Local government officials in England will censor the name and ethnicity of the London Bridge terrorist in an official report, to avoid “demonising” Muslims.
The Safeguarding Overview and Scrutiny Committee of Staffordshire County Council produced the report on Usman Khan, who stabbed five people, two fatally, at Fishmongers’ Hall and nearby London Bridge, where he was supposed to be attending a rehabilitation course, in 2019, because he had lived in Stafford.
While the report, available to view in its unredacted form on Staffordshire County Council’s website as of the time of publication, was notionally concerned with ‘Action to Prevent Future Deaths Following the Inquests Arising from the Deaths in the Fishmongers’ Hall Terror Attack’, elected councillors’ first port of call was not to discuss public safety, but whether or not the report should have referenced the terrorist’s name and heritage.
“At the start of the report, it mentions the attacker’s name, which is clearly a Muslim name, and it says that this man was of Pakistani descent. Could I ask what the thinking was behind putting those details into the report please?” questioned Councillor Gillian Pardesi, of the leftist Labour Party.
“I have to admit that I did not want those words to be put in the report; I think they can be removed,” responded council cabinet member Victoria Wilson — of the Conservative Party, incredibly enough.
Wilson then referred the question on to a nervous-looking council bureaucrat, who explained that the references to Usman Khan’s name and ethnic background had been lifted directly from reports by the Coroner and the Home Office, but that they could be expunged if councillors so desired.
Efforts to censor the report — pointlessly, given Usman Khan’s name and ethnicity are already in the public domain and known by anyone familiar with the London Bridge radical Islamic terror attack — received some mild pushback from committee chairman Bob Spencer, a marginally less wet Conservative than Councillor Wilson.
“I personally don’t see the need to change the language that’s contained in [the] report, but if the feeling of this committee is so strong that we should change it then I wouldn’t fight it too much,” he said, weakly.
“But I do worry about us constantly watering down facts, and these aren’t words that we’ve used, these are words that have been used by both the Coroner and the Home Office,” he suggested.
Councillor Pardesi, much more determined to impose her agenda, came back strongly, insisting that her “concern” was that “mentioning the name of this person, who happens to be of Pakistani descent, further demonises the Muslim community and it embeds in people out there a stereotypical profile of what an extremist is.”
“[W[e are in dire financial straits as a country and the far-right in particular will look for scapegoats to exploit that situation. Unfortunately that has meant, and will continue to mean, a further rise in hate crime and attacks on our Muslim members in particular.
“It also, lastly, chair, detracts from the fact that we have, in the world as a whole, a far more far-right and neo-Nazi threat than we have now of Islamist jihads. That is a basic fact,” she claimed.
Councillor Wilson ultimately agreed that the details would be censored, expressing her own view that “[i]f the person in question was from Spain or Ireland, I don’t feel it is relevant… I am happy to remove those words from the report. I don’t see how it relates to anything else.”