Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's Blog, page 9

Me and the Muslim Youth Helpline: An Explanation, An Apology and Hope for the Future

The current circumstances at the Muslim Youth Helpline (MYH) are devastating. The MYH is a faith sensitive charity for young Muslims, offering a helpline, webchat, email and signposting support service.  My wife, Akeela Ahmed, until this last Friday was Chief Executive there for some years, and prior to that Head of Support Services.
Currently, confidential communications – some of them involving me, Akeela and the police – are on an anonymous blog identifying itself as a ‘whistleblowing’ group of 30 signatories who signed an initial “statement against the CEO and Helpline manager ”, raised on 18th May.
Understandably, there have been huge concerns about what is published on that blog, based on communications between myself, Akeela and police. I completely understand why so many people who have seen this material are upset, worried and downright angry; and why so many people assume that what we have done is indefensible. Indeed, if I was in your shoes, I’d probably feel much the same way.
But there is a wider context here which has not been publicised. The first element of this wider context is our communications with the police, only a part of which the hackers have disclosed. On that front, I want to state from the outset that we made a fundamental mistake in our approach, and it had an entirely unintended consequence. I of all people should have known better, and we tried, with some success, to neutralise those consequences. But we did what we did in genuine fear, rather than any malice.
The second element of this context is how this information got on the blog in the first place – it did so as fallout from an escalating criminal campaign against the charity and its management since last year. Without understanding how this campaign affected our perceptions and emotions at the time, it is difficult to understand what led us to make this mistake. What follows is not a justification of the actions we took, but an explanation – the lesson of this narrative is, indeed, that whatever illegitimate actions others took, ours should have been wiser.
The Context
Around late last year, a non-Muslim (who I will call John) was employed on the helpline. The appointment was made by the relatively new Helpline Manager, who I will call Noor, and it was supported by Akeela. John, a qualified counsellor, was the first ever non-Muslim to work on the helpline.
His employment provoked a backlash in the charity from a minority of staff who said that John would be inherently incapable of understanding the challenges and issues faced by young Muslims (although his application proved otherwise); that if John answered calls on the helpline, callers would be able to “tell by his voice he’s not a Muslim”; that a non-Muslim would endorse haraam (forbidden) behaviour (although John displayed an exemplary understanding and respect of the Islamic faith); that the charity was “not Islamic enough” and that the employment of a non-Muslim on the helpline was evidence of how “diluted” the “Islamic” character of the charity had become.
When John finished training and started working on the helpline around January, this constant stream of feedback from a specific group of staff escalated into demands for John to either resign, or be removed from his job – an entirely illegal demand, of course. Throughout this period, Noor reported that she was facing difficulties getting many of the same staff to implement simple helpline policies such as not indulging in mobile phone conversations in the helpline room and so on.
Then the malicious rumours began. Several external organisations informed the MYH management that certain MYH staffers confirmed the charity was employing an “openly gay non-Muslim” on the helpline. To date, we don’t know whether or not he is actually gay. Around this time, several of the staff who had demanded John’s dismissal began to resign. And some remaining staff, who seemed aligned with this group, showed how disgruntled they felt about things at the charity in a range of obstructive behaviours. One male member of staff in particular who wasn’t doing very well on deadlines behaved in an openly aggressive and hostile way with Akeela several times. At one point, he was so enraged with her in a one-to-one meeting that he was physically shaking while he shouted at her.
Hackings and Harassment
Akeela discussed these issues in confidential emails with the Board of Trustees. Just as the Board was looking into doing something about those behaviours, something utterly bizarre and scary happened. On 24th April, the email account of Noor, the Helpline Manager – who as I said had brought in John with Akeela’s support – was hacked via remote masked IP addresses. Hacked emails from her office account were sent out to a wide range of people in and out of MYH.
Needless to say, Noor felt terrified. Why was she being targeted like this? The content of the hacked emails provided some explanation; they concerned interpersonal office relations. So whoever had chosen this course of action had done so with a view to discredit Noor and make her position untenable. The response of some former and current staff – the same people who had already objected to the direction of Noor’s general helpline work including the employment of a non-Muslim – was to demand that Noor be held to account.
The charity declared there would be a full independent investigation, but unfortunately this was slow to get off the ground. A couple weeks later, Akeela was approached in confidence by one of the staff members who’d previously passed on feedback against John. He warned her that a group of people in MYH were planning a “coup” against the charity over the next few weeks or so. He said that it had been planned months ago. When Akeela urged him to speak to the Board, he said he would only speak to an independent investigator. Akeela protected his confidence in the hopes an investigator would be appointed soon.
Shortly after that strange meeting, I and the family – Akeela and our two daughters who are 7 and 9 – took a week’s break in New York City from the 14thMay. Within MYH, only internal staff were aware of this. So it was with huge shock that on 15th May, while we were still jetlagged, Akeela received texts from colleagues that she was sending out strange emails to people in and outside the charity. Panic set in, as we realised that Akeela’s MYH email account had now been targeted by the hacker(s).
It was a traumatic experience. From that point on, we were constantly on guard, wondering what was going to happen next, and to what extent the perpetrators had managed to intrude on us. We got paranoid. Were they hacking Akeela’s phone? Her ipad?  Our daughters picked up on the fear and panic; they had to watch us either trudge around forlornly or run around in alarm as Akeela spent most of the time on the phone, trying to assist the Board of Trustees in managing the crisis that engulfed the office back in the London. This time the emails concerned incidents where Akeela had pulled up two members of staff (both of whom had raised issues about the charity’s direction) on simple issues of professional conduct, and seemingly with good reason. One of those was the individual who’d behaved with disturbing aggression only a matter of weeks ago.
Now I was really worried. Why were these people hacking? What was there agenda? Was this staff member, who had already openly displayed physical aggression toward Akeela, a culprit? It was at this point that I became seriously concerned that this was a sustained campaign of criminal activity that could well go out of control. And it didn’t seem like the charity had the resources to put a stop to what was happening. Overall, it seemed to me that individuals either currently or formerly (or both) affiliated with MYHbelieved they had the right to pursue some sort of vendetta – against Akeela and Noor – purely because of their unequivocal support for diversity and equal opportunities on the helpline.
I was so worried I wrote an email to the Chair, dated 16th May, in which I set out my concerns about the pattern of escalation. I told him I was worried that these incidents manifested an underlying ideological conflict about the identity of the charity.
When the Board moved not to condemn Akeela (or Noor), but to condemn the criminal hacking, it was clearly the wrong move as far as the hackers were concerned. On Friday 19th May, while we were still in New York, a statement addressed to the Board of Trustees was emailed out to a large group of MYH members, staff, volunteers, and even people not really affiliated to the charity. The document was signed, purportedly, by 21 people, among whom were a few former staff who had previously raised issues about the charity’s religious identity, and who had demanded that the only non-Muslim on the helpline should be sacked. The petition had now escalated those demands up the ladder to the people that had given John his job – Noor and Akeela. Now the demand was for the Board of Trustees to summarily dismiss both Akeela and Noor for “gross misconduct”.
So by the time we arrived back in London, Akeela rushed straight to work to find an office in disarray. The IT systems were shut down, work had ground to a halt and staff were petrified. That week, it quickly emerged that the petition itself was a fraud. Apart from the fact that it made use of illegally obtained emails, very soon signatories came forward to the Board revealing they had been deceived into offering their signature: they had never even been shown the petition, but had been asked by a few former and current staff members to give their name in order to put pressure on the management to improve operational issues, or some such. Still others said they had never even put up their signature at all. Others said they disagreed with the allegations and the demands for dismissals, but felt their feedback wasn’t heard, and the group pressured them into signing.
These revelations were deeply disturbing, and they proved that there was a clear distinction between the innocent volunteers who put their name to the petition, and a small group who had created it, and were driving the incidents of criminal activity.
Part of the reason I felt so scared for Akeela’s safety was precisely because of the lens through which I was seeing events unfold. As far as I could see, whoever that core group of people were, they seemed to adhere to a narrow interpretation of Islam that was racist – but that in itself was not the issue. What worried me was that they were embarking on a concerted campaign to forcibly impose their narrow views about Islam on the charity, by conducting criminal activities like the hacking and harassment of Noor and Akeela, and by using the illegally obtained materials to make a further illegal demand (them being sacked), followed by threats if the charity didn’t meet those demands. It seemed that this was an extremist coup; but it was also clear that most of the petitioners had no idea of this.
On my part, I wondered what might come next if they didn’t get their way. What if they decided that hacking was not enough? To make matters worse, Akeela had begun receiving strange and offensive texts both anonymously, and from a signatory to the petition. It was at this point that I feared for Akeela’s safety, and I didn’t know what else to do, other than to explain everything we knew to the police.
The third hacking happened on 8th June. We were woken a couple of hours after midnight by the buzz of texts on Akeela’s phone. More people receiving strange emails from her. We jumped out of bed and switched on the laptop. Confidential emails about the charity’s finances, the charity’s entire management accounts, Akeela’s correspondence with her solicitors, her Dad’s email to his lawyer asking for advice about our situation, his private email address and our residential address were sent out far and wide. How the hell had this happened? The emails had come from Akeela’s personal gmail account which she was now using since the charity’s IT systems had been shut down for security reasons. Who on earth could hack into Google?
We soon found out after consulting with an IT forensic expert that, given our computer and email circumstances, there was only one possibility – the hackers had somehow obtained access to our home computers for some time. This was a startling and tormenting revelation, and it is difficult for me to convey the fear and paranoia which arises knowing that unidentified people with an extremist vendetta against one’s wife have monitored all your private data for weeks. On expert advice, our internet has been disabled, and all our computers are suspect and can’t be used until after forensic analysis. My daughters are upset and frightened, as it’s been impossible to conceal our own emotions from them. Our concern was this – when will these people stop? How far will they go? It is under this unbearable pressure that Akeela made the decision to resign on Friday night, 8th June, after her gmail had been hacked, simply so that she could try and find a way to be safe from harassment.
The Police
When we went to the police, then, I promise you that we did not do it out of malice, but out of genuine fear about what might happen next along the scale of escalation. We have had a range of correspondence with the police and the hackers have only selected parts of it to present a picture that would discredit us. That does not mean we didn’t make tremendous mistakes. In hindsight, we should have known better.The ‘whistleblower’ blog says that we referred names of young Muslim petitioners to the police as a ploy to quell their grievances, and when that failed to get the authorities involved, we referred the names to Anti Terrorism. This is incorrect. What happened is actually quite the opposite. We reported specific crimes to the police, who referred the case to Anti Terrorism, and as a consequence I felt compelled to reach out to my own contacts sensitively to see if we could get a real investigation back down at normal police-level.
