by Tom Slater, spiked
The Islamic Republic of Iran is exploiting our porous borders to menace British Jews. Time for action.
We don’t half make it easy for them. Two Iranian nationals have been charged with terror offences over an alleged bomb plot against the Jewish community of Manchester, almost a year after the Heaton Park Synagogue attack in which two Jews were killed. The cherry on top? The alleged plotters came to the UK by small boats. National security and counter-terror work is difficult enough without our government effectively leaving the backdoor open to any passing Islamist, let alone hostile foreign states intent on doing us harm.
The case is ongoing, so there’s little we can say definitively. Counter Terrorism Police believe Rahman Salehi, 35, and Salam Ahmadyan, 36, were most likely coordinating with Iran. The plot involved a chlorine bomb, with the men accused of obtaining instructions and gathering components for it, and scoping out potential targets. Sickeningly, this included the same Heaton Park Synagogue which Syrian Islamist Jihad al-Shamie attacked during Yom Kippur last year. Reportedly, the Iranians came to the UK on small boats in 2020 and 2023. One was granted asylum, the other had an asylum application pending. No doubt they will also have been put up at the taxpayers’ expense.
Even if we park this case, as due process demands we must, you need not look far for examples of Britain’s broken borders being exploited by Jew-hating Islamists. It’s been completely memory-holed now, but a week after October 7 in 2023, a Moroccan ‘asylum seeker’, Ahmed Alid, stabbed his Iranian housemate in Hartlepool and murdered a pensioner in the street because he was so inspired by Hamas’s pogrom. He had been floating around Europe for 15 years after getting in trouble with the Moroccan security services.