My post yesterday on the recent history of questionable migrant conversions to Christianity was prescient as, serendipitously, Patrick Christys covered the same topic on his GB News broadcast of Tuesday, February 6, 2024.
Here is Christys’s editorial:
Earlier in the evening on GB News, Michelle Dewberry explored the topic. One of her guests, the former MEP and sister of Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, Annunziata Rees-Mogg labelled the Anglicans involved ‘gullible fools’:
She and the Rees-Mogg family are devout Catholics. She said that it takes at least one year to convert to Catholicism. Here is the video:
Today at Prime Minister’s Questions, Conservative MP Tim Loughton asked about Anglican involvement in migrant conversions. Rishi Sunak replied that the Government was looking into the matter.
We have a serious problem on our hands, doubtless from a cultural difference arising in British society. Another matter has been going on for at least two decades, that of grooming gangs. Everyone knows about them, so it was dismaying to see the following headline show up in one of our newspapers this week, especially as we have a Conservative government (bold in the original):
Grooming gang review kept secret as Home Office claims releasing findings ‘not in public interest’
Exclusive: Freedom of information request refused so ministers have ‘safe space’ to discuss policy
However, that is a matter for another day. I did cover a harrowing GB News documentary on the subject in 2023.
2024: the migrant chemical attacker, another Christian convert
On Wednesday, January 31, a terrifying chemical attack on a London woman and her two young daughters took place in Clapham, south of the Thames.
The suspect, Abdul Ezedi, a violent illegal migrant who was later granted asylum, remains on the run as I write. Grainy videos and photos show him with a burnt out right eye going about afterwards in the capital. Who could miss him?
I find that incredible, given all the CCTV cameras around London and the rest of the UK, which have been in place since Tony Blair (PM between 1997 and 2007) thought they were an excellent way to reduce crime. They have not helped much at all.
The suspect was based in Newcastle then travelled to London to carry out his heartless attack.
The woman’s neighbours ran out of their homes that evening to help, at great physical expense. On Saturday, February 3, The Times reported their experience (emphases mine):
A City worker has recounted how his partner tackled the suspected chemical attacker Abdul Ezedi as he appeared to be trying to harm a three-year-old child, giving a dramatic new witness account.
The couple were among the first on the scene in Clapham, south London, last week. The woman, who is in her fifties and also works in finance, ran out of her home when she heard screaming.
She saw a man, thought to be Ezedi, 35, attacking a “vulnerable” woman, 31, and her two daughters, aged eight and three. She did not realise that the victims were covered in a corrosive chemical.
“We had no idea any substance was involved; only that the guy was clearly intent on hurting the [three-year-old],” the witness said. “He then went to pick the child up off the road to do it [throw the child to the ground] again, which is when my partner lunged in and tackled him, grabbing his leg and falling to the ground in the process like a rugby tackle.”
He has arm injuries; his partner suffered burns and may have permanent damage to her eyes. She has “burnt both eyeballs” and has been seeing specialists every day.
The National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI, was drafted in by the Met on Saturday night to help find Ezedi. Officers from the agency are focusing on whether he may be receiving help from an organised crime group to evade capture.
Ezedi had said he was in a relationship with the 31-year-old woman, according to a close relative of the suspect quoted by Sky News. The victim and her daughters were confirmed to be residents of the Clapham South Belvedere Hotel, which other guests say is used as emergency accommodation.
Describing the aftermath of the attack, the Clapham witness said: “My partner immediately starts saying she has sharp pain in her eye. She thinks at the time that she has detached her retina, but then I start feeling pain on my arms and realise it could be acid.
“I have no doubt that if my partner had not jumped in then the child would no longer be with us, and if our other neighbours hadn’t immediately taken the family and washed them down then their injuries would have been far worse.”
The Met said the adult victim was sedated on Friday, with “life-changing” injuries. The injuries to her daughters were not as bad as originally thought and are “not likely to be life-changing”.
The search for Ezedi, an asylum seeker thought to have arrived in the UK in 2016 from Afghanistan on the back of a lorry, entered its fourth day on Sunday. As well as the National Crime Agency, the Metropolitan Police have drafted in the British Transport Police and Northumbria police.
