Police must publish advice that led them to drop imam case - The Jewish Chronicle

Last week’s decision not to prosecute an east London imam who urged Allah to destroy Jewish homes would be easier to understand if the UK had a strong free speech tradition.

But in a country where police knock on newspaper columnists’ doors for “Non-Crime Hate Incidents” and dispatch entire squads to arrest pensioners over social media posts, this case suggests a dangerous inconsistency in how the law is applied.

The same British authorities that so zealously enforce some of the most restrictive speech laws in the Western world tend to transform to First Amendment purists when it concerns Islamist hate preachers or Hamas apologists indoctrinating students at our finest universities (See our March 11 leader on the LSE book launch event).

It is often argued that scripture and context may justify more leniency in religious cases. But as Tom Wilson from the Counter Extremism Group explains, the critical context is this: the mosque sermon calling for Allah to destroy Jewish homes came merely two weeks after Islamist terrorists actually destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes – murdering, torturing, raping and abducting thousands of Jews in the process. And Hamas, like all Islamist terrorists, likes to quote a lot of scripture to justify its barbarous acts.

Another relevant context is that this country too has suffered numerous Islamist-linked terror attacks that have resulted in hundreds of victims. MI5 itself states that “Islamist terrorism is the most significant terrorist threat to the UK by volume”.

But the danger does not have to rise to the level of terror to demand our authorities’ proper application of the law. Passages such as the one cited by the east London imam incite hatred that often leads to intolerable abuse and violence against the Jewish community in everyday life.

If the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service were looking for proper context, they should have considered the 3,528 antisemitic incidents recorded in the UK last year. That’s the second-highest total ever reported to the Community Security Trust, topped only by the 2023 figures. Of these incidents, 156 contained discourse relating to Islam, Muslims and Islamist groups, while 65 evidenced radical Islamist ideology. If the authorities had dug deeper into the CST statistics, they would have discovered that there were 201 incidents in the assault category, the second-highest total ever, topped only by the annus horribilis of 2023.

Or the authorities could have checked their own Home Office and police figures from October 2024. These data showed that Jews – about 0.5 per cent of the British population – were the victims of 33 per cent of all religious hate crimes.

The decision to close the imam case is therefore truly a “shocking failure”, as Lord Walney told the JC last week. The government’s former independent adviser on political violence and extremism wants the authorities to immediately publish all the advice that led them to drop the case. If the authorities decline to do so, this newspaper will certainly file a Freedom of Information Act request.

Many holy books contain passages that incite hatred and violence. That is precisely why religious leaders have a duty to handle these passages with great care. In an era where Islamists have spent decades using scripture to inspire and demand mass murder, “context” is not a defence. It is an indictment. No imam amplifying these passages can therefore possibly claim to be innocently quoting scripture.

Given all that “context”, the east London imam must have known that he’s at the very least providing moral cover for hatred that all too often results in violence.

The authorities’ failure to recognise this basic truth represents not just an inconsistency, but a dangerous abdication of their responsibility to protect all citizens equally under the law.

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