Truth To Power

What a disappointment. I have been waiting all day for someone to claim that Dolly Parton had been a man, or that Carl Dean had been a woman, or both. Yet not a sausage, so to speak. The potential sausagemongers have instead been busy branding J.K. Rowling a Holocaust denier. She should sue them to Kingdom Come. But not before she had apologised unreservedly to Jeremy Corbyn.

A handful of crossdressers were persecuted by the Nazis, or just prosecuted in the normal manner, for being Jews, homosexuals, political dissidents, or prostitutes. Many survived the War by several decades, as did Dora Richter. Speaking of the Sexology Institute, it was one of numerous institutions raided on 6 May 1933, and Magnus Hirschfeld’s books, doubtless containing his contention that lesbians produced sperm, were burned four days later among 20,000 in Berlin, with at least 5000 more throughout the country. In Hirschfeld’s case as in so many others, that was primarily because he was Jewish. But he was also a prominent eugenicist, while the surgeon who under his aegis performed the first “sex changes”, Erwin Gohrbrandt, also sterilised the disabled, and oversaw the deadly freezing experiments at Dachau.

None of that has gone away, including in Britain. After all, last July it was felt necessary to proscribe both the Russian Imperial Movement and the Maniacs Murder Cult, with the latter not meaning, as one might have assumed, the infamous fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, who on 16 January went on to stage one of their trademark racist riots in Birmingham, a city from which they had clearly not been banned. Regrettable though the use of Artificial Intelligence might have been, that more than vindicated the ban on them from Villa Park alone, for one night only. But having hounded Craig Guildford from his job, that Maniacs Murder Cult is determined to hound him to his grave.

And what of the other Maniacs Murder Cult? What of the Russian Imperial Movement? Will Donald Trump be banning them in the United States along with the organisation with which they were proscribed, Palestine Action? Trump will cite its proscription and prosecution in its native Britain; indeed, barring British citizens from the United States is his only possible reason. If you support that proscription or those prosecutions, then you are siding with Trump. That puts you in the same category as the Labour Party, which is the only British party with a member on the so-called Board of Peace. Against that background, Mehdi Hasan addresses Louise Haigh:

Dear Louise,

Do you remember when you spoke truth to power?

I do.

It was June 2025, in a foreign policy debate in the House of Commons. You were a backbencher who was willing to use a term that most of your Labour colleagues at the time – including, shamefully, many on your own front bench – were still too afraid to say out loud. “It is impossible to conclude that this is anything less than a genocide,” you declared. You even called for the Labour government of Sir Keir Starmer to impose immediate “sanctions” on Benjamin Netanyahu and his “genocidal regime”.

You were on the right side of history then. More than a year later, you now have an even bigger opportunity to still be on the right side of history.

More than 70,000 Palestinians have now been killed by Israel in Gaza – around 14,000 of them since you delivered your remarks in the Commons. Just a few weeks after your speech, Israeli forces bombed the Al-Baqa seaside café in Gaza City, killing more than 30 Palestinians, many of them women and children. Two months after your comments, Israel attacked the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis with a double-tap strike, killing more than 20 Palestinians, including five journalists. And, since the so-called “ceasefire” in October 2025, an average of one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel in Gaza every single day, according to UNICEF.

More than a year since you spoke out, the G-word that you employed so provocatively and powerfully from the backbenches has now become the consensus of leading scholars and human rights groups around the world.

But, Louise, I have to ask: now that you are a cabinet minister – now that you sit at the table where executive decisions are actually made, as first secretary of state and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, as “the most powerful woman in Britain” – what are you going to do about it?

Because there is something you need to know about the word you used in June 2025. Genocide is not merely a political or moral judgement. You cannot deploy it only as a rhetorical flourish. It is a legal term with legal consequences. Under Article I of the Genocide Convention – which the United Kingdom acceded to back in 1970 – “contracting parties” have a duty “to prevent and to punish” genocide. It’s not a suggestion. It’s not optional. It’s a “binding duty” per the UN, imposed on every state party, including the UK.

The International Court of Justice confirmed in its landmark Bosnia v. Serbia case that genocide imposes a positive obligation on state parties, a “duty to act”. And yet here is the depressing truth, Louise: your government is currently doing almost nothing to discharge that duty.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has said Gaza is a “scar on our collective conscience”. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has condemned the “dire humanitarian situation”. One government source told my Zeteo UK colleague Shehab Khan that the Israeli government’s genocidal rhetoric is “abhorrent”. But the Genocide Convention requires more than official statements. Stern words cannot “prevent” and “punish” the perpetrators of an ongoing campaign of extermination.

