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Next month Birmingham in England plays host to the Commonwealth Games to be attended by a good proportion of countries that were once under the British Empire’s colonial occupation and domination. Over many centuries, the Empire slaughtered indigenous people, implemented policies that produced famines that killed millions, subject peoples were pitted against each other in a game of divide and rule, and natural resources were extracted for the benefit of the British imperial metropole. The Games were initially called the ‘British Empire Games’ but with the demise of the British Empire the name changed in accordance with the post-imperial reality to ‘Commonwealth Games’.

Birmingham’s connection with the Empire was predominately and infamously through the dark tools of violence specifically gun manufacturing, which were used on the native peoples of the world in the wake of British enslavement, military intervention and occupation. A neighbouring area to Birmingham, the Black Country, is famous for making chains and other metal products for enslavers and white supremacist Caribbean plantation owners. In today’s post-imperial era, Birmingham markets itself as a diverse, multi-cultural, and an entrepreneurial city with more miles of canals than Venice.     

The day-to-day running of the Birmingham’s canal network falls under the auspices of a charitable organisation, the Canal and River Trust (CRT). The Director of the CRT for the West Midlands region which covers Birmingham is a certain, Mr. Adnan Saif. As it stands today, Mr. Saif will have ultimate local authority over all the canals and rivers while the Commonwealth Games are in full flow. Mr. Saif has a distinctive career background.

Mr. Saif cut his professional teeth in the North Yemeni Islamist network originally centred around a children educational institution, officially and innocuously, called the ‘Scientific Institute’ which was parachuted and astroturfed into Birmingham’s Moseley Road in the Balsall Heath region in the 1980s. The Scientific Institutes had originated in late 1970s North Yemen and ran in parallel with North Yemeni Government schools. North Yemenis either sent their children to a government school or a “Scientific Institute”. It was through the offices of the UK’s North Yemeni Cultural Attaché, politically venal millionaire, anti-immigrant and now Donald Trump-supporting, Mr. Abdulla Al-Shamahi for whom the Birmingham’s Scientific Institute found a new home on the Moseley Road. Al-Shamahi is the father of aspiring British ‘national treasure’ and TV science presenter, Ella Al-Shamahi.

The curriculum of the ‘Scientific Institute’ was devised to make North Yemenis and whoever came into contact with it more than receptive to extreme Islamism. Yemen scholar, Dr Shiela Carapico author of Civil Society in Yemen goes as far as saying that the educational methods eventually utilised at the ‘Scientific Institute’, were first used in Afghanistan “to indoctrinate young men against the Soviets” in the 80s. Also, like in Afghanistan, one of the major functions of the ‘Scientific Institute’ was to help the North Yemeni government in its war against left-wing rebels, known as the National Democratic Front, in the southern regions of North Yemen in the 80’s. As another academic study put it, “they provided a useful bulwark against the rising leftist challenge…” That is they brainwashed children to be fodder against the political left. In Birmingham, the Institute was seen as a supplementary school simply teaching Arabic and the Qur’an for primarily second-generation children. As was the norm in North Yemen, there was no shortage of physical ‘discipline’ that accompanied its supposed teaching methods. Needless to say, not many parents knew the agenda or the political agenda behind this operation but they notably appreciated the fact that their children were being educated and taught in their mother tongue language. 

From Balsall Heath, Birmingham’s “Scientific Institute” eventually migrated to the Bordesley Centre in the 1990s. The Bordesley Centre was originally purchased by a Yemeni philanthropist. By this time, Mr. Saif had become the headteacher of this “Scientific Institute” curriculum. 

In North Yemen, the Scientific Institutes were and are very much associated with the Islamists movement which in the early 1990s branded itself as “Islah” or Reform Party. The Islah is considered to be the Yemeni chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood but with a continued close relationship with Saudi Arabia (or more accurately the tribal clan ruling Saudi Arabia). One of the founding leaders of Islah, Abd al-Majeed al-Zindani was considered by the United Nations to be an associate of former Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden. Not surprising that in today’s Yemen, Islah and Al-Qaeda have fought shoulder to shoulder in the war against the Ansar Allah government. Mr. Saif is not known to have provided an opinion about the war in Yemen but considering his background, one doesn’t need to be an intellectual heavyweight to imagine where his sympathies lay.