The Home Office is reviewing how Ezedi was granted asylum in 2020, having been prosecuted for sex offences. In 2018, he was convicted of sexual assault and indecent exposure and at Newcastle crown court was given a 45-week suspended prison sentence and placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years.
His asylum application was twice rejected by the Home Office. On his third attempt, an appeal to an immigration tribunal, he appears to have claimed that he had converted to Christianity. A priest vouched for his newfound faith and said he was “wholly committed”. He was granted asylum.
A shopkeeper in Newcastle upon Tyne, where Ezedi was living in a hostel for the homeless, said that despite his conversion to Christianity, as per his asylum application, Ezedi gave the appearance of still adhering to his Muslim faith. An assistant at the Sultan supermarket said Ezedi regularly bought Halal meat. “I know he didn’t have a wife because he spoke about how he wanted a wife and hoped to return to Afghanistan to find a bride.”
It raises questions over the Church of England’s practice of handing out certificates to converts which verify their conversion and are used in asylum applications.
In 2021 it emerged that the Liverpool Women’s Hospital bomber, Iraqi-born Emad al-Swealmeen, had been baptised at Liverpool Cathedral. An inquest was told that he may have faked his conversion …
He was the man about whom I wrote yesterday. Doubts about his conversion were confirmed as far back as December 2021, the month after the attack on Liverpool Women’s Hospital.
The article continues, describing how the attack unfolded:
The attack happened at about 7.30pm on Wednesday. A man can be seen on CCTV ramming a car into two people in the road, who look to be the mother and eldest child, covering their faces.
According to an onlooker, he then pulled the three-year-old out of the back seat, “slamming” her onto the road, where she landed on her head and lay “lifeless”, while her mother apparently yelled “I can’t see”. Witnesses said that Ezedi threw a corrosive substance over the mother and elder daughter, before ramming them with his car.
Twelve people were taken to hospital, including five police officers. Many of them were treated for burns from the alkaline substance. Another neighbour who went to help, Rachael, 36, told The Sunday Times that she had suffered third-degree burns.
Ezedi was next seen boarding a Tube at Clapham South station. He was last seen on Wednesday at 9pm, when he got on a Victoria Line train southbound from King’s Cross station, with what looked like severe burns on his right eye.
After raids on two addresses in east London and three in Newcastle, the police located “two empty containers with corrosive warnings on the label”. They are still undertaking tests on the substance.
Britain now has the highest number of recorded chemical attacks in the world, mostly on women, with a total of 710 in 2022 compared with 421 in 2021.
Hmm. I wonder why that is — or not.
Former Home Secretaries Braverman and Patel blame Anglicans
Before I go into what Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel said about questionable conversions, here is another loopy Anglican policy.
For those who don’t live here, we have many Church of England affiliated schools. This is their policy on sexual identity, notably:
… not being transgender is not a protected characteristic.
Now on to what our former Home Secretaries had to say in the wake of the chemical attack. Incidentally, Braverman was raised as a Buddhist and Patel as a Hindu.
On Saturday, February 3, The Telegraph reported:
Suella Braverman and Dame Priti Patel have hit out at Britain’s churches over their alleged support for “bogus” asylum claims.
Writing for The Telegraph, Mrs Braverman said that during her time as home secretary she “became aware of churches around the country facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims”.
Separately, Dame Priti, also a former home secretary, accused church leaders of “political activism” in their approach to asylum seekers, claiming that religious institutions supported cases “without merit”.
The clergy’s role in offering conversions to asylum seekers and support for their applications is likely to be considered by ministers in the wake of the chemical attack in London that injured a mother, two children and 10 others.
Abdul Ezedi, suspected of carrying out a chemical attack in Clapham, was twice denied asylum before being allowed to stay after claiming he had converted from Islam and that his life would be in danger if he returned to Afghanistan.
A government source said: “There are clearly general questions about whether it is really possible to credibly substantiate the solidity of a religious conversion, particularly where that view might carry important implications.”
We also learned an interesting fact relating to Al-Swealmeen’s conversion at Liverpool Cathedral in 2017:
Ms Patel cited the case of Emad Jamil Al Swealmeen, a Christian convert who detonated a bomb outside Liverpool Women’s Hospital in 2021, having been confirmed at Liverpool Cathedral in 2017.