And here’s the worst part: you actually know what the alternative looks like, Louise, because you called for it. When you were on the backbenches, unbound by collective responsibility and able to follow your conscience and speak truth to power, you rightly demanded immediate sanctions on both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his “genocidal regime”. Now that you are in the cabinet, I am sure some will insist you hold your tongue. They will ask you to be responsible, be moderate, be measured. But how is it responsible to do nothing as a genocide unfolds, a genocide you yourself publicly recognised? How is it moderate to be one of the most senior members of a government that continues to sell arms to a “genocidal regime”? How is it measured to choose career over conscience?

You could choose a different path, however: a more principled and consistent way forward. You could be the minister who pushes to suspend arms sales to Israel, and points out to her colleagues the clear legal risk in continuing to send British weapons to Tel Aviv. You could be the minister who uses her seat at the cabinet table to press for the UK to use all of the levers at its disposal – sanctions, travel bans, asset freezes – to force Israel to end its genocidal campaign in Gaza.

You could be that minister, Louise. The alternative is to be the minister who, upon entering the cabinet as one of the most influential and senior figures in the Burnham government, decided that genocide was no longer a word you were willing to use.

To be clear: I write this not to berate or belittle you, but to hold you to a standard you set for yourself. The truth is that you were bold and outspoken when it was easy to be bold and outspoken – when it cost you nothing, when you were a largely powerless backbencher. So the question now is whether you will be bold and outspoken when it is hard, difficult, costly; when it means disagreeing with the political and media establishment in this country and perhaps even your own prime minister, too.

Because that, Louise, is what “preventing genocide” actually demands. Not words, or thoughts, or prayers.

Action.

The world is watching. History is watching. And the people of Gaza – at least, those who survive this genocide – will remember what you did with all of this new power you now wield.

Yours, in hope,

Mehdi

Skwawkbox reminds us that, though rare, the right thing is possible:

Saeed Kamali Deghani’s 2010 Guardian article about a woman executed in Iran played a significant role in setting the anti-Iran narrative of the following years. Titled “Iranian facing stoning speaks: ‘It’s because I’m a woman'”, Deghani’s “exclusive interview” relayed Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s accusation that the Iranian court was lying about charges of adultery and murder. The article said that the charges were made up.

But in fact, it was Deghani’s article that was made up. Completely. And now — he says in the hope of forgiveness from God — he has admitted it:

Mina Ahadi is a communist Iranian exile who serves on the committee of Atheist Alliance International. She presumably has little reason to want to help the image of Iran’s Islamic Republic. But she has posted a screenshot of Deghani’s confession. In the accompanying caption, she says that Deghani had already confessed to her in 2010 — and that he had begged her not to expose him in case he was sacked and sent back to Iran.

And she shows little sympathy, advising him to calm down now that he is “in the arms of the executioners”:

You pleaded and begged so desperately that I would not tell your superiors at The Guardian that the interview with Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani was fabricated and a lie. You were terrified that you would be deported and that the executioners’ regime would execute you.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan was a journalist who, unfortunately, had learned the art of lying and fraud from some journalists who suddenly move from Fars, Tasnim, IRIB, Etemad, Hamshahri, and similar outlets to supposedly reputable international media or Iran International, and then begin reporting for them.

He has now returned to Iran, and presumably, after being debriefed and having his information extracted, he is helping the regime and conducting smear campaigns against the people.

A few days ago, he announced that the interview with Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani published in The Guardian—in which he claimed to have been in contact with Sakineh while she was in prison—was a lie. Meanwhile, the regime’s thugs and hooligans are now shouting that the reports about Sakineh’s stoning sentence were completely false and that stoning was not at all common in Iran.

My response to this man who fled London and has now joined the Islamic regime is this:

Sir, on the very day The Guardian published the interview, I called you and asked why you were writing lies. No one except me was in contact with Sajjad, Sakineh’s son. That was precisely why journalists from all over the world, including you, contacted them through us.

And you told me that if I reported this to The Guardian, you might be fired, deported, and executed.

You yourself told me in detail how you had secretly made a film about Neda Agha-Soltan, and you described the details of your escape from Iran. You said, with fear and terror, that if you were deported, you would be executed. That is why I neither told The Guardian nor made the matter public.

Now that you are in the arms of the executioners and bloodshed perpetrators, it would be better for you to calm down and stop struggling to justify yourself any further, because you are only making yourself complicit in some of their crimes.

