There’s a brilliant article in The Critic magazine today by the talented writer Sebastian Millbank. In his piece he takes aim at astroturfed ‘minority’ serving organisations in general and at the odious Tell Mama group in particular.
Mr Millbank writes about how Tell Mama is in his opinion an astroturfed entity that was propped up not by genuine community support and by voluntary contributions from those in agreement with their aims, but by millions of pounds of public money. In his article Mr Millbank speaks of how many of these organisations that purport to serve minorities or to say how brilliant multiculturalism is are little more than an organisational version of Potemkin Villages. Mr Millbank touches on the vast and heavy handed propaganda campaigns that get rolled out after every Islamic terror attack in order to damp down public anger about Islamic terror and certain Islamic cultural and communal practises. I agree with him on that. We shouldn’t be ‘not looking back in anger’ when some deranged Islamic extremist slaughters British teenagers at a pop concert, we should be getting angry, not at ordinary decent Muslims, but at the ideology that creates the sort of savages that set off bombs at pop concerts.
But as Mr Millbank says this propagandist approach to minimising Islamic terrorism or rather the public reaction to it and to promote a form of top down multiculturalism that is clearly failing dismally is starting not to work. The public Mr Millbank said are noticing the co-ordination of this pro-Islam and pro-Multiculturalist propaganda and rejecting it.
On the specific issue of Tell Mama Mr Millbank said:
*The propagandistic approach of the British government has not only alienated “left behind” communities hostile to migration, but has also antagonised many minority groups, who feel that instead of organically joining civil society, they are being represented by astroturfed groups with lucrative government grants. Such was the accusation levelled this week by Baroness Gohir, who accused the anti-Islamophobia organisation “Tell MAMA” of failing to represent Muslims, and being in bed with the British state. It’s certainly hard to treat it as credibly independent given that it was launched by the government — and a Conservative minister, naturally — and has received over six million pounds of public grants since its founding. Last month, its funding was abruptly paused, and an “open bidding process” was announced for the job of monitoring anti-Muslim hate crimes and incidents.
Tell MAMA is just one of a large number of implicitly or explicitly state-backed third sector organisations that are effectively nationalised lobby groups; ideological flying buttresses that steer public policy from without. *
Mr Millbank has a damned good point there. Some of those involved in the creation and management of Tell Mama have also got a reputation for allegedly running other publicly funded Islam related projects. The whole Tell Mama organisation is an astroturfed entity that gives the impression of being independent and unattached from government when in reality they were attacked to the government teat as firmly as a barnacle attaches itself to a seaside pier.
Mr Millbank has written a great piece and I would recommend that readers of this blog give it a go. You can find Mr Millbank’s piece via the link below.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-integration-industrial-complex-is-collapsing/