Thread by @UK_CAGE

When the War on Terror began, @UK_CAGE took issue with the way 'the rules of the game' changed in order to suspect 1.8 billion Muslims globally. Rendition, secret detention, torture were impacting on the lives of tens of thousands of people globally.

[Thread]

Whether it was unlawful detentions or the illegal invasion of Iraq, those on the Left stood alongside Muslims who had become the latest 'suspect community'. The solidarity became an important moment in the face of vilification.

Many of these left-leaning public figures, journalists and academics rejected binary ideas perpetuated around the causes of violence. There were those centrists and right-wing securocrats, who worked with think tanks and policy informing outfits to push a linear narrative.

It took many years before NGOs were able to tell the human stories of those detained, released detainees were able to speak truth of their experiences and serious academics on national security issues were able to push back against the reductive ideas around who suspects were.

The call of @UK_CAGE had been to understand human beings in their contexts, rather than painting entire communities as suspects. It was difficult to discern all motivations of those involved in political violence or militant groups, let alone predict who may turn to such measures

After the Arab Spring, and in particular Bashar al-Assad's brutal crackdown on the protesters in Syria, a portion of the Left, chose to mimic the narrative of those they had been criticising for reductive arguments around ideology and foreign involvement for almost a decade.

With Syria, some on the Left have chosen to paint a secular liberal Syrian population that chooses to side with the regime against 'terrorist' 'extremist' 'al-Qaeda' militants within the revolutionary forces.

Unfortunately this involves refusing to acknowledge voices on the ground from those who are not inside of regime-controlled areas. Their real-world experience of gas attacks, arbitrary detention, torture mass killings is belittled due to wider geo-political affiliations.

This comes as a surprise as those same people previously were happy to help highlight the rendition and torture of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki at the request and with the complicity of the US and Canada.

Perhaps even more bizarrely, those who were once pushing narratives of securitisation and the need for the rules of the game to be changed, now championed the idea that the whole revolutionary forces outside of ISIS could not be considered to be terrorist outfits.

So now instead of a centrist conspiracy of Saudi Arabia funded al-Qaeda networks globally, we have a leftist conspiracy of Qatar funded al-Qaeda networks in Syria. All the while of course, Qatar and Saudi have been complicit in various degrees in the War on Terror.

@UK_CAGE has always pushed for voices from the ground informing our work. In Syria, that means we listen to those who are actually on the front lines of fighting ISIS, but also at the same time trying to evade the bombs of Assad and Russians.

Those on the Left who keep recycling the same narratives that were once and continue to the be the mainstay of groups like @HJS_Org and @Policy_Exchange have betrayed their own values.

As for those who present themselves as supporters of the Syrian revolution, we see you and the role that you have played in establishing and profiting from CVE structures of Islamophobia in the UK and abroad. Your recent support for Syrians does not whitewash that role in any way