The Guardian has not deleted its article. The UK government -—and its media allies — continue to support the illegal and murderous US-Israel war on Iran, even as Iran’s defence threatens to plunge the globe into economic ruin and Trump escalates sanctions and threatens nuclear strikes because he is unable to defeat it. 

UK ‘mainstream’ media are not neutral and should not be trusted unless their claims can be independently verified.

But there are still some good ones, such as Martin Jay:

The Americans have their man for the Lockerbie bombing and are close now to a trial which in any democracy wouldn’t be allowed to happen due to the legal irregularities and malfeasance. But before we ask ourselves whether even the U.S. is a real democracy – or one that has all the auspices of one without the heart – we should never forget the farce of the original trial which found two Libyan spooks guilty of making and planting the bomb on Pan Am 103, with barely a grain of solid evidence to even link them to the crime. A travesty of justice on an epic scale was the theme established in the Netherlands at Camp Zeist, and we can hardly blame the Americans for continuing the theme with remarkable fortitude, impervious to any ignominy which exposes their first efforts as perfidious evidence-tampering and witness intimidation on a grand scale.

The madness continues at an even greater pace, though.

Soon, a Libyan suspect called Abu Agila Mohammad Masud will stand trial, accused by the Americans of being the bomb-maker. Yet the details around his arrest and interview (read: ‘torture’) are louche at best, and most insiders believe he is a patsy. In recent months, U.S. investigators have unearthed impressive amounts of documents, data, testimonies and even the accused Masud himself – building their case that ‘The Libyans did it’ – but none of it really stands up to assiduous scrutiny, legal or otherwise. Even a U.S. judge recently commented that the prosecutor’s case risked going to appeal in the event of Masud being found guilty, as most of the evidence hadn’t been ‘legalised’ by a number of countries’ authorities around the world. “Proceed at your peril,” the judge recently warned the prosecutor. One has to wonder: if U.S. prosecutors cannot even perform such a remedial task as getting stamps from the various judicial authorities, then how convincing can their case be in the first place – and who is behind the initiative?

The Lockerbie case breaks all the records for precedents. Within the borders of the UK, it is the greatest terror act there has been – but also the greatest cover-up by the British and Scottish governments, particularly the latter. We should not judge the investigations, though, by what they have uncovered – or covered up – but more by their omission to look at key facts, interview star witnesses, and not be distracted by political agendas. The two camps, which offer only the binary options of, on the one side Gaddafi, and on the other a Palestinian group who were experts in bringing down planes, is juvenile and not at all serious. There are nuances there which need to be unpacked, and if investigators are unable or unwilling to examine them, then we can only conclude that a massive miscarriage of justice is still being carried out today.

It is perhaps also an oversimplification to imagine that state actors could have played a role in the bombing of Pan Am 103 while operating on their own initiative. The camp which concludes the PFLP-GC were culpable – led by Dr Jim Swire – perhaps don’t go far enough in their own investigation before drawing conclusions that this group carried it out. Even the Saudi press just in recent days pointed the finger at its chief bomb-maker Marwan Khreesat as being the likeliest candidate, but still miss the point entirely. Regardless of whether you are in the Gaddafi camp or the PFLP one, everyone seems to be missing the bigger story and failing to look for bigger pieces of the jigsaw. The thought process seems to be that if we can nail the bomber, then we will work out who commissioned him. And so in the meantime, any investigation into who was the architect of Lockerbie will always be overlooked. This perverse dichotomy of logic is what has made the case unsolvable for nearly 40 years – which suits a number of Western governments who knew about Pan Am 103 beforehand and remained silent.

And yet there is evidence out there in the domain of intelligence circles which confirm that Khreesat was indeed the bomb-maker, but he was not working for the PFLP – he had gone freelance. While it is hard to imagine that the CIA allowed the bomb on board so as to kill three rogue officers who were on the flight, hell-bent on blowing the whistle when they got back to the U.S. about the program which effectively helped Shia groups in Lebanon become drug-runners – it is likely to be true. But what is much harder to imagine is that it was CIA officers themselves who had been planning to bring down a U.S. plane in Scotland for at least two years, with the express purpose of cranking up the pressure on President Reagan to bomb Libya and overthrow Gaddafi. Framing the Libyan leader so as to muster an enormous outcry in the U.S. was the plot, when two CIA officers met Safia Gaddafi’s wife – the financier of the plot – in a south London mosque in June 1987 to hammer out a strategy. For obvious legal reasons, I cannot publish their names, but it has been confirmed to me by a British agent who was there on other business that Khreesat was the bomb-maker. Gaddafi’s ex-wife wanted badly to seek revenge for her divorce and losing a child, according to the MI6 agent, who listened to the whole meeting and was shocked by what they were hearing.