More so, after the fall of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan government in 2011 to a NATO backed “revolution”, Mr Saif turned up in eastern Libya shortly afterward to provide training “for emerging leadership of local government in the cities of Benghazi, AlBaidha and Derna.” This area of Libya had always been a notorious breeding ground for Al-Qaeda. During the so-called Libyan regime change it was mainly Al-Qaeda-related groups in these eastern towns in Libya who initially took up arms against Colonel Gaddafi’s rule. An apologist for jihadi head-choppers, Dr. Asim Qureshi writing in 2014 rhetorically asked in light of the successful NATO-jihadi de facto alliance in Libya:

“…within the context of foreign fighters and the risk they represent in terms of blowback, is there any empirical evidence that returning fighters pose a national security threat to the UK?”

In 2017 he got his answer when a returning “fighter” from Libya blew himself up in Manchester Arena taking with him the lives of 22 innocents as they left a music concert. Whether Qureshi was being deliberately mischievous or simply mistaken can lead us to Dr. Hazem Kandil’s finding in his study “Inside the Brotherhood” that according to an account of one ex-Muslim Brotherhood member (in Egypt), the group are compulsive liars. They feel religiously sanctioned to lie. This assertion can be corroborated when Mr. Saif absurdly compares one of Yemen’s recent tyrants, Abdulla al-Ahmar to Nelson Mandela and Ghandi. Al-Ahmar alongside his co-rulers of Yemen, Ali Abdulla Saleh and Ali Mohsen simply impoverished Yemen and had made themselves personally rich. This triumvirate and their cronies in effect looted the country and left the masses of Yemenis with nothing - not even decent mosques besides the mega-mosque Saleh built in the capital Sana’a as a vanity project towards the end of his corrupt reign. Saif has also claimed that certain members of Al-Ahmar’s family died for freedom at the hands of a previous tyranny when in fact they died over a dispute over a financial tribute. Therefore, Saif’s comparison is very misleading, wrong and untrue.

No sooner had NATO assisted Islamists to overthrow Gaddafi, than the West established a “rat line” to funnel Libyan weapons to Syria for a regime change operation. Intermittent warfare between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Syrian government stretches back to the 1970s. In the late 1970s a Syrian army captain and secret Muslim Brotherhood member, Captain Ibrahim Al-Yousuf tricked army cadets to assemble for a meeting in a hall only to massacre 35 cadets who belonged to a minority religious sect. Al-Yousuf was to be remembered for paving the way for this massacre. During the CIA-backed regime change war on Syria in the last decade, Syrian jihadists in Aleppo named a battalion after Captain al-Yousuf. Qureshi became the Research Director for the commendable Cage advocacy organisation whose Outreach Director is Birmingham-based, former Guantanamo Bay inmate Moazzam Begg. The latter has given two different accounts of his time with foreign fighters in Syria during the CIA regime change war. In his defence, Begg has maintained he consulted with British domestic intelligence, MI5 and was given the “green light” when travelling to Syria.  

Recently declassified documents showed that British intelligence was no stranger to promoting Islamist narrative in the Arab world. In the late 1960s, an intelligence unit “created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats [in the war against “Israel”] on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time”. On this basis and the fact that Britain colluded and supported Islamists during the Cold War, one is compelled to ask whether British domestic intelligence gave the green light to the North Ex-Cultural Attaché in Yemen, Mr. Abdulla al-Shamahi to parachute his “Scientific Institute” into Birmingham? The Birmingham Scientific Institute had operated for 10 years and was officially disbanded in the mid-1990s. Many of the individuals involved in this Islamist operation have very much remained in Birmingham. The original building of the Institute is now officially some kind of mosque which had once provided the offices for the campaigning group, Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). The local Director of the MAB is Adnan Saif’s son, Abdulla Saif. An investigation held by the appropriate local or national authorities who gave the ‘green light’ for this Institute to operate and who ultimately financed it, wouldn’t be amiss.  

To be fair, no one knows for certain whether it can be considered a scientific formula that British support for Islamist extremism (when it suits its interests) will also produce a terroristic ‘blowback’. Knowing that the Muslim Brotherhood are not the sincerest of people, no one can guarantee that Birmingham’s “Commonwealth Games” will not also play host to a cruel karmic event that may naturally sail in, unannounced, dredged forth from the depths of a history, unacknowledged and hidden.