In 2016, the then dean of the cathedral said he had converted 200 asylum seekers in four years, but added: “I can’t think of a single example of somebody who already had British citizenship converting here with us from Islam to Christianity.”
Dame Priti said: “In that particular case [Al Swealmeen] and any other examples where Christian conversion is involved it is right that those cases are scrutinised and that there is a degree of honesty in establishments, including the Church of England as to what their motivations were.
“It’s no coincidence that religious leaders are constantly speaking out against any reforms and work introduced by us as Conservatives in this area …
Mrs Braverman said: “Attend mass once a week for a few months, befriend the vicar, get your baptism date in the diary and, bingo, you’ll be signed off by a member of clergy that you’re now a God-fearing Christian who will face certain persecution if removed to your Islamic country of origin. It has to stop.”
A Church of England spokesman said: “It is the role of the Home Office, and not the church, to vet asylum seekers and judge the merits of their individual cases.”
The church was not aware of any links with Ezedi.
Catholic Church finds no link with Ezedi
With the Anglicans finding no links with Ezedi, it was the turn of the Catholic Church to investigate, as a ‘priest’ had allegedly given him a reference. ‘Priest’ means Anglican or Catholic.
On February 5, the Catholic Herald said that the suspect was unknown to the diocese covering Newcastle, although he did use refugee services from the diocesan Justice and Peace Project:
The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle today denied assisting an Afghan fugitive wanted for an alkaline attack on a woman and her two children amid claims that an unnamed priest helped him to gain asylum in the UK.
Abdul Shokoor Ezedi is suspected of throwing a corrosive substance over the three in Clapham, south London, on 31 January, leaving the 31-year-old woman with such “life-changing” injuries to her face that she is being kept under sedation in hospital. Her two daughters, aged eight and three, are being treated for burns …
The Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle has come under pressure from the media to identify any priest who might have assisted Ezedi with his successful application.
A diocese spokesman says exhaustive checks have failed to produce any evidence that the Catholic Church assisted Ezedi beyond the provision of toiletries and food tokens from the diocesan Justice and Peace Project.
“After checking local parish records and central records and after consulting with clergy we have no indication that Abdul Ezedi was received into the Catholic Faith in this diocese, or that a Catholic priest of this diocese gave him a reference,” the spokesman says. “We do not know which Christian church received him nor which Christian minister gave him a reference.”
The spokesman confirmed that Ezedi “visited our diocesan Justice and Peace Refugee Project, a charitable venture which assists a wide range of people who come to us in need”.
He added: “The diocese will assist the police investigations in any way we can. We keep the victims in our prayers and hope that justice is done soon.”
The Justice and Peace Refugee Project gives support only in the form of food and toiletries to clients referred by the St Vincent de Paul Society. It directs clients to further support that might be available from other organisations; in a minority of hardship cases it gives out supermarket vouchers.
The project is not involved in any casework around asylum claims and therefore does not employ caseworkers. Nor does it seek to recruit converts to Christianity.
Government ministers: ‘not about asylum’
On Sunday and Monday, Conservative ministers doing the media rounds played down any potential negative publicity surrounding the chemical attack.
Guido Fawkes wrote about the Education Secretary Gillian Keegan, a lightweight if there ever was one, although, according to her academic record, she is a genius. On Sunday:
The Education Secretary landed herself in hot water yesterday for claiming Clapham attack case was “not really about asylum” on Sky News …
On Monday, it was the turn of Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris, who is equally unconvincing as a Cabinet member. The Telegraph told us:
Chris Heaton-Harris has insisted Abdul Ezedi would have been detained and deported if the Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill had been in place.
Asked whether he agreed with his colleague Gillian Keegan’s remark that the focus around the alkali attack is “not really about asylum,” he told LBC: “We know as a Government we need to tighten those (powers) further and that’s what we’re trying to do with our Rwanda Bill.
“This was an unbelievably tragic occurrence. Everybody that I know has been completely shocked by it. But we’ve tightened our laws since and he would not be here had we had the Nationality and Borders Bill in place and he’d been detained and deported properly.”
Yet, according to the Home Office’s testimony before the parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee on Wednesday, January 31, even the new Nationality and Borders Bill doesn’t allow for illegal entrants to be turned back. Civil servants said that illegals must still be taken in because the Home Office must be in no doubt about sending them back. If there is a scintilla of doubt, they will be accommodated on our shores.
