA have interacted. According to the lawyers from Mischon de Reya, Tell MAMA paid Ahmed to write a report titled “Return of the Reich: Mapping the Global Resurgence of Far-Right Power” in 2016. As it turns out, Tell MAMA officials had concerns with how Ahmed’s report was sourced. From “a research perspective,” a Tell MAMA official wrote, “I’d expect this from someone who was in their first year at university” and that it would be “wholly unacceptable to publish something under our banner without the appropriate citations.”
Nevertheless, Tell MAMA allowed for the document to be published on numerous places on the internet with Ahmed citing Tell MAMA’s involvement with the report. And while Tell MAMA did publish part of Ahmed’s report on its website, Ahmed has claimed in his recent coverage of Tell MAMA that the organization “suppressed” publication of the report he authored.
Ties to Far-Left Publications
Ahmed’s feud with Tell MAMA is one of a long series of controversies for a journalist who describes himself a “systems theorist and futurist” and “international security scholar.” In addition to serving as editor of the crowdfunded left-wing platform INSURGE Intelligence, he serves as an advisor to Declassified U.K., an investigative online journal critical of U.K. foreign policy.
Declassified U.K.’s co-founder, Matt Kennard, called Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza since October 7, 2023, “a tripartite U.S.-U.K.-Israeli genocide” at the Global Peace and Unity Conference in East London last October—which Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) covered here. Kennard’s use of this phrase is documented in this video posted here.
Present at Durban Hate Fest
Ahmed cut his teeth as a researcher for the Khomeinist Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC). In a long personal essay he published in 2022, Ahmed reported he had fond memories of “hanging out with the staunchly anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox rabbis of Neturei Karta, of whom IHRC were massive fans (and vice versa).”
Ahmed reports he left the organization because of its “toxic” approach to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and ties to the Islamic Republic of Iran. “There was open talk inside IHRC of exporting Iran’s ‘Islamic revolution’ into Britain and the West through the discourse of human rights,” he wrote.
Ahmed, it could be argued, contributed to this campaign in 2001, when, according to his CV, he presented a paper called “Apartheid in the Holy Land: Racism in the Zionist State of Israel” at the NGO Forum of the United Nations WorldConference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.
The Durban Conference’s draft document infamously equated Zionism with racism, prompting the withdrawal of Israel and the U.S. from the event. With his presence at the Durban conference, Ahmed was on the scene at what Gerald M. Steinberg from NGO Monitor described as “one of the most potent symbols of organized hate against Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.”
In his 2022 essay, Ahmed worked to distance himself from the IHRC which sent him to the Durban Conference. “I would learn during my time at IHRC that the organisation’s founder had close personal and political ties with the Iranian state, and that the bulk of its funding—so I was told—was coming from sources close to the Iranian government,” Ahmed wrote in 2022. “There was open talk inside IHRC of exporting Iran’s ‘Islamic revolution’ into Britain and the West through the discourse of human rights. Even at the time, although I was young and naive, I found IHRC’s inability to criticise Iranian human rights abuses strange for an organisation so ostensibly committed to Islamic authenticity.”
Whatever problems Ahmed had with the IHRC, it didn’t stop him from relying on the organization to promote his book, A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It at an event in 2011.
Accuses Conservatives of Extremism
In the years after working for IHRC, Ahmed has publicly accused prominent Jewish figures such as Melanie Phillips and Daniel Finkelstein of “mainstreaming far-right ideology.” He once compared respected Conservative peer Lord Finkelstein, an associate editor of The Times newspaper, to an ISIS supporter (for having sat as an honorary board governor of the Conservative think tank the Gatestone Institute). He also once referred to former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron as a “violent extremist.”
Ahmed responded to Conservative Communities Secretary Michael Gove’s March 2024 rollout of an updated definition of “extremism”—introduced during a period marked by open threats against Members of Parliament and a 589 percent rise in antisemitic incidents following Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel—by turning the accusation back on Gove.
Ahmed claimed that “this government is trying” to install “the architecture of a new far-right authoritarian politics that will erode democratic accountability, expand the ideological reach of the state, [and] elevate white nationalist and anti-Muslim ideologies.”
Ahmed assails his opponents ats “white nationalists” as well. In a 2021 article for Byline Times, Ahmed warned of “an increasingly mainstream white nationalist echo chamber” in the British government and media at a time when the Conservative cabinet was one of the most ethnically diverse in Britain’s history. The attorney general at the time, British-Mauritian-Kenyan Suella Braverman, would become the foremost critic of Islamism among British politicians.
Downplays Threat of Islamism
In the same 2021 polemic, Ahmed downplayed the threat from the totalitarian ambitions of Islamists, claiming, “Poor-quality research on these issues overseen by government officials seems to see enemies where there are none, projecting the [Muslim] Brotherhood as an all-encompassing threat lurking behind every mosque and Muslim community project.”
Later that year, Conservative MP Sir David Amess would be murdered in his constituency surgery by a radicalised British-born son of a Somalian government advisor. The perpetrator, Ali Harbi Ali, cited Amess’s membership of Conservative Friends of Israel as a motive and told prosecutors that his first target had been Conservative minister Michael Gove (co-founder of the Policy Exchange think tank and author of Celsius 7/7: How the West’s Policy of Appeasement Has Provoked More Fundamentalist Terror and What Has to Be Done Now) published in 2006.
Impact on Working Group?
Ominously enough, Ahmed submitted written recommendations in 2019 to a Home Office committee advocating restrictions on speech to counter “Islamophobia”—positions his wife, Akeela Ahmed, and Baroness Gohir may now channel into government policy.
For example, at a recent parliamentary hearing, Akeela Ahmed downplayed the threat of anti-blasphemy activism stifling free speech and inciting violence, a problem highlighted by chilling case of the Batley Grammar School teacher forced into hiding after using a cartoon of Islam’s prophet Mohammed from Charlie Hebdo magazine in a lesson on free speech in 2021. Instead of calling out the role Islamist extremism played in the Batley case, she blamed government officials for not working to promote “social cohesion.”
For his part, Ahmed responded angrily to FWI inquiries about his ties to the working group.
“To suggest that their views are discredited by virtue of alleged alignment with mine constitutes defamation by innuendo,” he wrote in an email to FWI. “Their public service and credibility stand independent of your attempt to create guilt by association.”