Yet none of this is being examined or verified. The MI6 officer in question has presented themselves to the U.S. prosecutor and was only too aware that in 1988 one of the many weekly ‘controlled flights’ from Lebanon en route to the U.S. had drugs on board, but were an easy way of not simply getting a bomb on board, but were ripe for being used to deflect blame towards Gaddafi – and so the two accused at Camp Zeist were used by Gaddafi’s wife as stooges for the bombing. Among a coterie of DEA, CIA and MI6 officers in Lebanon at that time, all knew of the CIA plot and all knew it was only a matter of time before a Pan Am flight came down over Scotland. It was simply a question of timing before all of the elements lined up – and the three renegade officers on board completed the last piece of the puzzle.

The Libyans had to fake the evidence, though, which was essential for Safia Gaddafi to agree to finance the whole thing – and by Christmas 1988 everything was in place.

It was critical that the two Libyans accused – one being somewhat of an expert with explosives – were framed, and so they were set to task to set up the Malta link which was crucial for the FBI and CIA – and now for the prosecutor in the Masud case. Perhaps they knew they were being set up, and in the case of Meghrahi, sent someone else to go to “Mary’s shop” to buy the clothes. There are still many questions left wide open, but a rogue CIA operation which involved killing U.S. citizens would certainly explain the extraordinary lengths the Americans are going to presently to cover up what really happened to Pan Am 103. But who was the poor soul tricked into carrying the bomb onto the plane in his luggage? Not the young Lebanese man Khaled Nazir Jafaar, who was already working for the DEA drug-running program and thought that his cassette recorder – or at least his suitcase – was packed full of heroin, making him nervous when he stood in line to check in at Frankfurt’s Pan Am desk. The real ‘bomber’ whom the CIA used was probably a white, powerful key figure of international politics who was happy to take his own life. Lockerbie is a movie which can’t be made, as Hollywood producers would argue that no one would believe the real story – and Americans certainly aren’t ready to find out the truth, a point that Erik Kenerson, the U.S. prosecutor of the Masud case, is probably banking on.

Ponder that as you read Imran Mulla here:

Key claims made by Jason Arday, who was the subject of a relentless media campaign over many aspects of his work and life and who was found dead on Friday, appear to be true, a Middle East Eye analysis has found. These include the Cambridge University professor's claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days for charity and that he played semi-professional football, which both became central talking points in recent attacks on the late academic. Certain other claims the sociologist made, which were widely denounced as false, have not been proven untrue, or appear more complex than some media discourse has suggested. 

Arday, 42, was found dead in south London last Friday. Earlier this month he had resigned from his role as a professorial chair at the University of Cambridge, and from Jesus College Cambridge, where he was a fellow. Cambridge announced an independent investigation into Arday's appointment on 6 August following plagiarism allegations. Extensive media coverage, which continued after Arday resigned, highlighted allegations - often presented as facts - that the academic had fabricated large parts of his life story.

Particularly mocked was Arday's claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. But Arday does in fact appear to have completed the challenge. On 16 June 2010 the Richmond and Twickenham Times, a London newspaper, reported that Arday, an "energetic lecturer", was set to "push his body to the limit by running the London Marathon route every day for 15 days followed by a run from Piccadilly to Teddington and back again for the second part of the challenge." He was raising money for two charities, Shooting Star Children's Hospice and homeless charity Shelter.

Arday, then aged 24, was quoted saying: "My mum took me to a homeless shelter when I was 17 and I was surprised to see people my age struggling for something as fundamental as a roof over their head, something I took for granted. I felt I needed to do something to help people in this situation by supporting Shelter’s work with homeless and badly housed families." At the time, the article said, Arday was studying for a master's degree in physical education. "I've been training for a few months now and I feel confident that I will complete all the marathons within reasonable times, but I’m under no illusion, it’s going to be tough."

