Chimes of Freedom II

Another miscarriage of justice or another terrorist locked away?

A Scottish Muslim student has been convicted on charges of terrorism. If the circumstances described by his lawyer are correct, this is a major miscarriage of justice as well as being against the principles of individual freedom and liberty. The laughable level of evidence included him 'growing a beard' and discussing suicide bombing with fellow students at college when he was 18.

Apparently this guy had in his possession some CDs and DVDs. How you can use CDs and DVDs for terrorism, I don't know. Perhaps they were made with TNT. Apparently viewing a beheading or desecration of a dead US soldier's body is enough to make you worse than a paedophile. It surely is no worse than the dozens of US based Internet users that come to this blog looking for pictures of dead bodies, dead Iraqis and dead kids.

He also set up up a website with links to an ISRAELI website complete with links. The Israeli website is apparently a Mossad site and makes available links to bomb making material for anybody to download. The site has not been removed and apparently has the blessing of the Israeli establishment. Apparently even the BBC have featured the site, so I reckon that should make them terrorists too. The Israeli government are terrorists and are making material available for the BBC to distribute. Not far from the truth really.

In fact in this case no actual evidence was found of terrorism:

'in media briefings before the trial, senior officers admitted that they had not found any evidence that Siddique himself was planning to carry out an attack.
Instead, prosecutors tried to convince the jury that the material found on Siddique's computer and websites he owned was intended to encourage others to carry out attacks.
But the biggest problem facing them was that most of the videos stored on Siddique's computer could easily be found by using internet search engines like Google.
Indeed, footage of Osama Bin Laden urging Jihad against the West was little different from the one issued by the al-Qaeda figurehead which was broadcast by the mainstream media, including the BBC, on the anniversary of 9/11.'

There you have it. An admission from the BBC of its guilt, M'lud. They go on:

'The court heard, for example, that Siddique told a college classmate he had actually met Bin Laden.

Siddique had visited several hardline Islamist websites, some of which preached anti-Semitism and encouraged young Muslims to martyr themselves as suicide bombers.
However, officers discovered that Siddique had also surfed pornography sites. He had played online poker and registered a team in an internet football manager game.'

That's right folks. This fundamentalist was also a porn surfer and gambler too. These things were not at all against his religious beliefs. Remember Forest Gate and the allegations of paedophile porn?

So the upshot is that if you are a Muslim fantasist with a few DVDs featuring say Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, or if you have downloaded the odd beheading video from youtube, then you are likely to be locked up for dozens of years. However, if you are white supremacist fantasist from Nelson with chemicals, explosives and weapons, then you can get away with it.

SEE Article below

Press Release from Scotland Against Criminalising Communities

Tuesday 18 September

Siddique trial was a travesty of justice

The media this morning are asking "Guilty.. But is Siddique really a terrorist?"

Of course Mohammed Atif Siddique isn't a terrorist. With a prosecution case that sought to manipulate the emotions of the jury, and terrorism laws so ill-drafted that it seems they can mean anything at all, the jury can hardly be blamed for getting it wrong. But even under our Kafka-esque laws it makes no sense to call this young man a terrorist, and it is to be hoped that the argument will be taken successfully to the appeal court.

The case has been a travesty of justice from start to finish.

It was bad enough that his family home was raided by armed police in April last year just because the police didn't like what they had found on Mohammed's computer when they questioned him at Glasgow Airport. Never mind that the family were law-abiding citizens who had been in contact with the police ever since Mohammed had missed his flight as a result of being questioned.

It was bad enough that Mohammed should be held on remand and brought before the High Court for, in the words of solicitor Aamer Anwaar, "doing what millions of young people do every day, looking for answers on the internet."

It was bad enough that the trial began just after the terrorism incident at Glasgow airport and ended on the anniversary of 9/11.

It's bad enough that Mohammed should be facing many years in jail for utterly insignificant actions that have harmed no one.

But last night it got worse. Anonymous sources in the security services told the media that Siddique had been preparing to become involved in a terrorist attack in Canada. No evidence about this had been presented during the month-long trial. So what was the point of the trial if Siddique is to be convicted ex judice of far more serious offences?

The hounding of Mohammed Atif Siddique should be a wake-up call to us all. It's time for Parliament to change the laws that allow cases like this to be brought to the courts. The current terrorism laws have created a culture of un-reason that treats terrorism as a kind of witchcraft. Terrorism is supposed to be a contagion - a contagion to which Muslims are uniquely susceptible. It is supposed to be carried on the breath, in printed words and images, in digits flowing across cyberspace. If you accept this lunacy, it makes perfect sense to see Siddique as a dangerous vector for the disease.

The lunacy has penetrated our police forces so thoroughly that officers feel able to tick all the boxes of anti-racism and diversity while persecuting the Muslim community relentlessly in their hunt for the terrorism bug.

If non-Muslims are inclined to think "thank God it's not us" they need to think again. What will happen when the counter-terrorism industry starts to produce briefings saying that, after all, the disease can sometimes be carried by non-Muslims, that the danger is very great, that it's better to be safe than sorry? And what will happen when police officers begin to worry about the racism built into their terrorism policies and try to keep themselves out of the dock by hunting for the disease without regard to creed or colour?

This kind of un-reason doesn't protect us from terrorism. It creates the climate that terrorism needs if it is to flourish. The only things it protects are the jobs of government ministers, the wars our government is conducting in Aghanistan and Iraq and the new war the US is threatening in Iran.

We're on the road to becoming a police state and journey's end is coming up very fast. It's time for a change of direction.

In the meantime, SACC sends its sympathy and its very best wishes to Mohammed Atif Siddique and to all his friends and family.

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