I’ll try to give you a fuller picture. On 23rd May, I drafted a letter for Akeela to send to the police, addressed to Superintendent John Morgan of Marylebone Police Station. I advised Akeela on the wording, and we agreed we needed to emphasise the pattern of escalating criminal activity. I also wanted to make sure the police understood why Akeela and Noor were being targeted in this way, so I set out the chronology of events indicating that a primary motivation of the core group behind the hackings and harassment seemed to be an extremist agenda to impose certain racist and homophobic values on the charity, by removing the very women who opposed them. In our letter, I thought I was simply relaying the facts. We highlighted the key incidents in the form of the two hackings, and the petition, but we also emphasised that a majority of the petitioners were not responsible for criminal activity, but had been duped by a core group of individuals who seemed to hold extremist views, and who therefore might be involved in the hackings and harassment.
We reported the crime properly on the 24th at the police station, and got our crime number. The next day, Akeela got a call from the investigating officer, who told her that “no criminal offense had been committed” and that the matter had been “referred to Anti Terrorism.”
This came as a shock. ‘Why?’ Akeela asked – she was told that the police couldn’t talk about that side of things. We were both quite worried about what that meant. I had wanted the police to recognise how unsafe Akeela felt and how insidious these criminal activities were. Although we had never used the word terrorism, it seems our mention of “extremism” triggered an unexpected referral to Anti Terrorism.
I take full responsibility for this turn of events as I drafted that letter and urged Akeela, out of concern as a husband for her safety, and for the safety of staff at MYH, to go the police. Specific evidence justifying our fear of potential violence against Akeela has also been passed on. At the time, in those circumstances where two women in the charity were victims of a sustained campaign of harassment to cause them to lose their jobs, purely to meet an insidious racist and homophobic agenda, it seemed the right thing to do. In hindsight, I can see that I should have been much more cautious in our use of language. We recognise that our use of the word extremism before the police, though put forward purely to highlight what we believed to be the motivations of the hackers, was mistaken. We did not intend for this to be referred to Anti Terrorism, and for that Akeela and I sincerely apologise.
At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. As the week went by, the prospects for the charity seemed worse. With the IT systems completely shut down due to the repeat hackings, fundraising had ground to a halt, and the Board began to fear the possibility that the charity might not survive the onslaught. In the meantime, our fears for Akeela’s safety were fuelled as she received further offensive text messages from unidentified people. Numerous calls to the investigating police officer were unanswered. Whatever ‘Anti Terrorism’ was supposed to be doing, it certainly wasn’t protecting my wife.
So on 30thMay I contacted Chief Inspector James Spencer, who is the Channel National Strategic Lead in ACPO, who I’d met some years ago. James had appreciated my criticisms of Channel, and had invited me to provide advice more formally. I had to contact him sensitively, as once something’s gone to SO15, it’s very difficult to get answers. I informed Akeela that we needed advice about how to proceed from a police officer who understands the system and is sympathetic to the issues. I felt that James, with his open-mindedness to my criticisms of Channel, would understand my concerns about extremism without conflating them with terrorism per se. I explained in my email to James:
“... she [Akeela] was informed that the police would not be conducting a criminal investigation – but that they would ask Anti-Terrorism to look at the case... She is deeply concerned that without a robust response from law-enforcement, the impunity that this group is now enjoying may encourage them to escalate their criminal activities.”
I knew I would not be able to do more than try to emphasise the criminal component, and the need for a criminal investigation. That is why we emphasised our worry that officers weren’t getting the point – I drew James’ attention to the attempt of some extremists to “forcibly takeover” a progressive Muslim charity through “criminal means” such as hacking and harassment. Again, I was trying to move it down from airy fairy concerns about terrorism to a concrete assessment of the criminality, and that’s why I mentioned that Channel might be useful in looking at the situation to assess the risks and perhaps help “put an end to this criminal activity.” James promised he would pass on the information back to Anti Terrorism.
In the following week, the campaign of harassment against MYH personnel escalated dramatically. Innocent young volunteers who had passed on information confidentially via email about the core group behind the criminal activities were now being targeted. This should have been impossible – all staff and the Board had switched to using their personal accounts for emails since the previous hackings. So the hackers were likely compromising personal accounts of MYH members too (hence the hacking of Akeela’s gmail).
On 6thJune, in an email that the hackers decided not to leak, I wrote to James with more details that had come to light in the previous week. I also set out the exact nature of my concerns:
“As the charity has attempted to use normal legitimate policies and procedures to address the issues of homophobia and racism arising from some of these individuals..., the individuals began resigning, and seem to have resorted to quite unbalanced criminal behaviour... [which has] escalated at different points. I am not going to insinuate more than what the evidence on record reveals about these individuals – what is absolutely clear is that when their ideological demands on the charity have not been met, they resorted to an escalation of covert criminal activity designed to sabotage the charity, and are now engaging in a campaign of harassment against its members.”
After I wrote to James, Akeela took matters back into her own hands and wrote directly to Camden Borough Commander, Chief Superintendent John Sutherland, raising urgent concerns about the lack of a proper police criminal investigation  based on due process, and demanding full disclosure of exactly what the police were doing:
“We first reported the crime on 24th May 2012, and I was informed by the investigating officer... that she has determined that no crime has been committed. In view of the circumstances of continuing criminal activity, I would be grateful if you could inform me as soon as possible whether an investigation into these criminal activities is underway, and what actions the police plans to take to enforce the law, put an end to these activities, and identify and prosecute those responsible.”
She closed the letter warning that if the police had decided not to focus on the actual criminal offenses she had reported, she “will be seeking a Judicial Review of this decision.” Thankfully, this letter prompted an immediate shift in the police approach, and I can confirm that the incidents of hacking and harassment that have brought the charity to a standstill are being investigated by the police as a criminal matter. 
Apology
Akeela’s primary concern was to ensure that the charity was protected from people who appeared not to mind that their criminal activities were seriously frightening a whole range of staff and volunteers, with a danger of leading to the complete closure of the organisation, and the prospect of further “reprisals and offences for the foreseeable future” – to quote someone who appeared to be acquainted with the core group responsible for the hackings. It seemed as if the hackers would prefer MYH to collapse, rather than allow it to remain a diverse, progressive charity.
Our efforts were not at all driven by spite or malice, but by the desire to seek help in a situation where we felt increasingly unsafe, and where we honestly worried that at least one member of staff had already demonstrated his aggression toward Akeela.
In our fear and panic for the safety of ourselves, and the staff and volunteers at the charity, we overlooked that the language of extremism, though justifiable, could lead to a further escalation. The responsibility for that language is not Akeela’s, but mine – as a husband, I advised her what to focus on, and I did not anticipate this result (though I should have). When we realised this mistake, we did our best in the circumstances to ensure a measured outcome, and thankfully there is no prospect of an Anti Terrorism approach to the criminal matters we reported.
Given the repeated traumas our communities have been subjected to in recent years, the intensifying breakdown of young people’s relationship with authority structures, the impunity of domestic state violence as we’ve seen in the London riots, and so on – I would like to express my sincere and unreserved apologies on behalf of myself and Akeela for the mistakes we made in our means of approach to the police, and for the fear and upset understandably provoked by the disclosure of some of this correspondence. I do not blame anyone who remains deeply angry about what we did, and I truly hope that you can understand and forgive us our mistakes.
The MYH Board Needs Your Support
Just as Akeela and I have made mistakes, so have those involved in a campaign against the charity that has now become criminal.
I have no doubt that some among this core group of individuals have noble intentions. They have a view of how the charity should be, and they feel that the direction it has taken is mistaken. But they have gone way too far – the ends do not justify the means.
While the deep-seated concerns this correspondence has generated are entirely legitimate and honourable, it is important to recall that the charity remains under siege. Ironically, the former staff who illegally obtained and published these confidential communications have ended up doing exactly the same thing which they object to when it comes to Anti Terrorism. They have conducted illegal spying of two women, and a family, and then cherry-picked information in order to demonise and subjugate. This suggests that they believe that criminal actions such as hacking, illegal spying, and harassment are perfectly justifiable in the pursuit of their goals which they believe are right.
It is therefore important, in this time of high emotions and confused perceptions, to keep a cool head. It is also important that we recognise that the cataclysm facing MYH is a microcosm of a wider ideological and intellectual struggle between real Islam, and a parochial strain of thinking that believes all kinds of actions are justifiable to pursue a pre-conceived ideological end – in this case, it appears to me, expunging “gays”, “non-Muslims”, and their supporters, to make an organisation “more Islamic”.
We face the shocking situation that in what is supposed to be MYH’s 10 Year Anniversary, this criminal campaign against the charity has paralysed its financial and other operations, and terrified volunteers and personnel, for the last 2 months – to the point that the helpline has had to close over security concerns, and the charity’s very survival is now in question.
This criminal campaign, then, was not just about Akeela and Noor. I still believe that this was and is an attempted coup to force a narrow ideological agenda onto one of the UK’s leading progressive Muslim charities. The point is that we are all free to hold ‘extreme’ views, whether they be about race or sexuality; but those views should never justify the kinds of actions that have been taken against the charity to date.It is therefore particularly important that concerned bystanders give support to the MYH Board at this time of crisis, rather than demanding their resignations and repeating unproven allegations on either side (that includes everything I’ve said here).
My plea to the individuals behind the hackings and harassment is as follows: Dear Brothers and Sisters, I apologise to you for any unwarranted fear or upset I have caused you, for my unintended role in having this matter looked at in any way shape or form by Anti Terrorism. Neither Akeela, nor I, ever wished you to be investigated in this way. However, I also want to tell you: this is not how to promote Islam. Real Islam is not about imposing your ideas on others at any cost. It is about celebrating diversity, having compassion for minorities, enjoining shared ethical values across culture and community, respecting difference, upholding free choice, and promoting exemplary conduct not through endless pontification and preaching, but through our own exemplary conduct.
Dear Brothers and Sisters, no ideology justifies criminality. The actions you have taken, however justified you might think they are, gives fuel to those who say that extremism is a persistent problem in our communities, and allows hardline authoritarian state structures to feel justified in resorting to ‘emergency’ measures outside the realm of due process – which is exactly what nearly happened in this case.
The need for measure and balance at this time is, therefore, acute. And I apply this equally to myself. At this time, we need to find a way to move forward. There must be a way that can pull us back from the brink. We need to acknowledge our mistakes, on all sides. Right now, it is imperative at this time when one of our leading charities faces such terrible difficulties, that our communities stand firm and unite on the basis of the values of love, compassion, generosity and forgiveness that we all share.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed15.6.2012