The news outlet My London ran a story saying Arday, a "Richmond College teacher" aged 24, was "taking on the challenge of a lifetime by attempting to complete 30 marathons in 35 days between 19 July and 22 August." The article said: "Jason has been training since November and follows a gruelling schedule, running seven miles from 4am to 6am and another seven miles between 10pm and midnight. In between, he teaches at the college." On 20 July 2010, a Richmond and Twickenham Times article reported that Arday had completed his first marathon. "Jason Arday set off from Clapham at 6am yesterday to run the 26-mile course, which took in the sights of central London and Teddington, before finishing in Putney," it said, and published a photo of Arday running. A Your Local Guardian story on 13 August then reported that the "end is in sight for an energetic lecturer who has nearly reached his target of running 30 marathons in 35 days."

'Tremendously inspiring'

Shooting Star's director of fundraising and marketing, Kim Darton, cycled alongside Arday on his 24th marathon, which was done in the early morning. He was quoted saying: "I stayed with Jason throughout and we shared life stories through the night. I am stunned by this splendid man, and found my moments with him tremendously inspiring." On 25 August, according to the Richmond and Twickenham Times, Arday completed his marathon "after enduring daily ice baths and a hairline fracture to his leg". Arday's claim that he finished his challenge despite having suffered a hairline fracture to his leg would be widely mocked in the press in the last weeks of his life. Some outlets characterised the injury as a "broken leg", which is different from what Arday was claiming.

The article by the Richmond and Twickenham Times quoted Arday as saying: "In the final two miles of the final marathon, there were 50 people alongside me. It was surreal, running through the centre of London - cars were stopping for me, people were cheering." Karen Peffer, Shooting Star's challenge events fundraiser, said: "It is a real privilege to have someone so unique and inspirational fundraising for our charity."

After his death, Sarah Carney, an old friend of Arday's, told the Socialist Worker: "By the time I knew him, he’d already raised loads of money for charity. He organised lots of events. In 2010, I was with Jason on the last of the 30 marathons he ran in 35 days," she recalled. "Lots of people participated because he did the same route every day. A lot of the other students would meet up with him and run some of the way with him. "A whole bunch of us ran with him for the second half of his last marathon. We all ended up in Sloane Square, in Chelsea. I’ve got photographs of him with the various T-shirts he wore, emblazoned with the charities he’d been raising money for. I can only vouch for the things that I know to be true. And these runs were true. He wasn’t an ordinary person. He was extraordinary."

Playing semi-professional football

Another claim derided online in the past few weeks was that Arday played semi-professional football. In fact he played for two semi-professional clubs, Walton and Hersham FC and Lewisham Borough FC. He was listed as a goalkeeper in Lewisham Borough FC's first team, MEE has found, and was referenced in a report on a match in October 2018. The writer Nels Abbey posted a video on X last week showing Arday singing in a changing room surrounded by other players. Arday claimed on a podcast that he played as an under-18 for Crystal Palace, but the club said it did not have records dating back to the 1990s and early 2000s, the years when he would have done so.

Local media also reported in 2011 that Arday planned to run 300 miles in three days on a treadmill to fundraise for homelessness charity Shelter. "He will attempt the challenge at Fitness First in Clapham Junction on August 10 and 12 - and on August 11 will be at Latchmere Leisure Centre in Battersea. He aims to be on the treadmill from 6am to 10pm every day," Your Local Guardian said. Arday claimed to have raised more than £5m ($6.8m) for charity, which has also been ridiculed. Yet he often described this in collective terms, rather than suggesting he alone raised the sum. He told The Guardian shortly before his death this month that the money had been raised through "many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period". Byline Times found this week that the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with had a combined gross income of more than £1.4bn to £1.5bn, suggesting his claim of £5m in collective fundraising is plausible.

Arday was also accused of falsely claiming to write a book. It was reported this month that biographies of him online said he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse. But although the book has not been published, it does have a publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, and has been described as being a forthcoming title. Other claims Arday made about his life have been questioned, including - perhaps most significantly - that he could not speak until he was 11 years old, besides "bits of words and... various noises out of context". Some former schoolmates said he made jokes and entertained other pupils. But other former schoolmates recalled Arday "not speaking and being regularly removed from class for additional support". Caroline Russell-Clark, a mother of one of the schoolmates, said she remembered Arday having "serious learning difficulties", and that "I do not remember him speaking until he was playing in the same football team as my son aged 14-15." 

Plagiarism allegations

Although questions still surround some of Arday's public claims, which were not true or in some cases changed over time, it appears the impression created in much press coverage and online commentary that the academic invented enormous parts of his backstory is wrong. The root of the scandal surrounding Arday, however, concerned allegations of plagiarism. These stemmed from accusations by the academic Dr Nathan Cofnas, published on Substack, about Arday's PhD thesis. Cofnas is a proponent of "racial realism" and wrote in February 2024 that without affirmative action, "blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment".

