David Cameron, Zac Goldsmith and Andrew Neil Owe Suliman Gani An Apology for Calling Him “Repellent” and an IS Supporter

What a disgrace the Tories are. With Zac Goldsmith consistently trailing Sadiq Khan in the polls, prior to the election of London’s Mayor on May 5, campaign managers — including PR guru Lynton Crosby, who specialises only in the kind of black propaganda that has dragged politics into the gutter for the last six years — decided to play the race card, accusing Khan, a Muslim, of sharing platforms with Muslim extremists, and singling out, for particular attention, Suliman Gani, a teacher and broadcaster, and formerly the imam of Tooting Islamic Centre.

This was an odd choice, as anyone who knows Suliman Gani can confirm, because he is no extremist, but, rather, a community leader who tries to build bridges between communities, and a tireless advocate for human rights. I have known him for many years through my work on Guantánamo and the campaign to free Shaker Aamer, and have always found him to be thoroughly decent. Although he is socially conservative, and opposed to gay marriage, which is not a position I take, it is one that many Tories do, but I have no reason to suspect that he views women as “subservient,” as alleged, or, crucially, to believe that he is at all supportive of terrorism.

So it came as a real shock when, last Thursday, speaking of individuals Sadiq Khan has shared a platform with, Zac Goldsmith said, “To share a platform nine times with Suliman Gani, one of the most repellent figures in this country, you don’t do it by accident.”

Suliman Gani was shocked. Everyone who knew him was shocked. One might expect the violence-seeking provocateur Anjem Choudary to merit a description as “one of the most repellent figures in this country” by a white political candidate playing the race card, but not Suliman Gani.

And oh, the humiliation when Gani posted a photo of Zac Goldsmith standing with him, taken at an event last November encouraging Muslims to stand for election as Tory councillors, which was organised by Dan Watkins, the Conservative Parliamentary Spokesman for Tooting, who had stood against Sadiq Khan (and lost) at last year’s General Election. Gani has also appeared with other prominent Tories, including Jane Ellison, Tania Mathias, David Davis and Andrew Mitchell during human rights campaigns.

Goldsmith was also caught out trying to accuse Sadiq Khan of supporting Tooting resident Babar Ahmad, who was extradited to the US on terrorism charges (and is now back home in the UK). As Dave Hill described it in the Guardian:

He accused Khan of poor judgment by campaigning on Ahmad’s behalf and said he had “never heard of Ahmad until quite recently.” But within hours, video footage from 2012 emerged of Goldsmith telling anti-extradition campaigners that Ahmad’s case had “caught people’s imagination” and that he’d “been bombarded with letters” about it.

And then, on Monday, Andrew Neil stepped into the fray, nakedly showing political bias at a televised Mayoral debate by targeting Khan for sharing a platform with Gani, who, he said, supported IS, a claim that he fervently denies.

Gani immediately took legal advice, and as the media took an interest I liaised with him and LBC’s Theo Usherwood, and accompanied him to LBC’s studios for an interview at which he sought an apology from Zac Goldsmith, and, to amplify the Tories’ discomfort, revealed that he had actually backed the Tory candidate Dan Watkins against Sadiq Khan in the General Election last May and “even supplied canvassers for his campaign,” as the Guardian described it, reporting that he also “said he felt he had been used by the Conservatives ‘as a scapegoat to discredit Sadiq Khan.'” On April 14, Gani had also tweeted this photo of himself with Watkins.

In the interview, which aired yesterday, Gani also “said he spoke to Goldsmith, who by that time had become the Tory mayoral candidate, outside the meeting, shook his hand and requested a meeting with him to discuss giving further help.” According to Gani, “Goldsmith was very polite and said it was: ‘No problem, and I should send him an email.'”

Before the interview aired, however, David Cameron got involved, repeating the claim that Suliman Gani supported IS during Prime Minister’s Question Time, to boos from the Labour benches, I’m glad to note, and denunciations from senior figures in the Labour Party. A spokesperson for Jeremy Corbyn said, “I think it demeans the office of the Prime Minister to repeat some of those allegations. Sadiq has been very strong on issues around terrorism.” Shadow Justice Minister Andy Slaughter stated, “Cameron sinks into the gutter in a desperate bid to prop up his failing candidate. Demeans his office. Shame on him.”

In response to the attacks, Gani tweeted, “PM David Cameron accused me of being an extremist and that I support IS! He did so during PMQT in the commons and therefore cannot be sued.” In a second tweet, he wrote, “I hope the Prime Minister will reflect and retract his comments. This is defamation at its highest level.”

As Dave Hill noted for the Guardian, “Gani also told Usherwood that his alleged support for Islamic State was based on a misconstrued remark made by someone else at a meeting where the ‘historical context’ of IS’s emergence was discussed.”

He added that it was “not clear if the meeting in question” was the one advertised in the poster for a discussion in January, “The Evils of Isis,” which I’ve also posted here. As he noted, however, “The title of the Mitcham event [is] of interest in view of the prime minister’s Commons allegation about Gani.” Perhaps the best way of looking at the way the Tories have mischaracterised Gani’s views is to understand that, although he is in favour of the establishment of an Islamic State, he is appalled by the brutality of Daesh, whose violence he regards as un-Islamic.

As Hill also noted, “Gani said he had ‘never promoted terrorism or violence,’ and went on to say that he had fallen out with Khan over the MP’s support for same sex marriage.”

In response to the PMQ debacle, Sadiq Khan said, “The Tories are running a nasty, dog-whistling campaign that is designed to divide London’s communities. I’m disappointed that the Prime Minister has today joined in.”

That certainly seems to be true, and while I hope the Tories pay at the polls for their dirty campaigning, I do also think that Suliman Gani deserves an apology from David Cameron, Zac Goldsmith and Andrew Neil. The Muslim community, and those who know him, have rallied around him, but damage has been done to his reputation that is completely underserved, and he seems, above all, to be collateral damage to the Tories in a disgraceful effort to swing some old white racists their way in the last weeks of the Mayoral campaign. Ironically, however, they seem instead to have alienated considerably more Muslim voters, many of whom were planning to vote for Zac Goldsmith until they saw the Tories in their true colours.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).

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