Occupy Planet Earth: Resisting the Militarisation of the State

Published on Counterpunch



Viva L'OccupationThe Occupy Movement is currently the most vocal manifestation of public resistance and civil disobedience to hit the West since the 60s. In turn, it has elicited a concerted and in some ways unprecedented militarisation of state violence. In the US, the deployment of tear gas, pepper-spray and rubber bullets has deliberately brutalised peaceful, civilian protestors – purely in the name of restoring 'civil order'. More than ever, the insistence by people on reclaiming public spaces in the name of opposing the injustice and inequality meted out by the proverbial "1 per cent" is unpeeling the mask of the democratic state, to reveal the unrestrained monopoly of wealth and weapons on which its power is premised.Unlike previous twentieth century protests, the Occupy Movement is distinguished by its genuine spontaneity, its leaderless dynamic, and its organic global proliferation through the streets of major industrial cities in the North. The driving force of Occupy, however, is not just the escalating global economic recession, although the latter's role in galvanising grievances shouldn't be underestimated. Rather, the determination of citizens to occupy strategic public spaces is inspired by a convergence of public perceptions.The majority of people now hold views about Western governments and the nature of power that would've made them social pariahs ten or twenty years ago. The majority are now sceptical of the Iraq War; the majority want troops out of Afghanistan; the majority resent the banks and financial sector and blame them for the financial crisis; most people are now aware of environmental issues, more than ever before, and despite denialist confusion promulgated by elements of fossil fuel industries, the majority in the US and Britain are deeply concerned about global warming; most people are wary of conventional party politics and disillusioned with the mainstream parliamentary system, due to the continuation of scandal after scandal. In other words, on a whole range of issues, there has been a massive popular shift in public opinion toward a progressive critique of the current political economic system. It is, of course, largely subliminal, not carefully worked out, and lacks a coherent vision for what needs to be done – but there can be little doubt that this shift has happened, and is deepening.People are increasingly disenchanted with prevailing socio-political and economic structures, and they are hungry for alternatives. Yet they see none readily available, no existing mechanism which allows their voices to be truly heard – what left to do, then, beyond simply occupying public space in an effort to, somehow, reclaim power?
Civil Contingencies: State-Preparations for Counter-InsurgencyYet as the global economic recession began to kick in since 2008, the "1 per cent" – or elements thereof – were well aware that one of the immediate consequences would be citizens taking to the streets. And they were preparing for it.In late 2008, an internal client memo from US bank and Federal Reserve member Citigroup, authored by chief technical strategist Tom Fitzpatrick, warned unequivocally of "continued financial deterioration, causing further economic deterioration, with the risk of a feedback loop." This will "lead to political instability… Some leaders are now at record levels of unpopularity. There is a risk of domestic unrest, starting with strikes because people are feeling disenfranchised."What to do? One answer to that question was put out by the US Army Strategic Studies Institute in December that year, in a report urging the US military to prepare for a "violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States" provoked by "unforeseen economic collapse", "loss of functioning political and legal order," or "purposeful domestic resistance and insurgency", among other threats. The report warned that Department of Defense resources may need to be put "at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquillity" – including "the use of military force… against hostile groups inside the United States." The noble aim of such state militarisation is, of course, to "restore public order and protect vulnerable populations" – from themselves, it would appear.Similarly, in the UK since 2004 the government has held extraordinary emergency powers granted under the little-known Civil Contingencies Act. The Act paves the way for the rise of totalitarian state power. Under the powers enabled by the Act, the government can unilaterally decree a state of emergency at its own discretion without public consultation or parliamentary approval. Once a state of emergency is declared, all manner of powers can come into play. Ministers can introduce new laws, "emergency regulations", by Royal Prerogative without recourse to parliament. These laws can include anything from destroying or confiscating property, banning protests and public assemblies of any kind, instituting curfews, prohibiting travel, deploying the army on British soil, sealing off whole cities, shutting down websites, censoring media, and so on. Worse still, the state could classify whatever it wants as new criminal offences."CIVIL CONTINGENCIES ACT" CLIP FROM THE UPCOMING DOCUMENTARY 'THE CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION':The problem is that the Act has nothing to do with responding to real emergencies. According to the journal of the British Association of Public Safety Communication Officials, the government has "no clear direction or dedicated budget and a complete lack of Act-specific assessment" relevant to actually preparing the country for concrete national emergencies or disaster scenarios. They rightly ask, "If the Government is truly committed to protecting the nation, why are Ministers not using the powers provided by the Civil Contingencies Act to proactively monitor the true state of preparedness across the country?"The New Transnational Class WarThis is a good question, because the bulk of Western government preparation for 'civil contingencies' has focused overwhelmingly on centralisation and consolidation of state military and police powers.  Why is this? For an idea of the kind of hopelessly regressive thinking that takes place at defence establishment level, a few excerpts from this choice Ministry of Defence report from 2007 are worth contemplating. The report, drawn-up by planners at the MoD's Defence Concepts and Doctrines Centre – a supposedly advanced military think-tank which plans for future trends – points out that by 2035, world population is likely to grow to 8.5 billion, with less developed countries accounting for 98 per cent of this growth. The report acknowledges that this massive population growth will occur in the context of massive global stress related to simultaneous environmental, energy and economic crises.Intriguingly, the report focuses on a "youth bulge", with some 87 per cent of people under the age of 25 inhabiting the less developed South. In particular, it notes that the population of the Middle East will increase by 132 per cent, and of sub-Saharan Africa by 81 per cent. These are predominantly Muslim regions. Hence the report warns of a danger that escalating global crises will fuel a rise in Muslim militancy: "The expectations of growing numbers of young people [in these regions] many of whom will be confronted by the prospect of endemic unemployment… are unlikely to be met." Growing resentment among the rising numbers of young people in these regions toward their undemocratic regimes will be channelled through "political militancy, including radical political Islam whose concept of Umma, the global Islamic community, and resistance to capitalism may lie uneasily in an international system based on nation-states and global market forces." But the report doesn't stop there. It goes further in pointing out a danger of radicalization not only in the South, but also in the North, and warns of a global middle class revolution: "The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx." This could occur on a transnational scale, due to an increasing global divide between a super-rich elite and the middle classes, as well as the rise of an urban underclass, in which case: "The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest." Curiously prescient – if a little off in terms of dates (24 years off, to be precise).Let's take a step back for a moment and reflect on this extraordinary document. It not only problematises population growth amongst particular religious and ethnic groups – it demonises all forms of potential resistance to prevailing global political economic structures across racial, national and class lines. And it does this because it is symptom-oriented – it offers a reactionary militarised response to certain surface symptoms rather than root structural causes related to the organisation of the global system.
The End of History is NighThe subliminal, unstated ideological assumption of this sort of analysis is simply this: the current global political economic order must be sustained, maintained, perpetuated at any cost; it cannot be permitted to undergo deep-seated structural reforms, because it is already perfect – we have already arrived at Francis Fukuyama's  End of History , the "unabashed victory of political and economic liberalism" in the West, and "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution", discounting all possibility of alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, resistance against the neoliberal system is illegitimate, and deserves to be crushed without remorse.
But Fukuyama was dead wrong. We are currently facing not simply one crisis, but a converging multiplicity of global crises – the global financial crisis, the global water crisis, the global food crisis, the crises of terror, war & militarisation – each of which is merely an interconnected symptom of a deeper Crisis of Civilization. Even the International Energy Agency now warns that we have a maximum of five years before we enter an unpredictable era of dangerous, irreversible climate change heading toward an uninhabitable planet, driven by a global industrial machine which privileges unlimited economic growth for the benefit of a tiny elite minority, against the needs of the vast majority of the human population.The Arab Spring in the Middle East and the Occupy Movement across the West are, in this context, populist outbursts of resistance against planetary-level human suicide; the beginnings of the death-throes of an overarching civilizational form that is simply not working. The very nature of our civilization – given its accelerating trajectory toward ecological and economic self-destruction – is now in question; its ideology of nature and life, its value system, and how these are inherently linked to its socio-political, economic and cultural forms.Yet what we are facing is not simply a process of civilizational collapse, but more fundamentally, a process of civilizational transition, the outcome of which remains to be seen. For the first time in human history, we face a civilizational crisis of truly planetary proportions. With it we are witnessing the self-destruction and decline of an exploitative, regressive and harmful industrial civilizational form within the next few decades, and certainly well within this century. With all this, we have an unprecedented historic opportunity, as this regressive civilizational form undergoes its protracted collapse, to push for alternative ways of living, doing and being – economically, politically, culturally, ethically, even spiritually – which are potentially far more conducive to human prosperity and well-being than hitherto imaginable.That can only be done if we galvanise the energy and excitement of the Occupy Movement to develop firstly, coherent critical diagnoses of the true nature of the problem; and on that basis, coherent alternative frameworks of action. We need to work concertedly to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of alternative social, political, economic, cultural, and ethical models of life. Not only do we need to develop our thinking and action on this, we need to develop innovative ways to show-case these ideas, to popularise them, and to educate communities and institutions. Most critically, we need to explore how communities, particularly those who are most marginalised and disenfranchised, can act on these models now, to begin creating real change at the grassroots, from the ground up. How can we work together to develop more participatory forms of economic exchange? How can we pool local and community resources to become more resilient to energy shocks – by becoming more self-sufficient in decentralized renewable energy production? How can we learn new skills so that we can grow our own food and be less dependent on the unequal and temperamental international networks of industrial agribusiness? How can we build new community-level political and cultural structures that render top-down state-military structures increasingly irrelevant?Taking to the streets and occupying public spaces are important seeds of direct action, but from them should blossom the models of social transformation and empowerment that the 99 per cent can begin exploring, in open dialogue with one another, and even with the 1 per cent whose monopolies we are protesting. For it is imperative to ensure that these popular energies develop accurate diagnoses of our predicament, so that our activism can be pointed in the right direction – not just at the 1 per cent, but at the wider political, economic, ideological and ethical system which enables their very existence, and which thus empowers the dysfunctional pathway on which we're currently heading.Check out our new film, based on my latest book: The Crisis of Civilization

