Lock & Load

Control of the asylum

If I were fleeing a dictatorship or a theocracy and found asylum in Britain, I'd breathe a sigh of relief. Nevertheless, a few individuals, having found sanctuary here, inexplicably decide to use the freedom and safety of the UK to campaign to transform this country into a theocratic dictatorship.

Even more inexplicably, when the Government threatens to send them back from whence they came to face the music of their own making (in an effort to preserve the UK, in theory at least, as a safe-haven from theocratic dictatorships), some people cry that this is "abhorrent".

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,15935,1550061,00.html

Of course it is abhorrent, on the face of it, to send someone back to a country where they may face torture or execution. (It should be noted however that the British Government is obtaining written undertakings by these other governments that these individuals won't be tortured or executed.) But what is the lesser of the two evils? Risking the lives of a handful of fascist agitators or making life risky and unpleasant for everyone else in this country.

Now I hasten to add, that by "everyone else" I not only include, by emphasise, those other people who have found asylum in the UK who continue to be persecuted by the likes of Omar Bakri Muhammad and his ilk. I have a friend who is a refugee from Islamist terrorists. Not only does he feel that their threatening rhetoric has followed him here, but he's had to deal with the irony of some of these terrorists being granted asylum ahead of his own claim. See, they would face the death penalty after their campaign to mutilate women, flog gays and execute apostates, but their victims might only risk being mutilated, stoned or murdered if returned - so they're much less of a priority.

In the past year, two gay Iranian asylum seekers have committed suicide - one setting himself alight outside an immigration centre - after their desperate appeals for the protection
of the United Kingdom from the horrors they faced at the hands of clerical fascists in Iran failed. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Meanwhile Bakri enjoyed the hospitality of this country for two decades.

It's shameful. So why are "Muslim leaders" in the UK expressing their horror that Bakri might have to face up to his crimes, while remaining silent about the innocent - like the late Iranian asylum seekers, or indeed the hundreds more currently in the UK fleeing exactly the sorts of conditions Bakri wanted to establish here?

posted by Brett Lock @ 8:29 am