Arday completed his PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015, which investigated it over plagiarism claims earlier this year. The university concluded in March that the citation issues in the thesis were the result of "honest and reasonable error", and that textual overlap with other work was "well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time". It said Arday's supervisory team had been "depleted" and that he had received only one formal supervision during the PhD. MEE has examined Arday's thesis, entitled "An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research." 

Most of the citation issues investigated by the university in a section on literature review involved textual overlap and similarities with work by academic Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Notably, Arday extensively cited Zwozdiak-Myers in other sections of the thesis, and seemed to acknowledge that he drew heavily on her work: "findings were situated within categories and dimensions of mentoring and reflective practice, which helped to navigate and facilitate the purpose of the study. Ideas for this were generated from the work of Pollard (2011) and Zwozdiak-Myers (2012), with regards to their conceptions of reflective practice." 

However, in the past two months Arday has been accused of further plagiarism, which he denied. These allegations included that he had reproduced quotes from interviews conducted by other academics and that quotes from his interviews were repeated in different papers. Responding to some of these accusations in an interview with The Times last month, Arday said: "At the stage I’m at now, if I write something, I can afford a proofreader... You’ll see there’s a very big difference between the work I wrote post-2021 and the work I’ve written up until now. "My writing is a lot better, purely because I can afford a proofreader to read through everything I’ve done and sharpen up the language." Numerous academics called for an investigation into his work earlier this month.

Tributes paid to Arday

At a vigil in Trafalgar Square on Monday, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy told a crowd of around 30,000 mourners: "I’m going to look around you and look at how many people have come tonight. That tells you what Jason meant. He held doors open behind him. He kept them open and thousands of us walked through. That is why this place is full tonight." 

Dr Rebecca Syed Sheriff, an academic at Oxford who worked with Arday, described him after his death as "kind, wise, warm, fun... He was just incredibly friendly. He loved sport - rugby sevens, football (we always planned to go to a match together), and was very supportive (if a little unreliable) of me, colleagues, early career researchers." 

She added: "He was great at doing interview training for the young people - he did some hilarious role-playing where he interviewed me using different styles. He always had good ideas, always genuinely interested in the experiences of young people who would not usually be seen in research." When Arday resigned from his role at Cambridge earlier this month, he stressed the move should not "be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me". Cambridge's chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, said this week that Arday had been subject to a "racist feeding frenzy".

And here:

Jason Arday was widely accused of being a serial plagiarist and fabulist in a media campaign before his death earlier this month. Numerous opinion columns and online posts claimed the Cambridge academic had a largely fabricated backstory. But last week, a Middle East Eye analysis found that key claims Arday made, which had become central talking points in attacks on him, appeared to be true. This included the sociologist's widely mocked claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days for charity.

Now MEE has found that the characterisation of Arday as a serial and unrepentant plagiarist does not stand up to scrutiny. Instead, an examination of his work and the controversies surrounding it reveals a more complex picture. The professor was not found guilty of plagiarism by any academic institution, despite allegations against him, although some academics have called for further investigation into his work. 

Arday wrote 33 peer-reviewed academic papers. Two of these 33 have had corrections made to them over questioned attribution. These papers made up approximately 6.06 percent of Arday's peer-reviewed output. The vast majority of Arday's work, which has largely focused on the topic of race in education, has not been charged with plagiarism. 

Nathan Cofnas, the academic and proponent of "race science" whose blog post about Arday triggered much of the press coverage about him, wrote: "When you take away the work that is plagiarized or not otherwise written by Arday, there is essentially nothing resembling real scholarship." But the academic Jason Stanley argued last week that Arday's "impact is easily comparable to the leading scholars in his academic field". He said: "In 2018, he published four single authored papers, an impressive achievement. According to Google Scholar, the most cited paper of these four has 238 citations, the second most cited paper has 184 citations, the third has 177 citations, and the fourth has 47 citations. "This is very impressive impact for a scholar right out of their PhD. A surprisingly large percentage of academic papers receive no citations at all." Stanley argued that "Arday came into the field around the time work on race in education was flourishing. It's reasonable to assume that Arday's work in fact contributed to that flourishing." 

Some of Arday's writing has been accused of being plagiarised on the basis of AI detection software. Cofnas based his accusations on an AI detection software called Copyleaks. Such software identifies textual overlap but does not in itself prove that work was plagiarised. The University of Cambridge's educational policy defines plagiarism as "using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement". Plagiarism, understood in the academic sense, needs to be established through academic procedures within universities. 

