The Iranian government’s brutal repression, and the tremors being felt (or not) in Waltham Forest
In October 2024, I posted on the close relationship between Waltham Forest’s Great and Good and the local Faizan e Islam Educational and Cultural Trust (see link below).
I noted that only a brief scrutiny of social media revealed that Walthamstow MP Dr. Stella Creasy, LBWF Leader Cllr. Grace Williams, and Leyton and Wanstead MP Calvin ‘I carried a knife when I was young’ Bailey had all visited Faizan, the first and second on multiple occasions; as had assorted Waltham Forest councillors, both Labour and Conservative; and as had the leadership of the borough’s police force (four times in 2022 alone).
I also noted that LBWF had included Faizan in its various ‘community programmes’, awarding it grants worth at least £23,500 between 2021 and 2023.
The problem about all of this, I suggested, was that while Faizan was in some respects acting responsibly, for example speaking out against terrorism, it also had demonstrable links with the Islamic Centre of England, which, amongst other things, had been warned by the Charity Commission for holding events in London eulogising the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and indeed was headed by an imam who (the evidence shows) Faizan like many others knew to be the UK representative of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
And while, as I recognised, everyone at Faizan had the right to free speech and association, just like the rest of us, and had certainly not acted illegally, whether public bodies and elected representatives should be granting such an organisation so much support was at best questionable, at worst a serious error of judgement.
However, that’s then, what about now? How are the various parties that I cited in the post feeling, and are any of them regretful?
In particular, I wonder about Stella Creasy. She regularly chooses to lecture residents on social media and implies that she speaks from the moral high ground, but given that Iranian demonstrators – with women at the forefront – are currently being shot in the street, and ever more is emerging about Tehran’s malevolent activities in the UK, its attempts to build networks of influence and silence its critics, does she feel that she made a mistake over Faizan?
Will she apologise?
And will any of the other Great and Good have the grace to follow suit?
One thing is for sure. Neither Stella Creasy, nor Calvin Bailey, nor LBWF councillors, nor the police can claim that at the time when I originally wrote, they had no way of knowing the truth.
And that’s simply because everything I cited in my post as evidence was already easily available in the public domain.
