A matter worth setting aside Cheltenham for.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi is welcome in Britain. Ibrahim Mousawi is fawned upon. Hizb ut-Tahrir operate with impunity.
But the Rt (Dis)Hon Jacqui Smith falls over herself to ban from entry the deputy leader of Likud - who had not, as it happened, ever suggested coming to the UK. Call it a pre-emptive strike.
These things, however, involve the great, if not the good: statesmen, politicians, celebrity terror-masters.
Mehdi Kazemi is nineteen years in age. He came to the UK to study English, in 2004. He left behind, in his native Iran, not only his immediate family, but also his boyfriend.
The position taken towards homosexuality by the current regime in power in Iran needs no discussion. They exult in the judicial murder of all who are accused of that … ‘crime’.
Whilst Mr Kazemi was in the UK, where, it might be worth noting, he has family members and family ties, his boyfriend was betrayed, arrested, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, tortured for information - before, of course, being duly hanged in April of 2006. No one would dare condemn that young man for breaking under the Iranian regime’s equivalent to ‘helping the police with their enquiries’; but break he did, and he gave up the name and identity of Mr Kazemi.
Mr Kazemi, fearing for his life once he learnt of his boyfriend’s execution and the revelation of his own homosexuality to the Iranian thugs of state, naturally applied for asylum in the United Kingdom. As his uncle, a commercial gentleman residing in Hants, notes, even should the Iranian state not manage to find and kill if he were returned to Iran, Mr Kazemi’s father is on record as intending to cleanse the family ‘honour’ by murdering his gay son.
Jacqui Smith and her ministerial jobsworths denied Mr Kazemi asylum. It has apparently been the firm intention of Her Majesty’s Government under this ministry - to the extent that this ministry have ever made a firm intention - to deport Mr Kazemi to his inevitable death at the hands of the barbarians.
Mr Kazemi sought succour from the Dutch, who have a special programme for gay and lesbian Iranians seeking to evade being hanged by the regime in their native land; they returned him, bureaucratically, to the tender mercilessness of Jacqui Smith.
Within a fortnight, he will be deported, unless something very much like a miracle should occur.
Perhaps it shall.
It is the view of the Home Office under this government that the execution of over 4,000 gays and lesbians since the mullahs seized power in Iran does not constitute ‘systematic repression’: cold comfort, one imagines, to Mr Kazemi, or to Ms Pegah Emambakhsh, likewise now facing deportation to the Iran from which she fled in 2005, one step ahead of the state apparatus. Her partner was not so fortunate: she is awaiting the carrying-out of her sentence: death by stoning at the hands of these enlightened gentry. Ms Emambakhsh is another of those of whom the Home Office, Jacqui Smith, and the ministry of the day have been willing to wash their hands, Pilate-like.
Earlier today, Jacqui Smith, under intense cross-party and human-rights-group pressure, agreed to ‘reconsider’ Mr Kazemi’s case - which presumes it was ever really ‘considered’ at all, a fact not readily evident - ‘in light of new circumstances since the original decision was made’: another lie, as there have been no new circumstances. One had not thought that one should be so grateful for this government’s systemic cowardice when confronted.
Mind, there’s been no sudden change of heart at the Home Office as regards Ms Emambakhsh, thus far.
I shan’t speculate on what drives the faceless bureaucrats at the Home Office and their political master - or mistress: I don’t imagine one need speculate as to why the biases seem to run as they do.
I merely say this. To find a more contemptible, vicious, lickspittle, cowardly, liberty-fearing, power-hoarding, undemocratic, crawling, venal, and morally bankrupt government in the history of the United Kingdom or its constituent nations, one would be forced to look very seriously at the governments of Stanley Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain, and indeed Noll Cromwell - and possibly to dismiss them as not measuring up.