The topic came up on Nigel Farage’s February 7 GB News show (first segment after the news and editorial), wherein a human rights lawyer explained the same thing. Also, he pointed out that these people are released on ‘bail’, which, in their case means, recognisance only as they do not have any money:
Anglican bishop hits back at Braverman
Later on Monday, February 5, The Telegraph carried an article about an Anglican prelate, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, the Bishop of Chelmsford, ‘Bishop hits back over Suella Braverman’s claims asylum seekers are faking Christian conversion’:
A bishop has attacked Suella Braverman after she said that churches were fuelling fake asylum claims …
The Church of England has rejected Mrs Braverman’s criticism, with the Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, writing in The Telegraph on Monday: “We are not politicians, and we know that to be involved in political debate can be bruising.
“But those who have claimed a link between the abuse of our asylum system and the action of bishops in parliament are simply wrong.
“It is saddening to see this being implied by former holders of senior ministerial office, who have had opportunity but not sought to raise these concerns with senior clergy before.”
Dr Francis-Dehqani, who will become the lead bishop on immigration later in February, denied that the Church was in any way responsible for the criminal history of converted asylum seekers.
The bishop repeated the usual Church of England disclaimer:
Churches have no power to circumvent the Government’s duty to vet and approve applications – the responsibility for this rests with the Home Office.
Furthermore:
The bishop also denied that church support for asylum seekers’ claims amounted to a “magic ticket” for entry to the UK, adding that the notion that a person may be “fast-tracked through the asylum system, aided and abetted by the Church is simply inaccurate”.
The Bishop of Chelmsford is one of the Lords Spiritual, as is the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both speak in the House of Lords on the compassion the British government owes to asylum claimants, even when arriving in their tens of thousands every year. They give nary a thought to the British people who need to live with these claimants.
The Bibby Stockholm converts: not a miracle
The latest conversion story to take the UK by storm was the Sunday, February 4 headline about the illegals on the Bibby Stockholm barge, moored near Portland in Dorset, on the south coast of England. Portland has historically been known for its fine quality stone.
Halfway through the weekend, we woke up to this Telegraph headline:
The article says:
… on Sunday, David Rees, a church elder and education consultant, told the BBC’s Sunday programme that 40 asylum seekers on the Bibby Stockholm had converted or were in the process of becoming Christians.
“Local faith leaders have visited the barge and work with the council and the barge management in looking after these guys,” he said, adding that the migrants had either converted in their home countries or on Christian Alpha or other courses in the UK.
The Alpha course, which introduces worshippers to the faith, was taken by Emad Al Swealmeen, the Liverpool bomber. The Iraqi asylum seeker blew himself up outside a maternity hospital in 2021, four years after his confirmation at the city’s cathedral.
Mr Elder [David Rees?? — c’mon, get it right] said he was confident that all the 40 Bibby Stockholm migrants were undergoing genuine conversions.
“Obviously, we need to make sure that they believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit and repent of their sins and also they want to start a new life in the church,” he said.
“So those are the sort of questions that we ask them, and they have to give a public testimony, at their baptism, which they did in their native language, and it was translated into English. There were no qualms at all about the content of that testimony, which was clear and conclusive about their faith in Jesus Christ.”
Tim Loughton, the aforementioned Conservative MP who asked Rishi Sunak a question at PMQs on February 7, was less sure:
Tim Loughton, a member of the home affairs committee and a former minister, said he was concerned that Christian conversion had become a scam, claiming there were cases in which some asylum seekers had got crucifix tattoos to reinforce their claims.
“We have got to have a much more rigorous scrutiny process for those claiming to have converted and the basis on which it would be dangerous to return them to their home countries,” he said.
However, the Home Office, which his colleague, James Cleverly MP heads as our latest Home Secretary, appeared to disagree:
The Home Office said caseworkers were trained to be able to establish the credibility of claims around religious beliefs so that protection was only granted to those in genuine need.
Guidance tells them to assess a claim “in the round” and not take the word of a priest as “determinative”. An asylum seeker’s participation in church activities must be considered, along with the timing of their conversion, knowledge of the faith, and the opinions of other congregation members as to the genuineness of the conversion.