Arday was cleared of plagiarism

A large part of the media coverage of Arday's alleged plagiarism focused on his PhD thesis, completed in 2015 at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). The university investigated the thesis over plagiarism claims earlier this year. It concluded in March that the citation issues in the thesis were the result of "honest and reasonable error", and that textual overlap with other work was "well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time". It said Arday's supervisory team had been "depleted" and that he had received only one formal supervision during the PhD. 

Most of the citation issues investigated by the university in a section on literature review involved significant textual overlap and similarities with work by academic Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. The Telegraph reported in July 2026 that it had identified 188 sentences in the thesis which were identical or highly similar to Zwozdiak-Myers's 2009 thesis. MEE has examined Arday's thesis, entitled "An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research". MEE has also reviewed a copy of the thesis that was put through the Turnitin detection software, which is used by most universities, including Cambridge. 

Much of the textual overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers which went uncited and unattributed appeared in the literature review section of Arday's thesis. Notably, Arday extensively cited Zwozdiak-Myers in other sections of the thesis. He also acknowledged that he drew heavily on her work, writing that "findings were situated within categories and dimensions of mentoring and reflective practice, which helped to navigate and facilitate the purpose of the study. "Ideas for this were generated from the work of Pollard (2011) and Zwozdiak-Myers (2012), with regards to their conceptions of reflective practice." "Reflective practice" means using direct experience to further one's understanding of something.

Zwozdiak-Myers had written that "reflective practice" could be useful for student teachers, while Arday engaged with this by arguing that peer-mentoring could aid reflective practice for student teachers. Crucially, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) considers intent when defining academic misconduct, which covers "all deliberate attempt(s) to gain an unfair advantage in assessments. This includes cheating, plagiarism, unauthorised collusion or any other deliberate attempt to gain an unfair advantage in summatively assessed work". Its consideration of the intent helps explain why the university cleared Arday of accusations of plagiarism. LJMU said Arday's "PhD still stands" on 14 August, after his death.

Corrections made to two of Arday's papers

Two of Arday's published papers have had corrections made to them. Allegations against the academic include that he reproduced quotes from interviews conducted by other academics and that quotes from his interviews were repeated in different papers. A 2018 paper by Arday, "Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?", was amended in 2023. New citations were added to make it "clear where ideas were adapted from past research", and some quotes attributed to interview transcripts were amended or removed.

In particular, concerns had been raised about similarity between lines in Arday's paper and those in a 2016 paper by the academic Anjum Memon. Social Sciences, the academic journal which published Arday's paper, said that "the statement that the research had been adapted from Memon" did appear in the paper. But the paper "inadvertently omitted overlap between the two publications in prior sections. The author has revised the text to address this, so that it is clear where ideas were adapted from past research". A 2021 paper by Arday was also amended, with two new references added. 

Peter Jukes, a journalist and the co-founder of Byline Times, said: "We've worked with academics comparing the 3% of the texts of two papers (of the 33 Arday had peer reviewed) and they confirm the university assessment - citation failures and data handling errors, corrected." Responding to accusations of plagiarism in an interview with The Times last month, Arday said: "At the stage I'm at now, if I write something, I can afford a proofreader... You'll see there's a very big difference between the work I wrote post-2021 and the work I've written up until now. My writing is a lot better, purely because I can afford a proofreader to read through everything I've done and sharpen up the language." 

Calls for further investigation

Outstanding questions about some of Arday's work still remain, and numerous academics called for a further investigation into his work earlier this month. Papers are often retracted and corrected in academia. According to the Retraction Watch database, which has recorded around 63,000 retractions, nearly 500 papers are retracted a month. There are many reasons why papers might be retracted. Retraction Watch has recorded 16 papers being retracted for "plagiarism or implied plagiarism" at Oxford University and five at Cambridge.

William O'Reilly, a Cambridge historian, was accused of having plagiarised one of his undergraduate student's essays. In 2023, a university tribunal upheld a complaint of plagiarism, ruling that the offence was "the product of negligent acts but was not deliberate." As a result, O'Reilly remained in his academic role. Cambridge initially resisted calls to investigate Arday's academic record and CV, citing LJMU having cleared him of plagiarism allegations. On 7 August, however, the university said it was opening an investigation "following new information about Professor Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments". Cambridge's statement did not mention the plagiarism allegations. Shortly afterwards, Arday resigned, stressing that the move should not "be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me". 

