When white people make complaints of harassment and hatred

On 12 June 2011, after the Conservative leader of Tower Hamlets Council, Peter Golds, who is gay, was repeatedly heckled by supporters of Tower Hamlets’ Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, as ‘Mrs Golds’ and a ‘poofter’ from the public gallery, he was quoted thus by The Sunday Telegraph:

“If that happened in a football stadium, arrests would have taken place. I have complained, twice, to the police, and have heard nothing. A Labour colleague waited three hours at the police station before being told that nothing would be done. The police are afraid of being accused of Islamophobia. 

Another Labour councillor said that the Met is now the reverse of what it must have been like in the 1970s, with a complete lack of interest when white people make complaints of harassment and hatred.”

After dozens of stickers appeared across Tower Hamlets declaring the borough a ‘gay-free zone’ and stating that ‘verily Allah is severe in punishment’, gay activist, Peter Tatchell, said:

“The police said no-one was allowed to talk publicly about this because they didn’t want to upset the Muslim community… The fact that the police wouldn’t publicly say what they knew was an absolute disgrace.”

The Telegraph’s Andrew Gilligan explained:

“Victims say that officers in the borough of Tower Hamlets have ignored or downplayed outbreaks of hate crime, and suppressed evidence implicating Muslims in them, because they fear being accused of racism. The claims come as four Tower Hamlets Muslims were jailed for at least 19 years for attacking a local white teacher who gave religious studies lessons to Muslim girls.

The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered more than a dozen other cases in Tower Hamlets where both Muslims and non-Muslims have been threatened or beaten for behaviour deemed to breach fundamentalist ‘Islamic norms’… 

Teachers in several local schools have told The Sunday Telegraph that they feel ‘under pressure’ from local Muslim extremists, who have mounted campaigns through both parents and pupils, and, in one case, through another teacher, to enforce the compulsory wearing of the veil for Muslim girls. 

‘It was totally orchestrated,’ said one teacher. ‘The atmosphere became extremely unpleasant for a while, with constant verbal aggression from both the children and some parents against the head over this issue’… 

Tower Hamlets’ gay community has become a particular target of extremists. Homophobic crimes in the borough have risen by 80 per cent since 2007/8, and by 21 per cent over the last year, a period when there was a slight drop in London as a whole. 

Last year, a mob of 30 young Muslims stormed a local gay pub, the George and Dragon, beating and abusing patrons. Many customers of the pub told The Sunday Telegraph that they have been attacked and harassed by local Muslim youths. In 2008 a 20-year-old student, Oli Hemsley, was left permanently paralysed after an attack by a group of young Muslims outside the pub. Only one of his assailants has been caught and jailed…

Khalid Yasin, a hate preacher who describes Jews as ‘filth’ and teaches that homosexuals must be killed… has spoken at least four times since 2007 at the East London Mosque, Tower Hamlets’ most prominent Muslim institution… The mosque is controlled by a fundamentalist group, the Islamic Forum of Europe, which says that it is dedicated to changing the ‘very infrastructure of society, its institutions, its culture, its political order and its creed ... from ignorance to Islam’…

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: ‘When any allegation of crime is made to us, we investigate appropriately. We will always take action against hate crime in accordance with, and within the confines of, the law’.”

Which assertion is, as the article demonstrates, absolute b***ocks.