'Noble' Lord
The Labour party has a problem on its hands - a Muslim peer named Lord Ahmed who has been caught out by The Times newspaper after claiming that his prison sentence for dangerous driving - was the result of a Jewish conspiracy.
Lord Ahmed - the UK's first Muslim peer - was sentenced to 12 months in jail for sending text messages shortly before his car was involved in a fatal motorway crash - which killed a 28-year-old Slovakian (Martyn Gombar) on Christmas Day 2007.
The Times obtained a copy of a TV interview given by Lord Ahmed - in the Urdu language while visiting Pakistan - in which the Labour peer claimed that his prison sentence was the result of pressure - by Jews "who own newspapers and TV channels".
A police investigation into the traffic accident established that Lord Ahmed's Jaguar hit a stationary vehicle on the M1 - shortly after sending and receiving a series of five substantial text messages while travelling at up to 70 miles per hour - on a southbound stretch of the motorway.
Labour has moved quickly to suspend Lord Ahmed and distance the party from his comments - which is predictable and understandable.
Yet the much bigger question is how has this man managed to remain a senior figure in the Labour party for so long?
Because the man has form in this area - in 2007 Lord Ahmed described Salman Rushdie’s knighthood as an insult to all Muslims. He asked how non-Muslims would feel if the Saudi Government “honoured the martyrs of the September 11 attacks on the United States?”.
What a complete idiot - yet a useful one in certain parts of the world it has to be said - for his willingness to play to the gallery and speak with a forked tongue to a selective audience - eager to have their prejudices confirmed by an eminent 'socialist' politician from the UK .
To compare Salman Rushdie to the suicide killers of 9/11 is both fatuous and dangerous - since Rushdie wrote a serious book about Islam (The Satanic Verses) - which hurt no one, yet was met with a fatwah (a religious order) commanding all good Muslims to murder the author - for his alleged blasphemy against the Islamic faith.
While the 9/11 hijackers were murderers and religious fascists who killed thousands of perfectly innocent people - including many Muslims of course - whose only 'crime' was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So the Labour party which elevated this odious little man to the House of Lords - has a duty to deal with the wider aspects of Lord Ahmed's behaviour - not just his latest outrageous and offensive claims about how he ended up in jail.
