Okay hang on a second...

Is this the same Ghulam Trust that was dissolved last year after one of its people brought £10,000 into Pakistan, money which was never accounted for?

Because when I search for 'Ghulam Trust' it's the only result I can find.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charity-inquiry-ghulam-mustafa-trust/ghulam-mustafa-trust https://twitter.com/APPGBritMuslims/status/1252280195874201602

If we assume the two are not connected, first of all it's weird that it's calling itself a Trust when I can't find any other body with that name.

Secondly, look at its Twitter page. Set up last month. All of its posts are coronavirus-related.

Something very strange about this.

So what I'm seeing here is a 'Trust', whose legal existence I can't find any solid evidence of, which appears to have been cobbled together in the last month, given a puff-piece on national TV about how we're coming together over the virus.

Strange.

Also, a small thing but...

What's up with the term "organic community responses"?

That's a really weird phraseology. Why would you need to clarify that a community response is organic?

Okay so I've kept digging here, because I thought there was more to this story. It gets stranger.

When you search for the ITV story on its website, you arrive at this. The page has been mysteriously removed.

You can still find the story on the Internet Archive though. It mentions a family in "Southwell" (sic), west London. Presumably they meant Southall and someone at ITV messed up the transcription.

But now get this. If you search for the name of that woman giving the quote, you don't get very many results.

I did, however, find a LinkedIn page. This was the woman's bio on that page. Make of that what you will.

This is the leaflet that the Trust made. You see that there is branding for two groups: Ghulam and a group called 'Islamic Help'.

When you search for the charity number in the bottom-right, it takes you to Islamic Help, not Ghulam.

If you look through the accounts for Islamic Help, you see the kind of thing that they do. With an income of about £7.9m last year, they seem to more or less exclusively help Muslims in developing countries.

Interestingly, this hasn't stopped Islamic Help from parading the ITV news segment on their website.

They refer to Ghulam as a "partner" of theirs.

My hypothesis here is that some branch of UKGOV hired a PR group like Zinc N*twork to work with Islamic Help to construct a happy 'communitarian' story about how all Ottoman subjects - sorry, British people - are coming together during this terrible crisis.

One of the great challenges of the liberal British state is to convince the general population that its various constituent groups - most notably its Muslims - are part of a common British project within a certain kind of post-Christian moral framework.

This is made very challenging indeed because most Muslim 'charities' simply don't care about the wellbeing of non-Muslims; they care about helping the Ummah. They would rather help 'Gaza' than the white atheist heroin addict living down the road.

This is why the powers that be absolutely cream themselves over the Ahmadis, a tiny group of Muslims with a recognisably Christian morality. From an optics perspective, they are perfect. Many of the 'real' stories you see about Muslim charities helping non-Muslims are those guys.

But this story also demonstrates the challenges facing the liberal state. Assuming my hypothesis is broadly correct, this little operation is aimed at Boomers sitting and watching linear TV. The name of the Trust quickly comes and goes. It's a dazzle for people on their sofas.

This is harder to do online, with events and news stories detached from simple linear TV. As I just showed, it's easy to search for these things. Getting ITV to remove news articles etc. is messy. It's a cliche but the internet does make these narratives harder to control. // END