Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Once again, the U.K. shows itself to be a safe haven for Islamic terrorists. According to a Feb. 14, 2021 report,
A terrorist who claimed asylum in Britain after he was sentenced to death in Egypt for a failed assassination plot is set to win the right to stay in this country.
Yasser Al-Sirri, 58, first claimed asylum in 1994 but was turned down and has taken the issue to court more than eight times at great cost to British taxpayers.
Al-Sirri, who was also charged in the US with assisting someone involved in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, has appeared in several tribunals since.
And last week a tribunal decided he was entitled to remain in the U.K. as a refugee.
Among al-Sirri’s other jihadi bona fides, he was a member of Egypt’s terrorist organization, Islamic Jihad, and it was for his activities with that group—including a failed assassination attempt on the then Egyptian prime minister which instead killed a 12-year-old girl—that he was sentenced to death in absentia. One of the founding members of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad—which eventually merged with al-Qaeda—was Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda. Its original mission was to overthrow and supplant the Egyptian government with an Islamic one—basically the same mission that was for a time realized by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The “Blind Sheikh” who conspired in the 1993 World Trade Center bombings that killed six, including a pregnant woman, and injured thousands, was also a graduate of Egypt’s Islamic Jihad.
Such is the jihadi background and terrorist affiliations and activities of al-Sirri (at left in the photo above), this man who was just granted “refugee status” in Britain. Of course, granting asylum and visas to “radical” Muslims is nothing new for the U.K.
For example, despite having no papers on him—and despite telling the Home Office that “he had been trained as an ISIS soldier”—Ahmed Hassan was still granted asylum two years before he launched a terrorist attack on a London train station that left 30 injured in September 2017. The Home Office also allowed a foreign Muslim cleric to enter and lecture in London, even though he advocates decapitating, burning, and/or throwing homosexuals from cliffs. According to another report, “British teenagers are being forced to marry abroad and are raped and impregnated while the Home Office ‘turns a blind eye’ by handing visas to their [mostly Muslim] husbands.”
If the U.K. is that lenient when it comes to handing out refugee status and visas, surely those who are truly persecuted are easily granted asylum. Not so. Consider the case of Asia Bibi—a Christian wife and mother of five who spent a decade of her life being abused on death row in Pakistan for challenging the authority of Muhammad; her story perhaps best sheds light on the immigration situation in the U.K. After she was finally acquitted in November, 2018, Muslims rioted throughout Pakistan; in one march, more than 11,000 Muslims demanded her instant and public hanging.
As Pakistanis make for the majority of the U.K.’s significant Muslim population—Sajid Javid, then head of the Home Office, is himself Pakistani—when they got wind that the U.K. might offer asylum to Asia Bibi, this innocent woman whose life had been ripped apart, they too rioted. As a result, then Prime Minister Theresa May personally blocked Bibi’s asylum application—“despite U.K. playing host to [Muslim] hijackers, extremists and rapists,” to quote from one headline. In other words, Britain was openly allowing “asylum policy to be dictated to by a Pakistan mob,” reported the Guardian, “after it was confirmed it urged the Home Office not to grant Asia Bibi political asylum in the U.K.…”
Indeed, while denying Asia Bibi, the Home Office allowed a Pakistani cleric who celebrated the slaughter of a politician simply because he had defended Asia Bibi—a cleric deemed so extreme as to be banned from his native Pakistan—to enter and lecture in U.K. mosques.
Incidentally, and as discussed here, the treatment Asia Bibi received from the U.K. seems to be par for the course when it comes to persecuted Christian asylum seekers and even visitors.
Discussing how “visas were granted [by the Home Office] in July [2016] to two Pakistani Islamic leaders who have called for the killing of Christians accused of blasphemy,” Dr. Martin Parsons, a human rights activist, expressed his frustration at this topsy-turvy situation: “It’s unbelievable that these persecuted Christians who come from the cradle of Christianity are being told there is no room at the inn, when the U.K. is offering a welcome to Islamists who persecute Christians.”
In other words, persecuted Christians need not apply for asylum in the U.K., whereas “radical” Muslims that only hate and seek to sabotage Britain are welcomed with open arms.
Socialism is not the Answer 