Burning Britain: Riot Fever as a Symptom of Systemic Failure

Warzone

The rioting, looting and plunder that started in Tottenham on Saturday has now spread like wildfire throughout the capital. Shops were broken into, properties vandalized, and flats and vehicles set alight by gangs of mostly young men in Croydon, Clapham, Brixton, Hackney, Camden, Lewisham, Peckham, Newham, East Ham, Ilford, Enfield, Woolwich, Ealing, and Colliers Wood. Trouble was also reported in Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, and Nottingham.

Described by witnesses as a 'warzone', these are the worst riots to hit London in decades. Over the next few nights, groups of young men, some armed with make-shift weapons and petrol bombs, overwhelmed suburban areas in what was essentially a spontaneous ransacking spree. The chaos has disrupted the lives of thousands of people, rendering them homeless, destroying their businesses, and endangering their livelihoods.

On Monday, at about 4pm, I was talking on the phone to my friend Muddassar Ahmed, CEO of Unitas Communications, while he was driving about town in East Ham where he lives. We were chatting about our plans for a meal round his place to celebrate Ramadan. Suddenly, he said, "Oh my God. There's a group of, like, 50 young guys and they're running straight towards me!" Fortunately they ran passed his car, but they continued onto Ilford Lane, which they'd barricaded using crates and boxes.

On Tuesday morning, my dad and stepmother who live in Croydon, where some of the worst violence occurred, told me over the phone how they'd watched as the previous night a gang of about 20 lads smashed their way into the Staples opposite their house and emptied almost the entire superstore. Indeed, many of the images of the carnage captured by journalists have also been revealing – apart from the stealing of expensive luxury items like flat screen televisions and hi-fi systems, a lot of the pillaging has focused on clothes and food.

Police Brutality

So it would be gravely mistaken to assume that the rioting and violence erupting throughout London was motivated fundamentally by opposing police brutality exemplified in the killing of Mark Duggan. Police brutality almost certainly played a role in sparking the initial rage. Early inaccurate media reports claimed that Duggan had fired first at the SO19 police officers who were tracking him, and that the officer who was hit was only saved by the bullet lodging itself in his radio. Forensic analysis later confirmed that the bullet was in fact police-issued, throwing doubt on the whole story.

Semone Wilson, Duggan's girlfriend, said: "I spoke to him at about 5pm and he asked me if I'd cook dinner. He said he spotted a police car following him. By 6.15 he had been gunned down. I kept phoning and phoning to find out where he was. He wasn't answering. I rushed down to where it happened. They let me through the police lines but they wouldn't let me see his body."

According to eyewitnesses, Duggan had been disabled by police and was lying on the ground when he had been shot. "About three or four police officers had both men pinned on the ground at gunpoint", said one who was at the scene. "They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor."

Pending further disclosure, the jury is still out on what exactly happened, but at the moment the available evidence does not lend confidence to the original version of events put out by anonymous police sources.

To add insult to injury (or this case, murder), when a 16-year old girl amongst the protestors who had gathered in Tottenham on Saturday approached the police to ask questions, the officers "set upon her with batons", according to one resident interviewed by the BBC.

Confusing the Issues

Then the fires started. What began as a peaceful but angry demonstration against Duggan's killing by members of Tottenham's local community was quickly overrun and overtaken by hundreds of youths, who exploited the circumstances to cause havoc and loot local businesses. The scale of the violence on Saturday alone, and the inability of police and emergency services to respond and contain it effectively, was instrumental in inspiring youths all over London's suburbs to mimic the violence and, quite literally, use the opportunity to take what they wanted.

Unfortunately, some activists have been confused by these events. Jodi McIntyre described the riots as an "uprising", and suggested it should "continue in an effective manner" with better "organisation" – "Random looting", he explained, "is not going to overcome police injustice. But until then, the language of the unheard will continue to be spoken." But to what end should such admittedly pointless random looting therefore continue? How does exhorting its continuation in any way fit into a genuinely progressives agenda for the inclusive, community-led, radical systemic transformation necessary to overcome our converging social, political, economic and cultural crises?

Responding to criticism for expressing support for the riots, McIntyre wrote: "If it is a question of where my solidarity lies, and the options are M&S and Footlocker versus young people in the streets, then there is only one answer." To be fair McIntyre expressed "sympathy" for those who had their "homes or cornershops damaged" and noted he has never supporting looting or arson – but ultimately, his comments illustrate a serious lack of understanding of what had happened.

There is no binary moral choice between support for the 'corporate establishment' and 'young people' – as if the riots somehow manifest young people challenging corporate power in a genuinely progressive way. The riots, the looting, the plunder, did not in any way constitute an "uprising" against corporate or even state power. On the contrary, the violence represented the most regressive manifestations of corporate and state inculcated values of crude materialist, market-driven hedonism. The looters and vandals were not politically-motivated, let alone progressively-inspired. On the contrary, what precisely illustrates the entirely self-destructive nature of this phenomenon is that its main victims were not the government, nor large corporates shielded by the promise of insurance pay-outs – but simply ordinary working people. If this was an uprising, it ended up targeting the very communities from which these young people came, even if these are communities from which they feel ostracized.

