So if you’ve found guilty of dangerous driving and someone has died because of this, you’d be thankful that you got away with dangerous driving rather than death by dangerous driving, meaning you only got 8 weeks in prison rather than the substantially longer time of the latter charge. This is what happened to Labour peer, Lord Ahmed, someone who certainly exists in the public eye and someone who should be grateful that he remained a Labour peer and grateful he was handed the more serious charge for his dubious activities.
Written By William Barns-Graham
Lord Ahmed was so grateful that he has accused Jewish people of moving his case to a more important court rather than the magistrate court he’d hoped to be charged in, back in 2008. Not only does this ‘blame-game’ smack of someone who clearly doesn’t feel as remorseful as he should considering his involvement in a person’s death, whether his dangerous driving was a cause or not, but it also exhibits someone with an anti-Semitic paranoia that is quite concerning, especially as a senior member of the country’s political spectrum.
Lord Ahmed, born in Pakistan and a supporter of Palestine, claimed that the Jewish owners of “newspapers and TV channels” were responsible for pressuring the courts to give him a more serious charge. He made these claims were made in a television interview in Urdu.
“My case became more critical because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians. My Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels opposed this,” the Times reports him as saying in the television interview. He furthermore claimed that the judge who sentenced him was appointed to the High Court as a “Jewish colleague” of Tony Blair.
This is not the first time Ahmed has been viewed as being controversial as he was suspended by the Labour Party in 2012 for calling for a £10m bounty for the capture of US Presidents Obama and Bush. He was cleared and subsequently cleared and reinstated. Whether this will happen following his latest suspension by the Labour Party following these reports, remains to be send. The Labour Party has released a statement saying it “deplores and does not tolerate any sort of anti-Semitism”.
The thing with Lord Ahmed is that is one of the few senior Muslim officials in British politics in a country with over a million Muslims. Clearly more needs to be done to bring more intelligent Muslims into British politics so that a significant sector of society is represented in Parliament and wider politics, but at the same time, such representatives cannot be culpable of the gaffes and fatal (indirectly according to the courts) crimes committed by Lord Ahmed. Furthermore, no one should be discriminated against and the Jewish community is also a significant sector of British population. For certain Israel and Palestine is an incredibly contentious topic, but it shouldn’t lead to the anti-Semitic paranoia exhibited by Lord Ahmed.
This much was noted by Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on the BBC.
“We are appalled by Lord Ahmed’s alleged comments which recall the worst Jewish conspiracy theories” he said. “However outlandish and incredible his allegations, there will always be gullible or malicious individuals or groups that will accept what he has said and add to the growth of anti-Semitic discourse.”
Benjamin has called for Lord Ahmed to be expelled from the Labour party, and the party would be wise to heed his advice about such a controversial character.
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