Bedfordshire Police confirms that it will no longer be advised by Ashuk Ahmed MBE, exposed by CAA as an antisemite
Bedfordshire Police has confirmed that Ashuk Ahmed MBE is “no long [sic] a member” of its Independent Advisory Group (IAG). No additional information or explanation was given.
Campaign Against Antisemitism exposed Mr Ahmed in April in the Daily Mail over his antisemitic social media posts, including the conspiratorial charge that ISIS is a Jewish invention whose horrors are propagated by the “Jewish media and their gentile pawns” in order to “justify more slaughter.” Mr Ahmed also posted a conspiracy theory video entitled “Humanity United against AshkeNAZI”, an extreme antisemitic group which claims to “expose…the current take over of the United States by the Jewish Ashkenazi tribe.” Ahmed further claimed that “Zionists control half the world”, told racist jokes in which Jews spitefully spit in Arabs’ clothes and urinate in their drinks, claimed “Jewish democracy” means bloodlust, wrote that the Labour and Conservative Parties are in the grip of their “Zionist paymasters” and painted the Israeli Prime Minister with blood dripping from his mouth while feasting on a child (reminiscent of the blood libel, a medieval antisemitic trope).
Despite interviewing Mr Ahmed under caution about the posts, Bedfordshire Police allowed him to remain on the IAG, which advises on hate crime among other duties. He quietly stood down following a complaint to police in November 2014, but then returned as Vice Chair of Bedfordshire Police’s South IAG.
When we raised the matter with Bedfordshire Police in April, Chief Superintendent David Boyle told us that “there have been no concerns raised among the force of impartiality from any current serving members [of the IAG].”
Astonishingly, Mr Ahmed was also selected as the Liberal Democrat candidate for the Parliamentary constituency of Luton South, despite the Party already knowing that he was an antisemite. The Party only moved to suspend Ahmed when Campaign Against Antisemitism exposed him in the Daily Mail. Mr Ahmed clearly has some standing in his local community and was awarded an MBE in 2009 for “services to young people.” He has worked as a community development officer for North Hertfordshire Council, and he has also worked at a radio station which received the Queen’s Award for Volunteering and which purportedly works to tackle extremism.
We are pleased that Bedfordshire Police has at long last confirmed that Mr Ahmed no longer advises the force, though we remain deeply dissatisfied by the way that the force has handled the matter. Bedfordshire Police was fully aware of Mr Ahmed’s views, having investigated him themselves, and those views should have disqualified him from being considered for advisory roles. Bedfordshire Police still has questions to answer.
We have now written to the Honours Forfeiture Committee to recommend that Mr Ahmed be stripped of his MBE.