Boiling Point

McIntyre is right about one thing, though, when he says, "Inequality is at the heart of this." Indeed, the violence is a disturbing symptom of the protracted collapse-process which industrial civilization now finds itself in.

The vast majority of perpetrators were young people, both men and women although mostly men. Young people in Britain have been hit hardest by the impact of recession. Unemployment in the UK is now at a staggering 2.49 million, having risen steadily over the last decade – increasingly so since the 2008 crash – with 1.46 million claiming jobseekers allowance. Across the country, one in five 16-24 year olds – just under a million young people – are unemployed.

Figures released just this summer showed that the economic gloom was deepening particularly across the capital, with 20 people chasing each available job in 22 of London's 73 parliamentary constituencies. In other areas, such as Peckham and Hackney which were also sites of major rioting, the number of people going after each job is over 40. And in almost every seat, this measure has worsened in the last few months.

It won't get better soon – this year will see unemployment rise to 2.7 million. And young people will face the brunt of it, as they already have. In the quarter to May 2011, the employment rate of working age men in London was lower than the national average, and underwent a "dramatic fall of 0.9 percentage points, while the national rate remained the same." Almost a quarter of working-age Londoners are economically inactive – 1.3 million people, and of these 397,000 people are aged 16 and over.

And there is an unmistakable race-dimension to class inequality. Black and ethnic minority (BME) groups face the brunt of the impact of economic crisis. Across the UK, BME groups have the highest rates of income-poverty, and in London, more than half of people living in low-income households are from ethnic minorities. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 70 per cent of those in income poverty in inner London are from minority ethnic groups, as are 50 per cent in outer London.

There is an interplay between the wider racial contours of social inequalities and institutional police racism. Despite commendable progress in significant areas, black people are still seven times more likely to be stopped and searched than white. Asians are twice as likely to be stopped and searched as white people. More than 30 per cent of all black males living in Britain are on the national DNA database, compared with about 10 per cent of white males and 10 per cent of Asian males. Black men are about four times more likely than white men to have their DNA profiles stored on the DNA database.

Meanwhile, the British government's flagship 'Big Society'-inspired policy to support young people amounts to nothing less than ruthlessly slashing youth services, and hoping the 'market' – which of course brought us into this economic mess – will magically take care of them. "One in four of England's youth services face catastrophic cuts of between 21-30 per cent – three times higher than the general level of council cuts", reports Kerry Jenkins, operations officer of Unite the Unions – a merger between two of Britain's leading Unions, the T&G and Amicus. "Many authorities intend to get rid of their youth services completely, while 80% of voluntary organisations providing services for young people have said programmes will be cut. Local authority chiefs predict that youth service budgets will be slashed by £100 million, leading to the loss of 3,000 full-time youth worker jobs."

Indeed, the government was warned. Less than a year ago, Sir Paul Ennals, Head of the National Children's Bureau, predicted that the combination of unemployment and cuts to services would lead to young people becoming "progressively disengaged from their own communities in a way that we are seeing in France", which has already seen riots and social unrest "driven by young people who are alienated from their community."

And as late as 2nd August – less than a week before the riots – criminologist Professor John Pitts, an advisor to several local authorities on violent crime and youth culture, warned that government cuts would lead to an increase in violent crime this summer.

The Failure of Neoliberal Capitalism

The unprecedented economic crisis, linked to the global political economy's fundamental breaching of ecological and energy limits, has already generated outbreaks of civil disorder all over the world in different regional and socio-political contexts. In the Middle East, we have seen the Arab spring, triggered by rocketing food prices, driven by a combination of environmental, financial and energy factors. In Europe, we have seen protests and rioting in Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Turkey and France, fuelled by the devastating impact of the global recession. It is only a matter of time before these crisis-conditions catch-up with the United States mainland.

In the UK, converging energy, economic and environmental crises are being refracted through the lens of a deeply unequal, yet vehemently consumerist, society. As Professor Pitts argued in a later interview directly about the riots: "Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future." Widening social exclusion has pushed these young people onto the margins of conventional morality – "Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose." Entrenched structural inequalities thus generate a sense of justification for looting: "They feel they can rationalise it by targeting big corporations. There is a sense that the companies have lots of money, while they have very little." Simultaneously, the rioting and violence lacked any progressive content whatsoever – driven by conventional neoliberal values of excessive consumerism, most looters used the opportunity not to challenge capitalism, but to indulge manically in its most materialistic values by simply stealing the items they could not normally afford: "Where we used to be defined by what we did, now we are defined by what we buy. These big stores are in the business of tempting [the consumer] and then suddenly these people find they can just walk into the shop and have it all."

The young people involved in this spate of violence are beyond the conventional alienation of repressed labour. Instead, they suffer from a deeper, more dangerous alienation of being utterly surplus to capitalist requirements, irrelevant and ostracized, and thus doomed to subsist on the margins, functionally illiterate, without hope or aspiration. That is a mode of being which is no longer capable of recognizing ethical constraints or boundaries, precisely because the state has already breached its contract of citizenship to them. The shooting of Mark Duggan, and the underbelly of class and race inequality it followed, was merely a match to a flame that has already burned for too long.

However the government chooses to now respond to the escalating violence, there can be no doubt that the episode represents a fundamental turning-point for British society, in a world that has already passed the tipping point on a whole range of interconnected systemic crises. The danger is that the authorities will offer the traditional, knee-jerk, business-as-usual response of maximizing police state powers, rather than addressing the root causes of our predicament. Of course, robust measures are clearly necessary to contain the violence and hold those responsible accountable. But we are already on the slippery slope of intensifying state-militarization – and we won't be able to get off as long as we refuse, as societies, to take responsibility for the systemic crises we all now face.

When Innocence is Not Enough: Talha Ahsan and the Rise of the (In)Security State

Published in Ceasefire Magazine

Three days ago was the six year anniversary of the London bombings. The anniversary passed relatively quietly – except for the appalling revelation that News of the World journalists had hacked into the phones of relatives of the 7/7 victims. Curiously, Scotland Yard seemed to have known about the hacking long ago, according to Graham Foulkes, whose son David was killed in the attacks. Further revelations that up to five Metropolitan Police officers had received bribes totalling £100,000 from the paper underscored the extent to which police corruption had facilitated the scandal

Ten days from now comes another anniversary – much less well-known, but nevertheless worthy of our attention – the five year anniversary of the detention without trial of a young British Muslim, Talha Ahsan. I first learned about Talha's case around 2007, when I went to pick up my father and stepmother from their friend's house in South London. It was late Friday evening, but I'd managed to find parking near the house.

When the front door opened, I was greeted by a mild-mannered elderly gentleman, Mr. Ahsan. He led me upstairs to where my dad was already seated with his wife, and I was offered tea and a delectable assortment of Indian sweets by Mrs. Ahsan. My dad introduced me as an author and mentioned my then-new book, The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry (Duckworth, 2006), in which I had challenged the British government's account of its policies before and after the 7/7 terrorist atrocities. The topic immediately struck the interest of our host, and I quickly learned all about what had happened to their son Talha.

Read the rest at Ceasefire...

Water, Oil and Demographics: The Middle East Triple Crisis

Originally published at Europe's World policy journal
Unless Arab governments invest much more in health, education and citizens' rights, warnsNafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, the pressures of water scarcity, oil depletion and population growth will spell their downfallsOne in five people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, so it is undeniable that we already face a global water crisis. But water scarcity is not just about its physical availability, it is also about power, poverty and inequality. Japan and Cambodia, for instance, experience about the same average rainfall of 160cm per year – yet while the average Japanese consumes nearly 400 litres per day, the average Cambodian uses only about a tenth of this.

As it is, the converging effects of population growth, climate change and energy depletion look set to make the physical scarcity of water a greater problem than ever. The Middle East and North Africa are particularly vulnerable, accounting as they do for 6.3% of the world's population but only 1.4% of its renewable fresh water. And three-quarters of the region's available fresh water is in just four countries: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Twelve of the 15 most water-scarce nations in the world – with an average of less than 1,000 cubic metres of fresh water per person per year – are also to be found in this region, namely Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Israel and Palestine. And in eight of these countries, available fresh water is less than 250 cubic metres.

Water consumption in the region is linked overwhelmingly to industrial agriculture. From 1965 to 1997, Arab population growth drove demand for agricultural development, leading to a doubling of land under irrigation. In countries with less agriculture or industry, like Kuwait, water is largely used for domestic purposes.

But demographic expansion in all these countries is set to dramatically worsen their predicament. Although birth rates are falling, a third of the overall population is below 15 years old, and large numbers of young women either are or soon will be reaching reproductive age. The Ministry of Defence in the UK has projected that by 2030 the population of the Middle East will have increased by 132%, and that of sub-Saharan Africa by 81%, generating an unprecedented "youth bulge."

