Every member of the U.K. government’s Working Group tasked with defining “Islamophobia” has expressed extremist opinions and has links to Islamism, a shocking report released by the Free Speech Union (FSU) on February 14, 2026, has revealed.
The 34-page investigation, The Islamist Links of the Government’s Working Group on Islamophobia, examines the relationships and public remarks of the five panel members and finds that its four Muslim members, as well as the chair, Dominic Grieve, an Anglican, have ties to Islamists.
“The Group’s job was not to consider whether a definition was desirable, but to build a public case to justify a decision that Labour had already made.”
Angela Rayner, then secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, set up the Working Group in February 2025. Members appointed to the panel as “technical experts” included Professor Javed Khan, Baroness Shaista Gohir, Akeela Ahmed, and Asha Affi. Dominic Grieve, a former parliamentarian and Attorney General, was made chair.
According to the report, four of the five panel members (including Grieve) had already expressed support for the controversial definition of Islamophobia produced in November 2018 by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims, which linked Islamophobia to racism.
The 2018 definition also prohibited mention of Muslims in Britain’s “grooming gangs,” historical references suggesting Islam had been imposed by force on conquered populations, and challenging claims that countries such as Israel had engaged in acts of “genocide” against Muslim populations.
The commission’s preexisting bias toward a restrictive definition of “Islamophobia” indicates that the Labour government has rigged the process from the start and that the panel fails to meet the objectivity standards required by the Code of Conduct for Board Members of Public Bodies.
The panel issued a definition of “Islamophobia” in October 2025, which the government has yet to publish. A leaked version of the definition revealed that the definition could still serve as a de facto blasphemy law and would effectively ban criticism of Islam, Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) reported in December 2025.
Writing the preface to the report, Fiyaz Mughal OBE noted that the members of the panel were “hand-picked” and “did not include a single person who dissented from the view that a definition was needed, suggesting the whole exercise was a politically motivated fait accompli from the outset.”
“The Group’s job was not to consider whether a definition was desirable, but to build a public case to justify a decision that Labour had already made,” writes Mughal, the Muslim founder of Tell MAMA, who has consistently opposed creating an official definition of Islamophobia.
Islamist Views of Four Muslim Panel Members
The FSU dossier found that working group member Asha Affi, a Somali community activist, stood as a candidate for the far-left, Islamist-aligned Respect Party in the London borough of Tower Hamlets in 2010. As early as 2016, Affi was calling for censorship to combat “Islamophobia,” warning that journalists should “desist from highlighting [the] ethnicity of perpetrators” as this made Muslims “vulnerable to revenge.” Affi even claimed lawful posts might constitute “hate crimes.”
Akeela Ahmed, founder of the British Muslim Network, has worked closely with the head of the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring, attempting to stop “Islamophobic” journalism. Ahmed’s co-chair at the BMN, Qari Asim, was sacked in 2022 as a government adviser on Islamophobia for jeopardising freedom of speech. Asim serves as senior imam at Leeds Makkah Mosque, which adheres to Sunni fundamentalist Deobandi doctrine.
Asim has also cultivated contacts with multiple Pakistani religious leaders who supported the Governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer’s killer, Mumtaz Qadri, as a “martyr” for Islam. Qadri killed Taseer because of his opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and his support for Asia Bibi, falsely imprisoned for blasphemy.
In 2013, Shaista Gohir authored a report claiming that any discussion of the predominantly Muslim religion of the “grooming gangs” is “Islamophobic,” since just as many child sexual abusers are non-Muslims. According to Gohir, reports of the high percentage of Muslims in the gangs were based on “spurious statistics” and rested on “shaky foundations.”
Her son, who ran her parliamentary office until 2025, claimed Israel fabricated evidence of the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, and posted claims that Israel “faked” the slaughter by spraying fake blood on the floor of homes whose inhabitants had been butchered, accompanying this claim with a photo of a murder scene and a laughing-face emoji.
Gohir posted tweets supportive of Hamas in 2014. That year, she accused Israel of genocide, saying: “Let’s not compare Hamas empty rhetoric to what Israel are actually doing—slowly finishing off a people. Genocide?”
Javed Khan runs the Muslim think tank Equi, a think tank that published a 2025 report urging the state to combat “misinformation” about Muslims. Its trustees include the Labour MP Afzal Khan, who was forced to apologise for sharing a Facebook post that referred to the “Israel-British-Swiss-Rothschilds crime syndicate” and “mass murdering Rothschilds Israeli mafia criminal liars.”
In April 2025, Javed Khan, while already a member of the Working Group, stressed the need for an official definition to a House of Commons committee, blaming Islamophobia on “media and social media,” which spread “fake news about Muslims.”
Grieve’s U-Turn on ‘Islamophobia’
The FSU report also outlined how Grieve, who until 2013 had acknowledged the failure of many British Muslims to integrate into civil society and public life, had changed his position and begun to portray “Islamophobia” as the “culprit” for the alienation of British Muslims.
Grieve has become vocal in his support for a narrow “Islamophobia” definition after being influenced by organizations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Engagement and Development, in which “leading members have also had a lengthy history of expressing extreme, Islamist views,” the report found.
“It is quite disturbing to realise that the Working Group tasked by the government with proposing an official definition of Islamophobia is entirely made up of people who are influenced by Islamists,” Tim Dieppe, who leads the public policy division at Christian Concern, told FWI.
“The goal of such Islamists is an Islamic blasphemy law. If the government adopts the proposed definition, then this will be a momentous step towards that goal,” Dieppe warned. “While it may not be illegal to voice criticism of Islamic doctrines, it could cost you your job. This government seems more concerned to appease radical voices amongst the Islamic community than to protect freedom of speech.”
The FSU dossier confirms an article published by FWI in July 2025 which identified conflicts of interest between the BMT and the Aziz Foundation (AF), as well as ties between some BMT members and Islamists.
