by David Shipley, The Daily Sceptic
To live in England in 2025 is to live in a strange land, where the headlines read like the most lurid, unbelievable, low-status conspiracy theories of a decade ago. The largest and most regime-threatening example of this is, of course, the scandal of the Pakistani rape gangs and the decades-long complicity of the British regime in their horrific crimes. But every day it seems as though there’s a new story which reveals that the country is even more rotten than we feared.
This is how I read the Times’s story last week about the “Civil Service Muslim Network“. In Zoom meetings attended by hundreds of (seemingly primarily Muslim) civil servants, the group’s leader, a Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) employee named Sami Rahman, made many remarks which seem obviously antisemitic, such as describing Israel as Shaitan (Arabic for ‘the Devil’). He also openly encouraged Muslim Network members to influence and even oppose government policy, saying: “Whether it’s Islamophobia or anti-Muslim hatred, whether it’s Palestine, or OPT [occupied Palestinian territories], whether it’s any other thing… it’s a time for both setting agendas, but resisting them as well.” He added that “working in central government, we do have responsibility to be that voice and to have conviction”.
This story was first reported by the Times last year after it received a memo of the meetings. The civil service then suspended Sami Rahman and conducted an internal investigation. Rahman was represented by the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) Union, and was exonerated because, according to Mohammed Shafiq, Chair of the union’s national black members’ committee, “the Times had a transcript that was handed to them but no recording. And people at that meeting disputed the transcript”.
But now the Times has obtained full video recordings of the meetings and has published excerpts confirming its earlier reporting, and Rahman has been suspended again.