The Water Sector Assessment Report on the Gulf countries expects that the availability of fresh water is likely to halve because of these demographic pressures, and the risk is that this will exacerbate the danger of inter-state conflicts over declining freshwater supplies. Competition to control water has already played a key role in the region's geopolitical tensions, for instance, between Turkey and Syria; Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority; Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia; as well as Saudi Arabia and its neighbours, Qatar, Bahrain, and Jordan. A halving of available water supplies due to population growth over the next 20 years could all too easily intensify these tensions and turn them into open military hostilities.

A recent study by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) suggests that water scarcity would also trigger social unrest within national borders, because of water's important cultural and symbolic function in underpinning the social contract in the Arab world. Underground water supplies are being heavily depleted by their use in irrigating deserts, a situation which could exhaust them completely as local populations double or more in size. While economic growth, accompanied by greater urbanisation, migration to urban areas, and higher per capita incomes has been translated into greater demand for freshwater, the population movements that have resulted are now exacerbating local ethnic tensions.

"If the water goes away, then suddenly the whole deal that holds the government together goes away", warns John Alterman, the CSIS Middle East director. He adds that this could undermine state legitimacy, radicalise 'identity politics' and lead to civil disorder and even state-failure. "It is a fundamental problem", he says, "for these governments and the people who live under them."

Climate change and energy depletion are likely to further amplify these dangers. Many of the region's irrigation systems are already under environmental strain because of salinity or over-exploitation of groundwater. From 1974 to 2004, the Arab world experienced rises in surface air temperature ranging from 0.2C to 2C, and forecasting models generally project a hotter, drier, less predictable climate that could produce a 20-30% drop in water run-off in the region by 2050, mainly due to rising temperatures and lower precipitation.

As early as 2015, the average Arab will be forced to survive on less than 500 cubic metres of water a year, a level defined as severe scarcity. Shifts in rainfall patterns will certainly affect crops, particularly rice. A "business-as-usual model" for climate change suggests global average temperatures could rise by 4°C by mid-century, and this would devastate agriculture in the Middle East and North Africa, with crop yields perhaps falling by 23-35% with weak carbon fertilisation, or 15-20% with strong carbon fertilisation.

The worldwide cost of infrastructural development capable of responding to the intensifying water crisis could amount to trillions of dollars, and even then the creation of this new infrastructure would itself be energy intensive and would therefore only mitigate the impact of scarcity on richer countries.

Hydrocarbon energy depletion is due to complicate matters even more. In its latest "World Energy Outlook" for 2010 the International Energy Agency (IEA) argued that conventional oil production worldwide most probably peaked in 2006, and is now progressively declining. This conclusion certainly fits the latest production data, which shows that world oil production, has been undulating but gradually declining since around 2005. Yet the IEA also argued that the shortfall will be made up from greater exploitation of unconventional oil and gas sources, albeit at far higher prices because of the greater environmental, energy and extraction costs.

The bad news is that the IEA's optimism about unconventional sources could be fundamentally misplaced. The six biggest Middle East oil producing countries officially hold around 74bn barrels (Gbs) of proven oil reserves between them. But British geologist Euan Mearns of Aberdeen University notes that published reserve data puts the most likely size of these reserves at only around 350 Gbs. And the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, found in a study for Energy Policy that official world oil reserves had been overstated by up to a third – implying that we are on the verge of a major 'tipping point' in oil production. Other studies by Sweden's Uppsala University, Reading and Newcastle Universities in the UK and Boston University in the U.S. suggest that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) of unconventional oil and gas sources, even accounting for technological advances, will be too small to mitigate peak oil.

All this means not only that the era of cheap oil is over, but that within the next decade or so major oil producing countries will increasingly struggle against costly, below-ground geological constraints.

If that proves to be the case, then by 2020, perhaps as early as 2015, the contribution of Middle East oil to world energy consumption could become negligible. That in turn would mean a catastrophic loss of state revenues for what are now the major Arab oil producing countries, rendering them highly vulnerable to the converging impacts of existing water shortages, rapid demographic expansion, climate change induced-droughts and declining crop yields.

This worst-case scenario is not inevitable, but there is only a very short window of opportunity for policies to change the situation. Revising water conservation, management and distribution efforts that have been neglected can reduce water consumption and increase efficiency, but these need to be combined with radical efforts to speed the transition away from oil dependence to a zero-carbon renewable energy infrastructure. Furthermore, concerted investments in health, education and citizens' rights, especially for women, are the key tools for alleviating population growth in the region, and unless Arab governments pursue these policy measures urgently they are unlikely to survive beyond the first quarter of this century.

Diversity Does Not Breed Terrorism - Cameron's Multicultural War (Unabridged Version)

This is the original, unabridged version of my oped published today by the Independent on Sunday

Cameron's recognition that we should acknowledge the dangers of extremist ideology, and the need to tackle it head-on, is welcome. His call for a social vision that young British Muslims can feel part of, to overcome the sense of rootlessness which can make a minority of them vulnerable to extremist recruitment, makes eminent sense. And his condemnation of the divisive impact of segregated communities, along with state support for groups with backward ideas about women and society, is certainly important – though hardly groundbreaking.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the details. By pinpointing the root cause of terrorism as an amorphous "state multiculturalism", Cameron reveals that his government's understanding of the problem is as simplistic as his predecessors.

The actual background of those already convicted on terrorism charges undermines his suggestion that the government should attempt to crack-down on 'non-violent extremists' – an undefined category that could include anyone from climate protestors, to student dissidents, to civil liberties campaigners. Over a third of terrorism convictions between 1999 and 2009, and every single major terrorist plot in the UK including 7/7, were linked to the extremist network formerly known as al-Muhajiroun. Yet despite being proscribed, the network has never been fully investigated by police. Many of its leaders roam free despite a track record of flagrantly inciting to violence, while its spiritual leader, Omar Bakri Mohammed, was allowed to escape to Beirut despite confessing to having advanced warning of al-Qaeda plans to bomb London. Worse, the court records of the fertilizer bomb plot trial showed that another individual Mohammed Quayyum Khan, also known as 'Q', was an al-Qaeda 'go-between' who recruited the leaders of that plot and the 7/7 mission – yet inexplicably remains at large.

As former Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus has noted, the fact that al-Muhajiroun had disturbing links with British security services in the Balkans during the late 1990s, as well as with repressive Western client-regimes abroad such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, among others, may well explain this reticence. Our links with militant Islamists during this period was motivated by the desire to use them to access strategic oil supplies in Central Asia and elsewhere, according to whistleblowers like former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds – whose testimony before the 9/11 Commission and U.S. Congress is so embarrassing for the U.S.-led 'War on Terror' it has been retroactively classified.

These links are compounded by an interventionist foreign policy programme that has been heavily disfigured under the influence of short-sighted (and self-interested) U.S. geostrategy in the Muslim world. As both internal Home Office and Joint Intelligence Committee reports have conceded, Britain's unquestioning allegiance to U.S. hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and Central Asia has been counterproductive. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, for instance, the radicalization of the insurgency has accelerated in direct proportion to NATO's troop surge, and ceaseless civilian casualties from indiscriminate U.S. airstrikes have inflamed local grievances, while failing utterly to meet even the most elementary requirements of the national interest.

Our U.S.-hijacked foreign policy has also poured fuel on the fire for extremist recruiters at home, who point to our interventionism abroad as ample evidence of an anti-Muslim agenda; which is then made worse by domestic policies that reinforce the structural problems prevailing in many British Muslim communities.

For instance, Cameron overlooks how government policies have intensified British Muslim social exclusion. The dogmatic adherence to neoliberal principles pursued by both Tory and Labour governments, continuing under the coalition regime, have widened inequalities in the UK with debilitating consequences for the working class from both white and ethnic minority communities. Consequently 69 per cent of British Muslims of South Asian background live in poverty, compared to 20 per cent of white people. Meanwhile, questionable and sometimes institutionally racist local authority housing policies have systematically housed white and ethnic minority communities in segregated areas of the same cities. The upshot is that Muslims in Britain are now overrepresented in poor housing, unemployment, low educational achievement, and in prisons.

But Cameron has already been warned that his own economic policies will make this sense of exclusion even worse. As was revealed by equalities secretary Theresa May's letter of June last year to Chancellor George Osborne, senior ministers are well aware that the coalition's cuts would likely widen social inequalities, such that "women, ethnic minorities, disabled people and older people will be disproportionately affected."

Of course, poverty by itself does not cause extremism, but on this scale feeds the sense of a separate identity. Crucially, this even afflicts more upwardly-mobile groups who often remain painfully aware of the unresolved problems in their wider communities. This was revealed in the path-breaking research of Quintan Wiktorowicz – now the White House senior director for global engagement at the U.S. National Security Council. Even more surprisingly, Professor Wiktorowicz, a former academic and author of the book Radical Islam Rising, found from his hundreds of interviews with British Islamists – many linked to al-Muhajiroun – that religious identity is not the root cause of violent radicalization. On the contrary, while very religious Muslims were the most resistant to radicalization, he found that those who did not have a strong grounding in Islam were most at risk of being attracted by Islamist extremism.

