Islamist organizations in Britain are cheering the U.K. government’s decision to stop financing a controversial project run by moderate Muslims established to monitor anti-Muslim hate incidents.
On March 12, Islamist organizations Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) and 5 Pillars UK applauded the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for ending all funding to the Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) monitoring service.
Islamists will throw anyone under the bus if it supports their twisted world view.
The flare-up between extremist and moderate factions showcases a power struggle among British Muslims competing for government funding and state patronage, as well as the intensifying national debate over what constitutes “Islamophobia” and hate crimes against Muslims. The organization has been condemned by Islamists who say it has sided with people hostile to Muslims. Others have accused the organization of hyping the problem of anti-Muslim hate.
Tell MAMA, which has been wholly funded by taxpayer cash to the tune of £6 million since its founding in 2012, is facing closure due to the funding cut. The government initially notified Tell MAMA that it would end direct funding on March 31, 2025, but the charity issued an update on March 25 informing the public that officials had agreed to sustain the charity for the year 2025-26.
“It says a lot that Islamists are cheering in the hope that Tell MAMA fails. The question must be asked if they are hoping that British Muslims don’t have access to a service that helps them get support when they suffer anti-Muslim hate,” Fiyaz Mughal OBE, founder of Tell MAMA told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“This also says a lot about the shape shifting and devious nature of Islamists simply because the values of Tell MAMA are based on protecting human dignity and not driven by religious political identities. Islamists will throw anyone under the bus if it supports their twisted world view,” Mughal warned.
Condemned by Islamists and Counter-Islamists
While secular commentators have accused Tell MAMA of fueling the “Islamophobia industry” by exaggerating anti-Muslim hate crimes or pretending to serve as the moderate face of Islam, Islamists claim that the monitor has been “discredited among the Muslim community” because it “underreported incidents of Islamophobia.”
“Tell MAMA and its founder, Fiyaz Mughal, have always been deeply problematic,” MEND emphasized. “With this organization now defunded, the government has the opportunity to engage with groups that genuinely represent the Muslim community.”
MEND urged the government to “reallocate its funding to legitimately grassroots civil society bodies who work to record cases of Islamophobia and provide support to victims” blaming Mughal for spreading “ideas that fed into the same Islamophobic tropes that his organization was ostensibly established to challenge.”
Tell MAMA “often avoided the widely accepted term ‘Islamophobia’ in its work, thus refusing to accept that Islamophobia is much more than a narrow definition of anti-Muslim hatred,” MEND complained. “As such it did little to tackle the structural or institutional Islamophobia emanating from media, political parties and right-wing institutions.”
“This is welcome news. Tell MAMA is widely discredited and been imposed onto Muslim communities,” Newham Muslims tweeted. “Government shouldn’t make the same mistakes again and force representation on us.”
The group called on the government to fund “genuine grassroots organizations” like MEND, MEND’s Islamophobia Response Unit, and the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring. FWI earlier reported on the MCB’s founders’ links to Jamaat-e-Islami, an organization which advocates for the creation of an Islamic state and the imposition of Sharia law.
In 2016, Islamist news portal 5 Pillars UK warned that Tell MAMA (TM) was “nearing its sell-by date” and predicted that the monitoring service “will inevitably be made redundant.” It commended the hardline organization MEND for initiating “the campaign of getting local communities to push for the recording of Islamophobia as a separate category of crime.”
5 Pillars UK criticized the government for awarding £375,000 to create Tell MAMA and shortly thereafter supplementing it with £214,000. In July 2013, Tell Mama received £337,130 from the Big Lottery Fund.
5Pillars accused Tell MAMA for sharing speaking platforms with the now-defunct Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank, claiming it had links to far-right extremists, racists, and homophobes.
Apart from the “vast amounts of tax payers’ money” which has been “unjustifiably” granted to Tell MAMA, “many in the Muslim community have expressed serious concerns about the group’s attempts to hijack the voice of local communities on any discussion about policing Islamophobia and policy responses to anti-Muslim hate crime,” the news website added.
