Sunday, October 28, 2012

Anjem Choudary - face of Islam in Britain?

Jim Rohn once said "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with". This unprovoked assault on English grammar contains a concept with which I agree, and if we apply this maxim to Twitter accounts followed by Anjem Choudary's we are left with the impression he is a nobody.

There is little I can do to analyze zero accounts followed. I can, however, examine those 2,186 folk who choose to follow Anjem. Who are they?



First I checked their locations. My efforts were hampered a little by those who chose to describe their location as "Dar-al-Kufr" (land of unbelievers), kuffrland, Londonistan and other spoof locations, but there was enough to give a representative sample and countries Anjem may wish to consider should he wish to further his career abroad are listed to the left.

Those outside the UK fell outside my interest; I was curious only to see if he enjoyed support of many British Muslims. With that I took a closer look at the 57% and noticed something of a trend:
Filtering out Allah and Muslim, then doing a wordcloud of a sample of those remaining revealed quite a few EDL fans. While I must admit a lack of familiarity with all of Anjem's published works I'm of the strong opinion that he and the English Defence League have not collaborated an any projects to date. I feel it safe to say they do not warm to each other, and assume many of these followers are not also fans.

But how to check further?

I fed Anjem's account through another script, and checked to see what his followers also follow. I reproduce for your entertainment most popular 31 accounts amongst those that follow Anjem. I've taken the liberty of highlighting a few I feel Anjem may not endorse. The percentage of his followers that follow each account is listed to its left.

22.22%BBC Breaking News
21.56%Al Jazeera English
19.48%WikiLeaks
16.39%Barack Obama
16.13%Reuters Top News
15.83%Tommy Robinson EDL
15.32%Breaking News
13.55%HSM Press Office
13.55%George Galloway
12.89%Islamic Thoughts
12.73%UK Prime Minister
12.73%EnglishDefenceLeague
12.48%Salman Rushdie
12.33%Piers Morgan
12.33%BBC News (World)
12.13%Joseph Barton
12.08%CNN Breaking News
12.02%Bill Gates
12.02%Robert Spencer
11.62%The Economist
11.42%Lord Sugar
11.42%Dalai Lama
11.16%Wayne Rooney
11.01%yvonneridley
10.81%The New York Times
10.65%Rio Ferdinand
10.40%YouTube
10.40%Ricky Gervais
10.30%Imran Khan
10.25%Frankie Boyle
10.15%Stephen Fry

Filtering out the news websites, it seems the EDL is inordinately popular amongst his followers. Anjem feels gays should be stoned to death, but over 10% of his followers enjoy the work of Stephen Fry.

UK Muslims do not like the chap. His followers are not fans. So why do I keep seeing him on TV as a voice of Islam?

A young Anjem "Andy" Choudary

2 comments:

Sarah AB said...

Hi - you should certainly add Robert Spencer to your list of highlighted names - this is the man behind JihadWatch.

Geoff said...

Ah! Hadn't realised. Thanks for the tip, will tweak this evening.