The attack on Cage is part of the more general assault on politically active Muslims and an attempt to push Muslim organisations to the margins of public life. Cage is not the only group to have had its banks accounts, those of its staff and – let it be emphasised – their children, closed.
Not being a charity, it is not even one of the 55 Muslim charities that are currently being attacked (or 'investigated' as they would have it) by the Charity Commission. The Commission, headed by the neoconservative ideologue Lord Shawcross, has put 'intense regulatory pressure' on charities that have funded Cage to publically declare they will never do so again.
In addition, Amnesty and others have been pressurised to draw a cordon sanitaire between Cage and themselves. This plainly amounts to a campaign to bully and censor people into dissociating themselves from Cage and has had a significant impact on its ability to undertake its human rights work. [openDemocracy] Read more