In 2018, the Home Office said it had awarded Tell MAMA with £2.5m from 2017 to 2019. Luke Hall, former Minister of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, announced in 2019 that the government was providing an ongoing grant of £2.5 million to Tell MAMA. In April 2024, Baroness Scott confirmed that Tell MAMA had received over £6 million since 2012.
“This year we have made up to £1 million of funding available to Tell MAMA to provide support for victims of Islamophobia, and we will set out our approach to future funding in due course,” a government spokesperson said, announcing the termination of further funding.
Former U.K. Counter Extremism Coordinator Charlotte Littlewood who described Tell Mama as “the most effective anti-Muslim hate monitoring organization in the U.K.” said that the project had “faced a smear campaign by Muslim peers and ministers who are greatly concerned over Islamophobia.” The cut smacked of “tribal infighting” and a “want to redirect funds.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source close to the Home Office told FWI that the decision to cut funding may have been due to lobbying from Islamists in the Labour Party or simply because the government was looking to save money. If the same funding were allocated to a rival Islamist monitor, this would betray Labour’s bias in favor of Islamism, he said.
The Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats explained how bodies like Tell MAMA are accused of “political collaboration” with the government by organizations like MEND.
A 2017 report by the Henry Jackson Society’s Centre for the Response to Radicalisation and Terrorism warned that MEND officials “have expressed highly concerning views on terrorism” and “regularly hosted illiberal, intolerant and extremist Islamist speakers at public events.”
Titled MEND: “Islamists Masquerading as Civil Libertarians,” the 87-page report notes that MEND “has consistently opposed the government’s counter-terrorism and counter extremism legislation, usually without proposing credible alternatives.”
Azad Ali, MEND’s Head of Community Development & Engagement, openly declared that he would reject democracy if it came at the expense of not implementing sharia law, the report stated, noting that MEND was actively seeking to influence electoral politics with its Islamist agenda.
Funding Cut Before
This is not the first time Tell MAMA’s funding has been axed. In 2013, the Liberal Democrat parliamentarian Don Foster said that the body’s sponsorship would not be renewed after police and civil servants raised concerns about its methods.
Tell MAMA was alleged to have hyped anti-Muslim crime even though police statistics showed that hate crime in mainly Muslim areas has fallen in the past 10 years. It also failed to disclose that 57 percent of its 212 reported “incidents” were offensive posts on Twitter and Facebook.
Moreover, the monitor did not reveal that a further 16 percent of the 212 reports had not been verified and not all the online abuse even originated in Britain, investigative journalist Andrew Gilligan reported.
On Wednesday, Shaista Gohir, chief executive of the Muslim Women’s Network UK, called for an inquiry into Tell MAMA claiming a “lack of transparency” on how the network is spending public money.
“We need an inquiry because, if you look at the questions, they’re very simple: how much was spent on salaries? How much was spent on consultancy fees?” Baroness Gohir, a member of the House of Lords, asked.
Responding to Gohir’s accusations, Mughal told FWI “the Government are satisfied with the financial spend on staff, salaries and on Tell MAMA project costs.”
“The rest is an attempt to whip up a storm to damage Tell MAMA because of vested interests to get access to our funding or because some want to defend corrosive Islamist values that should have no part to play in European social life,” Mughal observed.
Baroness Sayeeda Warsi.
(Photo by By Chris McAndrew via Wikimedia)
Earlier on March 11, former Conservative chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi endorsed the government’s decision to pull funding from Tell MAMA noting that “concerns have been raised on a series of issues by parliamentarians from all parties.”
“Too often my regular engagement with a hyper-diverse British Muslim community has shown that large sections simply do not trust or chose TM to report their experiences of anti-Muslim racism and attacks,” Warsi tweeted. “This at a time of rising anti-Muslim hate is unacceptable.”
Warsi has close ties with MEND and has been invited to its events at least seven times since 2015, two of them fundraising dinners, the Jewish Chronicle reported. It noted that “the Baroness seems to have held MEND rather too close for comfort, inviting the conclusion that she is either very confused or that she is at heart more MEND than mainstream.”
