by Danny Lockwood, TCW
[…] It is all, however, a convenient distraction from both the real villains and bigger scandals in play.
This shouldn’t be about Guildford’s craven deceptions or any hint of police anti-Semitism, because the bigger villain by far is West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster. A Jeremy Corbyn supporter, Foster appointed Guildford in the first place and his biggest accomplishment may have been concealing the man’s shortcomings for as long as he did.
It’s Foster who should be stretched out on Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s rack, explaining why the chief executive of Birmingham’s radical Green Lane Mosque was part of a panel that hired Guildford.
Any Chief Rabbis on that selection panel? Catholic Bishops? You can’t imagine so, but Foster is keeping those cards very close to his chest, as indeed he is about his promise in early 2023 of ‘generic support’ for any Green Lane Mosque funding applications – a year in which it pocketed £2.2million in public grants.
Nice work if you can get it. All that lovely lolly and the puppet of a PCC dancing on the end of your string to boot!
What troubles me most about this is the civic gravitas bestowed upon Green Lane of all the dozens of mosques in and around Birmingham. I recently saw a YouTube video from that establishment, in August of that enriching year of 2023. Imam Shaykh Zakaullah Saleem was lecturing his followers about the sharia law’s instructions on how men should stone a woman to death.
‘They should be buried waist deep to protect their modesty,’ he explained patiently, like a vet discussing a sedative for your poor old mutt whose back legs have gone.
Modesty, huh? Because that really matters when a frenzied crowd of zealots are going to pelt a terrified woman’s head with rocks.
But Saleem wasn’t some radical Iraqi or Pakistani guest speaker. Oh no. He is Green Lane’s long-serving chief imam and ‘head of education’. Still.
To be fair, the clip didn’t make clear what the woman’s capital sin might have been. Burning hubby’s naan bread? Over-spicing his curry? Or more grievously, leaving the house unaccompanied or not wearing her niqab?
Or maybe this was referencing a teenage girl getting too westernised and trying on make-up? I read just last week about one such girl being drowned by her father and brothers for exactly that. Not in a third-world cultural cesspit, but today’s ‘enlightened’ Netherlands.
Beats being buried up to your waist and stoned to death, I suppose. Either way don’t expect to read about it in the Guardian.
British governments, police forces and local authorities – of all political affiliations – will not risk offending a single Muslim for fear of losing votes they’ve never controlled anyway.