Mohammed Saleem killed: MI6 fascist assassin Pavlo Lapshyn

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

State racism and rising Islamophobia: Remembering Mohammed Saleem
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comment/2018/5/11/state-racism-and-r ising-islamophobia-remembering-mohammed-saleem

Malia Bouattia
State racism and rising Islamophobia: Remembering Mohammed Saleem

Mr Saleem's murderer was found in possession of white supremacist materials [Getty]
Date of publication: 11 May, 2018

Comment: Tragically, the brutal murder of Mohammed Saleem five years ago was not an isolated incident of Islamophobic hate crime in the UK, writes Malia Bouattia. Tags: Mohammed Saleem, racism, Islamophobia, Muslim community, racial profiling
It has been five years since the tragic, racist murder of Mohammed Saleem.

The eighty-two-year-old was stabbed three times in the back, by neo-Nazi Pavlo Lapshyn, as he left his local mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham late one evening in April 2013.
On arrival in the UK as a refugee at the age of seven, my own childhood days were also spent in Birmingham, and the horrific death of Mr Saleem was a stark reminder to me - as I'm sure it was to so many others who thought 'things are getting better' - that people of colour and Muslims remain under attack in this country.

The poor response by the state to the far-right attack only reinforced this feeling, as the weeks, months, and years that followed appeared to be more a scramble by institutions to suppress the whole story, rather than an attempt to deliver justice.

One of Mr Saleem's daughters, Maz, is a staunch ant-racist activist who continues to fight for justice for her father, as well as opposing the very system that created and sustains the Islamophobic hate that killed him.

In light of her father's case, Ms Saleem spoke to me about the failure of the police, who, within minutes of her father's murder, said "this is not a racist attack", and refused to investigate it as such.

It was later uncovered that Pavlov Lapshyn had planted bombs outside three different mosques in Walsall, Tipton and Wolverhampton, and was in possession of white supremacist materials, including a video game entitled 'Ethnic Cleansing'.

At interview he admitted that he murdered Mohammed Saleem because he hated "non-whites".

One of the many photographs implicating him included a picture of the murder weapon accompanied by the words "Mohammed Saleem was killed by". He also took a picture with the knife for a white supremacist website.


Following Lapshyn's sentencing to at least 40 years in prison, Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale from West Midlands Police stated that he was "very definitely driven by an extreme right-wing ideology and white supremacist ideology".

Maz Saleem recalls the levels of institutional racism in the aftermath of the haunting incident, when her family were suspected and investigated for the killing as the police wrongly thought the perpetrator was likely to be from the Muslim community.

"The state mismanaged, misdirected and ultimately underplayed the significance of my father's terrorist murder," explained his youngest daughter.

Following one of Lapshyn's attempted bombings, Saleem remembers the wrongful arrest of an eighty-two year old Muslim man, who had actually removed the bomb to a safe place away from worshippers; a sad reminder of how counter-terrorism policies and police forces racially profile Muslims and people of colour, assuming guilt until proven innocent.

Read more: Muslim group blames Trump for surge in Islamophobic attacks

The anti-racist and anti-war activist said that she wasn't surprised by the actions of the police and other officials given that "the Muslim community is treated as a suspect community, basic human rights can be stripped off them at will through PREVENT and Schedule 7. They can be spirited to secret locations and tortured in Guantanamo. This is the extent to which we are turned into the problem".

The levels of racism were also clear to see in the wider public response to Mr Saleem's death, or rather the lack thereof. Ms Saleem remarked that the response would have probably been a lot different had the attacker been called 'Abdul'.

Just weeks after the fateful night in April 2013, the world was in shock over the brutal murder of Lee Rigby, with global media outrage and an outpouring of support from the public.

The Saleem family watched as the government responded immediately by calling an emergency Cobra meeting - a cross-departmental crisis committee that responds to national emergencies.

Maz Saleem highlighted that, "In stark contrast, my father's case was met with a deafening silence and an attempt to cover up the implications of the narrative peddled by the state, media and senior politicians that contributed to the incident that my father fell victim to."

'The Muslim community is treated as a suspect community' - Maz Saleem
The loss of Mohammed Saleem did not only leave a gaping hole in his family's life, but also that of the local community that he had served and supported for 30 years.