Perhaps even more counter-intuitively, despite entrenched social exclusion, studies show that British Muslim communities are largely integrated into British social and cultural life. A 2009 Gallup poll found that while only half the general British population identifies strongly as British, 77 per cent of Muslims in the UK identify very strongly as British, with 82 per cent affirming themselves as loyal to Britain. Although employment levels for British Muslims are at only 38 per cent, British Muslims have a higher confidence in the judiciary than the general public, and 67 per cent of them want to live in a neighbourhood that has a mix of ethnic and religious people – compared to 58 per cent of the general British public

The danger is that by blaming "state multiculturalism", Cameron is not simply barking up the wrong tree, but undermining the good-will on both sides of the fence. As economic inequalities deepen under the impact of the coalition's ill-conceived economic prescriptions, social cohesion will be challenged. Meanwhile, his speech will be exploited both by militant Muslims to vindicate their claims that the state is the avowed enemy of Islam, and by far-right extremists to legitimize their vendetta against minority and Muslim communities. Rather than dealing with the root causes of terrorism, this only makes our predicament far more volatile.

By blaming our longstanding celebration of diversity – a uniquely British value that stands us out from our European neighbours – Cameron is targeting precisely the principles that make our country strong. If he really wants to deal with the scourge of Islamist extremism, he would do well to focus on encouraging the authorities to investigate and prosecute individuals linked to groups like al-Muhajiroun who remain at large despite breaking the law; on re-evaluating a U.S.-centric foreign policy that has empowered Islamists abroad who support extremists at home in the name of oil and geopolitics; and on addressing the social problems that working class communities of all ethnic and religious backgrounds are experiencing due to the bankrupt economic policies of successive British governments.

The Great Unravelling: Tunisia, Egypt and the Protracted Collapse of the American Empire

As first published at The Learning Machine

The toppling of dictator Ben Ali in Tunisia in the wake of mass protests and bloody street clashes has been widely recognized as signifying a major transformation in the future of politics and geopolitics for the major countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). There is little doubt that the Tunisian experience triggered the escalation of unprecedented protests in Egypt against the Mubarak regime. The question on every media pundit's lips is, 'Will events in Tunisia and Egypt have a domino effect throughout the Arab world?'

The potential fall of Hosni Mubarak is serious stuff. As The Economist points out, Egypt is "the most populous country in the Arab world", viewed by the U.S., Britain and West as "a strategic pivot" and a "a vital ally" in the 'War on Terror'. No wonder then that activists across the world are holding their breath in anticipation that one of the world's most notorious dictators, and one of the West's most favoured client-regimes, might be overthrown.

What is happening in Tunisia and Egypt, however, is only a manifestation of a deeper convergence of fundamental structural crises which are truly global in scale. The eruption of social and political unrest has followed the impact of deepening economic turbulence across the region, due to the inflationary impact of rocketing fuel and food prices. As of mid-January, even before Ben Ali had fled Tunis, riots were breaking out in Algeria, Morocco, Yemen and Jordan – the key grievances? Rampant unemployment, unaffordable food and consumer goods, endemic poverty, lack of basic services, and political repression.

Global Food Crisis: 2011

In many of these countries, certainly in both Tunisia and Egypt, tensions have simmered for years. The trigger, it seems, came in the form of food shortages caused by the record high global prices reported by the FAO in December 2010. The return of high food prices two to three years after the 2008 global food crisis should not be a surprise. For most of the preceding decade, world grain consumption exceeded production – correlating with agricultural land productivity declining almost by half from 1990-2007, compared to 1950-1990.

This year, global food supply chains were again "stretched to the limit" following poor harvests in Canada, Russia and Ukraine; hotter, drier weather in South America cutting soybean production; flooding in Australia, wiping out its wheat crops; not to mention the colder, stormier, snowier winters experienced in the northern hemisphere, damaging harvests.

Climate Change

So much of the current supply shortages have been inflicted by increasingly erratic weather events and natural disasters, which climate scientists have long warned are symptomatic of anthropogenic global warming. Droughts exacerbated by global warming in key food-basket regions have already led to a 10-20 per cent drop in rice yields over the last decade. By mid-century, world crop yields could fall as much as 20-40 per cent due to climate change alone.

But climate change is likely to do more than generate droughts in some regions. It is also linked to the prospect of colder weather in the eastern US, east Asia and northern Europe – as the rate of Arctic summer sea-ice is accelerating, leading to intensifying warming, the change in atmospheric pressure pushes cold Arctic air to the south. Similarly, even the floods in Australia could be linked to climate change. Scientists agree they were caused by a particularly strong El-Nino/La-Nina oscillation in the Tropical Pacific ocean-atmospheric system. But Michael McPhaden, co-author of a recent scientific study on the issue, suggests that recently stronger El-Ninos are "plausibly the result of global warming."

Energy Depletion

The global food situation has been compounded by the over-dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, consuming ten calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of food energy produced. The problem is that global conventional oil production has most likely already peaked, having been on an undulating plateau since 2005 – and forecast to steadily and inexorably decline, leading to higher prices. Although oil prices dropped after the 2008 crash due to recession, the resuscitation of economic activity has pushed up demand, leading fuel prices to creep back up to $95 a barrel.

The fuel price hikes, combining with the predatory activities of financial speculators trying to rake-in profits by investing in the commodity markets, have underpinned worldwide inflation. Just as in 2008, the worst effected have been the poorer populations of the South. Thus, the eruption of political unrest in Egypt and elsewhere cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the context of accelerating ecological, energy and economic crises – inherently interconnected problems which are symptomatic of an Empire in overstretch, a global political economy in breach of the natural limits of its environment.

Post-Peak Egypt

Indeed, Egypt is particularly vulnerable. Its oil production peaked in 1996, and since then has declined by around 26 per cent. Since the 1960s, Egypt has moved from complete food self-sufficiency to excessive dependence on imports, subsidized by oil revenues. But as Egypt's oil revenues have steadily declined due to increasing domestic consumption of steadily declining oil, so have food subsidies, leading to surging food prices. Simultaneously, Egypt's debt levels are horrendous – about 80.5 per cent of its GDP, far higher than most other countries in the region. Inequality is also high, intensifying over the last decade in the wake of neoliberal 'structural adjustment' reforms – widely implemented throughout the region since the 1980s with debilitating effects, including contraction of social welfare, reduction of wages, and lack of infrastructure investment. Consequently, today forty per cent of Egyptians live below the UN poverty line of less than £2 a day.

Due to such vulnerabilities, Egypt, as with many of the MENA countries, now lies on the fault-lines of the convergence of global ecological, energy and economic crises – and thus, on the frontlines of deepening global system failure. The Empire is crumbling. The guarded official statements put out by the Obama administration only illustrate the disingenuous impotence of the U.S. position.

Imperial Surrogate

While Vice-President Joe Biden insisted that Mubarak is not a dictator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Obama lamely condemned "violence" and voiced moral support for the right to protest. The slightly muted response is understandable. For the last 30 years, the U.S. has supported Mubarak's brutal reign with economic and military assistance – currently providing $1.3 billion a year in Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The U.S. Congressional Research Service reports that additionally:

"Egypt benefits from certain aid provisions that are available to only a few other countries. Since 2000, Egypt's FMF funds have been deposited in an interest bearing account in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and have remained there until they are obligated... Egypt is allowed to set aside FMF funds for current year payments only, rather than set aside the full amount needed to meet the full cost of multi-year purchases. Cash flow financing allows Egypt to negotiate major arms purchases with U.S. defense suppliers."

The U.S. also happens to be Egypt's largest bilateral trading partner. It is "one of the largest single markets worldwide for American wheat and corn and is a significant importer of other agricultural commodities, machinery, and equipment." The U.S. is also the second largest foreign investor in the country, "primarily in the oil and gas sector."

Perhaps Biden's denial of Mubarak's dictatorial qualities are not that difficult to understand. Since the assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in 1981, Egypt has officially been in a continuous "state of emergency," which under a 1958 law permits Mubarak to oversee measures unnervingly similar to the USA Patriot Act – indefinite detention; torture; secret courts; special authority for police interventions; complete absence of privacy; and so on, ad nauseum. Not to mention the fact that inequality in the U.S. is actually higher than in Egypt.

Friends of the Family

Yet ultimately, the U.S. administration cannot absolve itself. Successive State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for Egypt, while still conservative, catalogue the litany of routine police-state repression inflicted on the civilian population over the last decade by Mubarak's security forces. When asked about the shocking findings of the 2009 report, Clinton herself downplayed the implications, describing Mubarak and his wife as "friends of my family." So it is not that we do not know. It is that we did not care until the terror became so unbearable, that it exploded onto the streets of Cairo.

