Daily Archive

The BBC reports:

Former Iraq hostage Norman Kember has said he helped fund Islamic preacher Abu Qatada’s bail.

Mr Kember, 77, a peace campaigner, said he did it in a spirit of “reciprocity and kindness” because Qatada had helped him when he was in captivity…

…Qatada, a Palestinian-Jordanian, last month won an appeal against deportation. The government is seeking to over-turn that…

Interestingly, Mr Kember above isn’t to the BBC a “so-called” peace campaigner, but let’s not digress. Regardless, it is a moving and powerful inter-faith statement by him, except perhaps in one tangible sense: he is hardly taking a great financial risk.

For Mr Kember seems highly unlikely to lose his contribution owing to the gentleman’s absconding. After all, the only reason Mr Qatada was behind bars is because he is one of those teflon few the British government can’t seem to get to leave the country. (Granted asylum by Britain only then to become a security worry here, yet now unwilling to return home because they greatly fear “torture” there, and because of that fear the British government can’t currently do more than politely ask them to depart.)

On the other hand, the British government thankfully has no legal trouble chasing a serving British soldier’s Canadian wife all the way to Spain. Eh, that is the latter’s tough luck of course, in having desperately to jump through consular hoops to remain. She should have been a Jordanian asylum-seeker, convicted of terror offenses by a court in her appallingly repressive, Hitlerian home country to which it is absolutely unthinkable even to consider that she be forced to return . . . but which is, strangely, otherwise good fun to deal with, what with its children’s museum-building, glamorous queen and all.

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UPDATE: Aside from Canadian UK forces wives, another group that this Government thank goodness has little trouble evicting from the country: husbands of Filipino nurses who die unlawfully as a result of NHS screw ups.