It also left many Muslims worried for their own safety, particularly upon the now familiar realisation that the British state "was not on their side", as Maz Saleem sums up.

With a great sigh, she states that in reality, "I feel no lessons have been learned" listing some of the Islamophobic attacks since that of her father's.

These included the attempted murder of Zaynab Husssein, and a twelve-year-old Muslim girl at the hands of Paul Moore who ran them over, the death of Muhsin Ahmed who was fatally assaulted by four white male EDL supporters in Rotherham, and the killing of Makram Ali who was deliberately hit by a van outside Finsbury Park Mosque by Darren Osborne.

All of this, she explains, is the consequence of "a hostile environment, imperialist wars and vicious right-wing media depictions of Muslims and migrants".

She also points out that this racist climate is created to "justify the continued so-called War on Terror, neo-colonialist and imperialist endeavours abroad and as a distraction from domestic policies which are privatising all welfare services, education and stripping everyone of their democratic freedoms".

People of colour and Muslims remain under attack in this country
Saleem's plea goes out to all communities to unite against rising racism and xenophobia, and for Muslim public figures - within and outside of faith spaces - to speak out against the injustices they see.

Her inspiring passion for social justice - one that many have witnessed at Palestine solidarity demonstrations and anti-Trump rallies - leads her to the conclusion that, "We must march as civil rights activists marched. Only by visible unity and education can we build a society where racist murders simply don't happen."


Malia Bouattia is an activist, a former president of the National Union of Students, and co-founder of the Students not Suspects/Educators not Informants Network.
Follow her on Twitter: @MaliaBouattia

[Whitehall_Bin_Men]

A medal at the British embassy for Birmingham's Neo-Nazi terrorist
Tony Gosling
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/uk-domestic-terrorism-press-902/

Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist. Over the last 20 years he has been exposing the secret power of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and élite Bilderberg Conferences where the dark forces of corporations, media, banks and royalty conspire to accumulate wealth and power through extortion and war. Tony has spent much of his life too advocating solutions which heal the wealth divide, such as free housing for all and a press which reflects the concerns of ordinary people rather than attempting to lead opinion, sensationalise or dumb-down. Tony tweets at @TonyGosling. Tune in to his Friday politics show at BCfm.
Published time: 29 Oct, 2013 12:25
A medal at the British embassy for Birmingham's Neo-Nazi terrorist
Pavlo Lapshyn (AFP Photo / HO / West Midlands Police) / AFP
Of all the circumstances surrounding last week's conviction of Britain's Neo-Nazi Ukrainian born terrorist, Pavlo Lapshyn, the London press' failure to join the dots, even to call him a terrorist, is scandal all of its own.
When considering state actors' role in aiding domestic terrorism, the London press has a blind spot. They seem to forget that during the 1970s & 1980s Irish troubles, state complicity and 'collusion' was pouring petrol on the flames. Evidence has been around for years that the British Army's Force Research Unit (FRU), Brigadier Gordon Kerr specifically, was an integral part of the anti-IRA, Loyalist terror program.

State terrorism in Northern Ireland
State collusion with British terrorists arguably represents the greatest threat to UK national security, because it has gone almost entirely unrecognized and unpunished. This week Irish writer, Anne Cadwallader, pointed out in her new book about the Irish troubles, 'Lethal Allies', that serving policemen in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) instigated and took part in terrorist murders of Catholics. Along with the unofficial 'shoot to kill' policy, this collusion was a powerful recruiting tool, generating ever more terrorism.

Collusion also turned Northern Ireland into a civil war training ground for the police and army, pitting soldiers against urban guerrillas. Cadwallader says: "There was systematic collusion in the 1970s... there must have been somebody trying to push Northern Ireland over the edge of the abyss. If there had been a virtual civil war, I think it would have suited some people in London."

Masked youths prepare to throw molotov cocktails as they block the railway line near the house of former Irish Republican Army (IRA) man Colin Duffy in Lurgan, southwest of Belfast and Bellaghy, Northern Ireland (AFP Photo / Peter Muhly)

The disbanding first of the British Army's Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) and then the RUC police force in Northern Ireland were, arguably, two of the most important acts that paved the way for the peace we see in the province today. Since so few were brought to justice for these state-sanctioned assassinations, it is absurd to suggest, as so many do, that UK state terrorism is 'all in the past'.

