British MP blames jail term on Jewish 'conspiracy'
Lord Nazir Ahmed, one of Britain's first Muslim peers, was jailed after causing deadly crash while texting and driving at high speed.
By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENTLord Nazir Ahmed 370(photo credit: Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah / Reuters)
LONDON – A British politician jailed for causing a deadly road accident while texting behind the wheel, has reportedly blamed his prison sentence on a Jewish conspiracy.Lord Nazir Ahmed, 55, who became one of the first Muslim peers in the UK after former British prime minister Tony Blair appointed him in 1998, has said that his prison sentence was a result of pressure applied on the court by Jews “who own newspapers and television channels,” the Times of London quoted him as saying Thursday.Nazir also purportedly claimed that the judge in his 2008 trial was appointed to his position after he helped a “Jewish colleague” of Blair during an important case. According to Ahmed, Justice Wilkie was hand-picked to carry out the sentencing because no other judge was willing to handle his case.He also alleged that Jewish-owned media organizations pressured the courts to charge him with a more serious offense.Ahmed maintained that the plot to stemmed from Jewish disapproval of his support for the Palestinians in Gaza. The Times said he repeated his comments during a television interview in Pakistan, which was said to have been broadcast last April.“My case became more critical because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians. My Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels opposed this,” he allegedly said in the interview.Ahmed denied he ever gave the interview. The Times said it has sent his lawyer a copy of the transcript.A spokesman for the Labor Party said that they would launch an investigation to look at the disgraced peer’s comments.“The Labor Party deplores and does not tolerate any sort of racism or anti-Semitism. We will be seeking to clarify these remarks as soon as possible,” the party spokesman said.Martyn Gombar, a 28-year-old Slovakian, was killed in December 2007 after his car was hit by Ahmed’s Jaguar near Sheffield, in south Yorkshire. The police said that while he was driving at 70 mph, he had sent and received five text messages.
According to the Times, three Court of Appeal judges refused to quash Ahmed’s conviction. They maintained that the sentence was justified and that there should not be “one law for the rich and powerful and one law for the rest.”However the appeal court did agree to the “exceptional” course of suspending the sentence for 12 months after learning that his sentence would hinder Ahmed’s work “building bridges between the Muslim world and others.”The peer was freed after serving only 16 days in jail.Last year Ahmed was suspended by the Labor Party following reports that he offered a £10 million bounty for the capture of President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush.Lord Nazir Ahmed allegedly made the offer after the US announced a $10 million bounty for Hafiz Muhammed Saeed, founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group blamed by India for a series of attacks in Mumbai in 2008 that killed 166 people.In 2009, Ahmed joined forces with a number of British-based Islamists to sign a letter praising Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after he walked out of a debate with President Shimon Peres at the Davos Conference in Switzerland.Following the incident, he led a delegation to the Turkish Embassy in London to pay tribute to Erdogan.The same year, he also reportedly threatened to mobilize 10,000 Muslims to prevent the House of Lords from screening “Fitna”, a film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders that claims that Islam sanctions terrorism.In 2005, Ahmed hosted a book launch in the House of Lords for an activist who frequently uses anti-Semitic language in his work. Russian-born Israel Shamir claimed that blood libels against the Jews were in fact true and that all political parties were Zionist infiltrated.In an interview on the Iranian mouthpiece Press TV during Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Ahmed said that Jewish student groups actively recruited for the IDF. He said that British Jews who served in the IDF should be arrested and, if necessary, charged with war crimes.“We know that there are student unions that have been actively recruiting young people in Britain to join the IDF and we also know that there are young Jewish students who go and serve on the kibbutz and also in schools, who are also then doing national service in Israel,” he said.