Sorry, but that is not happening. What are other congregation members going to say if these converts are potentially intimidating? Ask yourselves what you might say if faced with that question.
Conclusion
Let us return to Suella Braverman’s experience as an immigration lawyer and Home Secretary from her February 3 article in The Telegraph:
For years, I defended the Home Office in immigration cases as a barrister and saw the reality of our broken asylum system. Then, it was sham marriages and bogus colleges that allowed migrants to game our system.
But, as Home Secretary, I saw how the racketeering has continued, and expanded in myriad ways.
Today, it is adults claiming to be children, Muslims pretending to be Christians, heterosexuals feigning homosexuality, healthy people alleging mental illness, economic migrants impersonating refugees fleeing persecution, those who have chosen to come here arguing that they have been trafficked as slaves, or those masquerading as political dissidents.
Many asylum seekers are genuine and it’s right that we offer help when their cause is just. But far too many are bogus and using our laws against us …
It has to stop. We must get wise to the problem. It is no wonder that the former dean of Liverpool Cathedral noted that he converted about 200 asylum seekers to Christianity over a four-year period – but he doesn’t recall baptising any Muslim who was already a British citizen.
It’s why I set up a dedicated taskforce focused on rooting out the grifters enabling this sordid business. Through more reporting, increased investigations and tougher enforcement, it has succeeded in identifying some of the bad actors. This work must continue in earnest.
Our system remains broken when asylum seekers convicted of sex offences may remain in the UK. Once you break our laws, surely you forfeit any right to stay here? We need a system whereby foreign offenders automatically lose their right to claim asylum or plead modern slavery. No exceptions, no caveats.
Now, you’ll say: why didn’t you fix it when you had the chance as Home Secretary? Well, during the past year, we increased the number of removals of foreign offenders and those illegally here – an improvement on previous years and back to pre-Covid levels.
But the real reason we have not yet got to the bottom of the problem is that every time the Government passed yet another law, we balked at the chance to exclude the vague and evolving rules contained in international law, be it the Refugee Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights or the Human Rights Act.
While in government, I pushed to exclude these treaties from our asylum law, but to no avail. I laid out proposals on how to cut the Gordian knot of human rights law that is the root cause of the problem. These instruments stymie our ability to control who comes into our country, who stays here and who must leave.
The reality of government is that if the consensus is not with you, then even as Home Secretary you will not prevail. Instead, we got tweaks, compromises and half-measures. Post-Brexit, we did not take back control. Rather, we have ceded it to international law, a foreign court, and activist judges and lawyers.
I don’t seek to demonise those who, understandably, seek a better life abroad. Hundreds of millions of people live in poor conditions around the world and will have a profound desire to better themselves and their families. My own parents had that same deep longing when they emigrated – lawfully – to the UK from Kenya and Mauritius in the 1960s.
People may come here lawfully, in an orderly manner. But what we are talking about with illegal immigration is the deception, criminality and playing of the system that so defines our asylum policy in the 21st century.
We can dance around the issue for years to come, but the truth is that our government will always be limited in what it can do unless it withdraws from the European Convention on Human Rights. The jurisprudence from the Strasbourg Court that is binding in the UK has taken a broad and ever-expansive approach to the very noble rights set out in the original text. We’ve tried working within its boundaries for decades, but that approach has failed.
We can no longer allow amorphous concepts of international law to override the supremacy of Parliament, especially in matters of vital national interest. We cannot have fought for freedom, self-government and a voice for the British people in 2016 only to afford foreign offenders greater rights than their law-abiding victims.
The British people have voted time and time again for proper control of our borders. Yet we still have dubious characters coming to our country illegally every week. It is no wonder people are giving up on politics. This is a national-security and public-safety emergency. Gang warfare, terrorism, drugs, rape, murder, acid attacks – those capable of such heinous crimes will keep coming until we get serious, put the British people first, and pass the hard-headed laws required to properly secure our border.
Suella’s right. Dame Priti is right.
However, some people are just dead against doing right by the British taxpayers — the people who pay the salaries of Government ministers, MPs from all parties, civil servants and asylum-friendly charities, partly financed by the Government (i.e. us).
This post first appeared on Churchmouse Campanologist | Ringing The Bells For, please read the originial post: here