Birmingham's summer of terror
Britain's most recent terrorist, 25 year old Ukrainian, Pavlo Lapshyn, who was convicted last week, was extraordinary in many ways. Despite a racially motivated murder and three bombs including Mosque bombings and a nail bomb, most of the London media used the word 'murderer' rather than 'terrorist' to describe him. The fact that no-one was killed by his bombs, which terrorized Birmingham's Muslim community over the summer months, was described by the city's spiritual leaders, quite rightly, as a miracle.

Lapshyn turned up in Britain in the spring, having won a work experience intern competition run by the robotics software company, Delcam. Astonishingly, this competition was run in conjunction with the British Embassy in Kiev, where he received his ticket to the UK from the British ambassador himself.

It is the Diplomatic Service and Foreign Office's job to look into the credentials of anyone taking up residence in Britain. Yet not only, it seems, did they miss Lapshyn's fanatical Neo-Nazism but failed to notice that he had been arrested in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, in 2010 for using home-made explosives to virtually destroy the flat he was living in. Despite blowing out his mother's doors and windows, Ukrainian police let him off with a caution because he said he was simply doing a 'science experiment'.

Police forensic officers walk behind a police cordon after an expolosion in Tipton, central England, July 12, 2013 (Reuters / Darren Staples)

Whether MI6 and the Diplomatic Service failed to do their job when vetting Lapshyn or not rather depends what their real job was. Incredible though it will seem to some, Lapshyn might have been identified by MI6 as a useful puppet to fuel sectarian strife in Britain and been conveyed to the UK for that very purpose. This is precisely the covert role the British Secret State has taken on in the past and does regularly abroad, all shrouded under the guise of 'national security'.

Just like MI5 and GCHQ, the top echelons of MI6 operate like a cult, light years and several hermetically sealed cordons of security from democracy. The MP charged with their oversight, former Conservative Defense Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, has even been criticized by former GCHQ boss Sir Francis Richards as being inappropriate.

One of Rifkind's many jobs is working for LEK, who consult on satellite, missile, security systems and electronic warfare. He is blatantly a fox in charge of the democratic henhouse, a front in the corridors of power for the private profiteers of the NATO zone Military Industrial Complex.

The 'lone wolf' theory
Just five days after entering Britain and taking up residence at the Birmingham flat Delcam software provided for him, Pavlo Lapshyn crept up behind 82 year old Muslim grandfather, Mohammed Saleem, and killed him by plunging a knife into his back three times. The explanation he later gave to police was simply that Saleem 'was not white' and that he 'wanted to start a race war'.

Residents speak to police officers guarding a cordon after an explosion in Tipton, central England July 12, 2013 (Reuters / Darren Staples)

Mohammed Saleem's daughters, Shazia Khan and Maz Saleem, say whilst dealing with the trauma of their father's murder their grief was made worse by an excruciating struggle. It took them weeks to convince West Midlands police that their father's murder was racially motivated.

The two sisters expressed their relief when Lapshyn confessed to the murder because they would not have to endure a lengthy and painful trial. The flip side though is we may never know whether, as the police say, the Ukrainian really was a 'lone wolf'. The Norwegian police insisted Norwegian neo-Nazi killer of 77, Anders Breivik, was a 'lone wolf' too, despite some evidence of state collusion.

In the 1970s and 1980s, MI6 and the CIA were lead agencies in Operation Gladio, which recruited European Neo-Nazis like Lapshyn to commit terrorist acts in Italy, Germany, Belgium and elsewhere. The aim was to create a state of panic, a 'Strategy of Tension' which would enable governments to scapegoat society's innocent minority groups and to take draconian measures, running rough-shod over civil liberties.

Otherwise professional, British police and journalists seem reluctant to take state collusion with far right terrorists seriously. One look at the 1992 three-part BBC Timewatch series on Operation Gladio should put them straight on that though. After watching it they'll wonder, as with Norway's Anders Breivik, are all these Nazis really just lone wolves?

In a country where the greatest threat to national security and natural justice is arguably the secret state itself, MI6 staff have once again let us all down in Birmingham. So rather than just shrugging their shoulders and turning a blind eye, perhaps named officers should be standing in the dock alongside Pavlo Lapshyn this week, 'fessing up, and serving long jail sentences too.