Egypt is central among a network of repressive Arab regimes which the British and Americans have actively supported since the early twentieth century to sustain control of cheap oil "at all costs", as Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd noted in 1956, as well as to protect Israel. Declassified British Foreign Office files reviewed by historian Mark Curtis show that the Gulf sheikhdoms were largely created by Britain to "retain our influence," while police and military assistance would help "counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves" – particularly from "ultra-nationalist maladies". The real danger, warned the Foreign Office in 1957, was of dictators "losing their authority to reformist or revolutionary movements which might reject the connexion with the United Kingdom."

Protracted Collapse

No wonder then that the chief fear of Western intelligence agencies and corporate risk consultants is not that mass resistance might fail to generate vibrant and viable democracies, but simply the prospect of a regional "contagion" that could destabilize "Saudi oil fields." Such conventional analyses, of course, entirely miss the point: The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unravelling – not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable – already in overshoot of the earth's natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population.

The solution in Tunisia, in Egypt, in the entire Middle East, and beyond, does not lay merely in aspirations for democracy. Hope can only spring from a fundamental re-evaluation of the entire structure of our civilization in its current form. If we do not use the opportunities presented by these crises to push for fundamental structural change, then the "contagion" will engulf us all.

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He is author of A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), which inspired the forthcoming documentary film, The Crisis of Civilization (2011).

Radio Ecoshock Interview

My interview with Radio Ecoshock, the web's premiere ecologically-oriented radio show, about my new book, A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010). Listen to it here - my bit starts around 30 min in.

My new book makes the Guardian's 'non-fiction choice'

On New Year's Day I was pleasantly surprised to find that A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It was given a pretty positive, if short, review by Steven Poole in the Guardian, alongside two other books, which you can read here. Here's the excerpt about mine (some of it might not entirely make sense without reading the other reviews):

If you still need something to worry about, how about a grand conflagration of climate, financial, energy, food, and civil-liberties crises, which might destroy the world as we know it before the century is out? Such troubles, Ahmed argues, are not blips in our civilisation but "integral to the ideology, structure and logic of the global political economy", which therefore needs to be changed if humanity is to survive.

Ahmed could be charged with a certain ebullience in his delineating of potential catastrophe, which will necessitate "the dawn of a post-carbon civilisation". But his arguments are in the main forceful and well-sourced, with particularly good sections on agribusiness, US policies of "energy security", and what he terms the "securitisation" of ordinary life by western governments. Finally he offers a rather catholic range of recommendations, including treating water and energy as "part of the Global Commons" and eliminating the lending of money at interest. Building more car-parks for philosophers and novelists to frolic in, sadly, doesn't seem to be on the world-saving agenda.

Short and sweet.

Oil or Terrorism: Which Motivates U.S. Policy More?

As published by Foreign Policy In Focus (Institute for Policy Studies, Washington D.C.)

Among the batch of classified diplomatic cables recently released by the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, several have highlighted the vast extent of the financial infrastructure of Islamist terrorism sponsored by key U.S. allies in the ongoing "War on Terror."

One cable by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in December 2009 notes that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide." Despite this, "Riyadh has taken only limited action to disrupt fundraising for the UN 1267-listed Taliban and LeT [Lashkar e-Tayyiba] groups that are also aligned with al-Qaeda."

Clinton raises similar concerns about other states in the Gulf and Central Asia. Kuwait remains reluctant "to take action against Kuwait-based financiers and facilitators plotting attacks outside of Kuwait." The United Arab Emirates is "vulnerable to abuse by terrorist financiers and facilitation networks" due to lack of regulatory oversight. Qatar's cooperation with U.S. counter-terrorism is the "worst in the region," and authorities are "hesitant to act against known terrorists." Pakistani military intelligence officials "continue to maintain ties with a wide array of extremist organizations, in particular the Taliban [and the] LeT."

Despite such extensive knowledge of these terrorism financing activities, successive U.S. administrations have not only failed to exert military or economic pressure on these countries, but in fact have actively protected them, funnelling billions of dollars of military and economic assistance. The reason is oil.

It's the Hydrocarbons, Stupid

Oil has always been an overwhelming Western interest in the region, beginning with Britain's discovery of it in Persia in 1908. Britain controlled most Middle East oil until the end of World War II, after which the United States secured its sphere of influence in Saudi Arabia. After some pushback, Britain eventually accepted the United States as the lead player in the region. "US-UK agreement upon the broad, forward-looking pattern for the development and utilisation of petroleum resources under the control of nationals of the two countries is of the highest strategic and commercial importance", reads a 1945 memo from the chief of the State Department's Petroleum Division.

Anglo-U.S. geo-strategy exerted this control through alliances with the region's most authoritarian regimes to ensure a cheap and stable supply of petroleum to Western markets. Recently declassified secret British Foreign Office files from the 1940s and 1950s confirm that the Gulf sheikhdoms were largely created to retain British influence in the Middle East. Britain pledged to protect them from external attack and to "counter hostile influence and propaganda within the countries themselves." Police and military training would help in "maintaining internal security." Similarly, in 1958 a U.S. State Department official noted that the Gulf sheikhdoms should be modernized without undermining "the fundamental authority of the ruling groups."

The protection of some of the world's most virulent authoritarian regimes thus became integral to maintaining Anglo-U.S. geopolitical control of the world's strategic hydrocarbon energy reserves. Our governments have willingly paid a high price for this access – the price of national security.

Still Funding Radicalism

One of al-Qaeda's chief grievances against the West is what Osama bin Laden dubs the "Crusader-Jewish" presence in the lands of Islam, including support for repressive Arab regimes. Under U.S. direction and sponsorship, many of these allies played a central role in financing and supporting bin Laden's mujahideen networks in Afghanistan to counter Soviet influence. It is perhaps less well understood that elements of the same regimes continued to support bin Laden's networks long after the Cold War – and that they have frequently done so in collusion with U.S. intelligence services for short-sighted geopolitical interests.

In fact, Afghanistan provides a rather revealing example. From 1994 to 2001, assisted by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Clinton and Bush II administrations covertly sponsored, flirted and negotiated with the Taliban as a vehicle of regional influence. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, former White House Special Assistant to Ronald Reagan, also testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia about the "covert policy that has empowered the Taliban," in the hopes of bringing sufficient stability to "permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan."

The Great Game is still in full swing. "Since the U.S.-led offensive that ousted the Taliban from power, the project has been revived and drawn strong U.S. support" reported the Associated Press in 2005. "The pipeline would allow formerly Soviet Central Asian nations to export rich energy resources without relying on Russian routes. The project's main sponsor is the Asian Development Bank" – in which the United States is the largest shareholder alongside Japan. It so happens that the southern section of the proposed pipeline runs through territory still under de facto Taliban control, where NATO war efforts are focused.

Other evidence demonstrates that control of the world's strategic energy reserves has always been a key factor in the direction of the "War on Terror". For instance, the April 2001 study commissioned by then-Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed official fears of an impending global oil supply crunch, energy shortages, and "the need for military intervention" in the Middle East to maintain stability.

Energy and Iran

Other diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show clearly that oil now remains central to U.S. policy toward Iran, depicting an administration desperate to "wean the world" off Iran's oil supply, according to the London Telegraph. With world conventional oil production most likely having peaked around 2006, Iran is one of few major suppliers that can potentially boost oil output by another 3 million barrels, and natural gas output by even more. The nuclear question is not the real issue, but provides ample pretext for isolating Iran.

But the U.S. anti-Iran stance has been highly counterproductive. In a series of dispatches for the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh cited U.S. government and intelligence officials confirming that the CIA and the Pentagon have funnelled millions of dollars via Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni extremist groups across the Middle East and Central Asia. The policy – officially confirmed by a U.S. Presidential Finding in early 2008 – began in 2003 and has spilled over into regions like Iraq and Lebanon, fuelling Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian conflict.

Not only did no Democratic members of the House ever contest the policy but President Obama reappointed the architect of the policy – Robert Gates – as his defence secretary. As former National Security Council staffers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett observe, Obama's decision earlier this year to step up covert military operations in North Africa and the Middle East marked an "intensification of America's covert war against Iran."

This anti-Iran directive, which extends covert U.S. support for anti-Shi'ite Islamist militant networks linked to al-Qaeda, hardly fits neatly into the stated objectives of the "War on Terror." Unless we recognize that controlling access to energy, not fighting terror, is the primary motive.

Beyond Dependency

While classified covert operations continue to bolster terrorist activity, the Obama administration struggles vainly to deal with the geopolitical fall-out. Getting out of this impasse requires, first, recognition of our over-dependence on hydrocarbon energy sources to the detriment of real national security. Beholden to the industry lobbyists and the geopolitical dominance that control of oil provides, Western governments have supported dictatorial regimes that fuel widespread resentment in the Muslim world. Worse, the West has tolerated and until recently colluded in the sponsorship of al-Qaeda terrorist activity by these regimes precisely to maintain the existing global energy system.

Given the convergence of peak oil and climate change, it is imperative to transition to a new, renewable energy system. Such a transition will mitigate the impact of hydrocarbon energy depletion, help prevent the worst effects of anthropogenic global warming, and contribute to economic stability through infrastructure development and job creation.

By weaning us off our reliance on dubious foreign regimes, a shift to renewables and away from supporting oil dictatorships will also make us safer.