In a normal world, the atrocities perpetrated during the October 7 massacre would put Muslim-affiliated human rights organizations in the West on their back feet. The murder, rape, and kidnapping of more than 1,200 Israeli civilians would be a source of shame for the leaders of genuine human rights organizations intent on protecting the welfare of Muslims living in Western democracies.
We unconditionally condemn the settler colonial and apartheid Zionist regime.
A spokesperson for CAGE International, a “human rights” organization in the UK
To the contrary, Islamist organizations in the United Kingdom have ridden extremist support for Hamas’s atrocities like a wave to generate publicity for their cause. Groups such as the Islamic Human Rights Commission and the Muslim Association of Britain have taken to the streets to offer an intimidating pro-Hamas message to the general public.
Another group, CAGE, an Islamist advocacy group that campaigns to delegitimize Western self-defense against Islamist extremism, has used October 7 as an opportunity to adopt a new name (“CAGE International”) and promote itself as a global champion of human rights and social justice. Despite its stated commitment to human rights, the organization has offered no criticism of the October 7 massacre and changed the subject when queried by Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) about the attack.
“We unconditionally condemn the settler colonial and apartheid Zionist regime,” a CAGE spokesperson wrote. “In the face of unrelenting ethnic cleansing for 75 years, a live-streamed genocide before our eyes, routine genocidal remarks by Israeli political and military leadership – in the face of all this, every Palestinian has the right to resist.”
The spokesperson added that “The struggle of the Palestinian people is a constant source of inspiration for us.”
Since its founding in 2003 as “CAGEprisoners” to advocate for prisoners detained by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay after September 11, CAGE has advocated principally for male terror suspects, convicted terrorists, and Islamist ideologues.
CAGE defended Palestinian cleric Abu Qatada, the chief ideologue of Al Qaeda, in his fight against deportation from England, which began in 2005. The Guardian reported that in 1999 he “effectively issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of Jews, including Jewish children” and told his congregation that “Americans should be attacked, wherever they were.” In 1995, Qatada had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, justifying the killing of converts from Islam in Algeria, and their wives and children. Qatada was deported to Jordan in 2013.
CAGE also campaigned for the release of the late Yemeni-American Al Qaeda recruiter Anwar Al Awlaki from a Yemeni prison in 2007. Awlaki was linked to terror plots across the US and Europe, including six in the UK. CAGE continues to publish an interview with Al Awlaki in which he endorses CAGE, and an apologia on its website for the American terror recruiter.
And in 2015, CAGE Director Asim Qureshi called ISIS executioner “Jihadi John,” aka British Kuwaiti Mohammed Emwazi, a “beautiful young man” who was partly radicalized by MI5. Emwazi allegedly beheaded American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. His other victims allegedly include British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning and Japanese journalists Haruna Yukawa and Kenji Goto.
CAGE has campaigned for a repeal of all UK counterterror laws instituted since 2000, depicted the Prevent counter-terrorism policy as state-sponsored “Islamophobia,” and described Muslims who work with counter-extremism officials as “native informants,” and “Uncle Toms.”
More recently, CAGE has produced two reports since December that claim to document the “repression” of Palestine solidarity in schools, workplaces, and in the street across the UK and Europe, “in a full spectrum attack … coordinated by right-wing interests, mainstream media, politicians and lobby groups” which has seen its advocacy case work increase 455 percent since October 2023.
CAGE claims that Muslims are being universally oppressed while hundreds of thousands of protesters have freely attended anti-Israel demonstrations every weekend in the UK since the October 7 massacre. English police have arrested or cautioned a few hundred protesters on a range of public order offenses, including antisemitic hate crimes and suspicion of supporting Hamas, a proscribed terror group in the UK, or inciting terrorism. To further its narrative of Muslims being oppressed, CAGE has condemned the recent ban on Hizb Ut-Tahrir, which has promoted jihad, declaring the decision to be “a danger to all who dissent and not just those who oppose the Israeli genocide.”
Steven Greer, research director at the Oxford Institute for British Islam and author of Tackling Terrorism in Britain: Threats, Responses, and Challenges Twenty Years After 9/11, said the goal of CAGE and other groups like it is to prove that the West in general, and Britain in particular, are “hostile to Islam, hostile to Muslims, hostile to Palestinians, hostile to the whole Islamic experience, to global Islam,” he added. “To sustain that narrative requires a great deal of effort and finance. But it’s a distortion.”
Hannah Baldock is a UK-based researcher on radicalization and terrorism.