A senior academic at the University of Cambridge, who asked not to be named, told MEE that "universities shouldn't be safe spaces for plagiarism, and if we hold our students to the highest standards we have to apply those standards to ourselves. But calling someone a plagiarist is not a very helpful way of measuring the severity of what has been alleged - which is why both a careful, though speedy, investigation and some commitment to convey its findings to the public where allegations are already in the public domain ought now to be the norm. The university simply has to learn something from this tragedy." 

The academic added: "The case of Professor Arday has revealed huge problems with the process, some of which were already known from public reporting of other cases: it takes far too long and the university struggles to balance the need for confidentiality with the fact that an allegation is in the public domain". They further said: "It's easy to accuse someone of plagiarism and those allegations - as in this case - absolutely merit a careful investigation. But if you're going to do that investigation privately and thoroughly, there has to be an acknowledgement of the need to explain and defend the findings rather than abandoning your employee to be tried by social media and hostile columnists who have not carefully considered the facts."

Cambridge's chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, said after Arday's death that the academic had been subject to a "racist feeding frenzy". Cofnas, who accused Arday of plagiarism and was formerly an academic at Cambridge, is a proponent of "racial realism" and wrote in February 2024 that without affirmative action, "blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment". Ghent University in Belgium, which employs Cofnas, suspended him last week pending a disciplinary investigation into "recent public statements" that he made. Cofnas said he was being made a "scapegoat".

Arday's claims re-evaluated

While media scrutiny of Arday initially focused on allegations of plagiarism, coverage soon widened to focus on numerous aspects of his life.  Although questions still surround some of Arday's public claims, which were not true or in some cases changed over time, it appears the impression created in much press coverage and online commentary that the academic invented enormous parts of his backstory is false. Particularly mocked was Arday's claim that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. But Arday does in fact appear to have completed the challenge in 2010, as MEE showed last week. There was press coverage by multiple local newspapers before, during and after the challenge; witnesses to it were quoted at the time and this month; Arday blogged about the challenge at the time; and there are numerous photos of him during it. No evidence has emerged to suggest he faked the marathons. 

Another claim derided online in the past few weeks was that Arday played semi-professional football. In fact, he played for two semi-professional clubs, Walton and Hersham FC and Lewisham Borough FC. Arday claimed on a podcast that he played as an under-18 for Crystal Palace, but the club said it did not have records dating back to the 1990s and early 2000s, the years when he would have done so.

Arday also claimed to have raised more than £5m ($6.8m) for charity, which was heavily ridiculed. Yet he often described this in collective terms, rather than suggesting he alone raised the sum. He told The Guardian shortly before his death this month that the money had been raised through "many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period". Byline Times found this week that the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with had a combined gross income of more than £1.4bn to £1.5bn, suggesting his claim of £5m in collective fundraising is plausible. Arday was further accused of falsely claiming to have written a book. It was reported this month that biographies of him online said he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse. But although the book has not been published, it does have a publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, and has been described as a forthcoming title.

Arday as an academic and a teacher

Since his death, numerous former colleagues and students have paid tribute to Arday and praised his record as a sociologist and a teacher. Dr Rebecca Syed Sheriff, an academic at Oxford who worked with Arday, described him after his death as "kind, wise, warm, fun... He was just incredibly friendly. He loved sport - rugby sevens, football (we always planned to go to a match together), and was very supportive (if a little unreliable) of me, colleagues, early career researchers". She added: "He always had good ideas, always genuinely interested in the experiences of young people who would not usually be seen in research." 

Melanie Ramdarshan Bold, a former colleague of Arday's and a professor at the University of Glasgow, said he was "forever uplifting and supporting the people around him. I went to him for advice often, and he was always wise and thoughtful". "I learned so much from him: from his scholarship, which was brilliant and edifying, but just as much from the way he approached the world and other people," she added. 

Sophie, a former BTEC (Business and Technology Education Council) student of Arday's when he was a college teacher, said: "I met Jason during my college years. I was one of two girls doing a sports btec, the rest of the class was made up of well off boys and I was experiencing homelessness and the accompanying medical and financial struggles. "Jason was my teacher and my football coach but most of all Jason checked in on me almost every day, he made sure I had somewhere to sleep and eat, he made me feel I belonged and that I could succeed no matter the circumstances." She added: "He also introduced me to a sports coaching company and I worked there for 11 years before eventually getting my degree."