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.