Soap star turned investigative journalist Ross Kemp has said he had to wear the same body armour he wore in Syria while filming in Birmingham, England.
The 53-year-old, famous in Britain for his role as EastEnders hardman Grant Mitchell, was filming with armed response and counter-terror units attached to West Midlands Police, the British Transport Police, Northumberland Police, and South Yorkshire Police, the Birmingham Mail reports.
Kemp has fronted a number of documentaries on the war in Afghanistan, post-apartheid South Africa, and other extreme locations since he stepped away from the long-running soap opera — but the Mail reports he considered working in multicultural Birmingham his most shocking experience yet.
“I am making a documentary about our armed response units and counter-terrorist units – armed police across the UK – [and asking] do we have enough to meet the threat that is now posed to us?” explained Kemp. “Not only by terrorists, but also by the increase in the use of hand guns by drugs gangs.”
He also revealed he had to “wear the same body armour that I wore in Syria on the streets of Birmingham” in an interview with the Metro.
Birmingham, one of Britain’s great industrial cities during the country’s heyday, has undergone large-scale immigration in recent decades, particularly from the Islamic world.
Last year, French media even reported that it had become something of a haven for Islamic radicals across Europe, seeking a Western country where they can practice their faith without any interference.
The community of Small Heath, for example, is now 96 per cent Islamic, and has become a popular destination for Muslims formerly based in France but inconvenienced by that country’s ban on full face-veiling.
Paris emigre Hassan boasted to the French press about how it was easy to have managers at work fired for “racism”, and how you could break from your shift to pray easily.
“In France it is impossible to tell your boss that you have to pray, but here, you can do it everywhere. At Ikea, at the factory … It is the manager who comes to propose it to you,” he gloated.
An English convert to Islam suggested it was a similar story in education, describing how state schools in the city “encourage the practice of rigorous Islam” and “It is the teacher who calls up to make sure the little girls don’t forget to wear their headscarves.”
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