Readers may recall the incident when a particularly peace avoiding member of the Religion of Peace was arrested after attacking various Jewish individuals in Stamford Hill, North London, a place that is home to many Orthodox Jews. Well he’s finally been convicted of religiously inspired violence after a long slog through the courts and a considerable time after the incidents in August 2021.

The slog included an initial refusal be the Crown Prosecution Service to prosecute the case on the basis that the assailant one Abdullah Qureshi, aged 29, who comes from Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, was motivated by religious hatred of Jews. The Crown Prosecution Service had initially decided to not consider this case one of religious hatred. However after a campaign by Jewish groups the religious hatred charges were reinstated and Qureshi, who for reasons that will become apparent I’m going to call ‘Mo-Hammered’, pleaded not guilty to the charges even though he’d earlier pleaded guilty to the charges without the religious hatred addition. He was later found guilty and will be sentenced on 22^nd December 2022.

It makes me wonder whether the CPS would have been so quick to drop religious hatred charges if this had been a case of a non-Muslim randomly attacking a Muslim? As someone who has observed for a fair while now how the application of ‘hate crime’ laws has been handled in the UK I can say that I very much doubt that the CPS would be so quick to drop any religious hatred element in a case like this if the alleged victim was Muslim. At the end of the day there was enough evidence in Qureshi’s case for the CPS to eventually bring this case to court and win it which begs the question: Why did not the CPS prosecute this case as a religious hatred one in the first place? That question itself begs another which is are the CPS biased against cases where Jews are the victims? The fact that I can even ask that question is in my view testament to one of the major problems with all ‘hate crime’ laws and that is that not only are they very subjective but they also create different classes of people whom the law treats differently. That for me goes against Deut: 16:18-20 and all that stuff about treating people equally before the law.

I’ve been following this case on and off for a while and some of the details mean that it’s an absolutely bizarre one. Here we have a Muslim man who was not at the time under any psychiatric care, travel hundreds of miles from Dewsbury in order to walk around Stamford Hill randomly attacking Jews. Qureshi the long distance Jew botherer was found when arrested to have on his phone a written copy of a ‘defeat Allah’s enemies’ prayer however nobody from what I can see, not even the Jewish Chronicle which has a pretty good court report for this case, is talking about Islamic Jew hatred or whether it could have been an influence in this case and on Mo-Hammered’s actions.

Sure everyone is talking about how Qureshi, or ‘Mo-Hammered’ as I’ll call him from here on in, claimed that he had no enmity towards Jews and that his violent rampage through Stamford Hill was due to his consumption of alcohol, magic mushrooms and cocaine. However they are not talking about whether Islamic Jew hatred could have been a factor here. Hmmm! I’m not sure I buy that. Lots of people get shitfaced on occasion as Mo-Hammered appears to have done but I’ve rarely known intoxicated individuals travel hundreds of miles in order to attack Jews or any other group for that matter. Maybe mixed in with Mo-Hammered’s coke, booze and hallucinogens is the Islamic Jew hatred that Mo-Hammered’s father, who handed his son into the police, managed to avoid and obviously doesn’t share. Qureshi Senior is by the evidence of his actions a good man, he was appalled at what his son had done to Jews and turned him in. This raises some questions such as: Why hasn’t his son gone the same way and been law abiding? Did someone or some group radicalise Mo-Hammered into his manner of thinking at the time of the attack? Did whoever radicalised him, if that is the case, exploit someone, who might have been a bit on the edge mentally in order to do their bidding in some way?

Something made Mo-Hammered do what he did. It must have been something much more than booze, coke and mushrooms? Maybe mixing such drugs with deep reading of an ideology that doesn’t have in the modern world a good reputation when it comes to its views of Jews is not a good thing to do, a bit like someone mixing Ketamine and booze with country and western music, it can’t be doing good things for the persons head.

What astonishes me about this case is that Mo-Hammered travelled so far in order to carry out these attacks. If he wanted to attack Jews then there are Jews in Manchester which is only thirty odd miles away from Dewsbury, yet he travelled hundreds of miles to Stamford Hill, it’s this matter that makes the intoxication excuse decidedly weird. It’s the equivalent of me taking it into my head after copious quarts of Guinness that people from Middlesborough were the enemy then travelling up there from where I am in order to hit some random local. It’s not a sane thing to do.

Now it could be that Mo-Hammered is definitely insane, after all a court appointed psychiatrist has said that Mo-Hammered is paranoid and showing psychotic symptoms. Mo-Hammered said that he heard voices commanding him to attack Jews but there is no prior record of the defendant having any formal mental health diagnosis. The other bits of Mo-Hammered’s backstory don’t look right either. Did he really travel down to London to see family and visit historic graveyards? I suppose it could be true but this man’s account of his movements might not be accurate.

I’m going to speculate a bit here. There does seem to be a mental health component to this case, how big a factor is difficult to determine but the defendant’s mental fragility is something that might have been noticed and exploited by whoever radicalised Mo-Hammered, if that is what happened. Clever extremists don’t do this sort of lower level attack themselves, they get divvys or the easily manipulated to do that stuff. Maybe Mo-Hammered was one of those divvys who are sent off to be human weapons in this manner. It could even be the case that he was radicalised but the radicalisation was lying somewhat dormant and it was only when he was confronted with real Jews in front of him in London that the radicalisation burst out of him like the monster bursting from John Hurts stomach in the movie ‘Alien’

I’m not sure that we will get to the whole truth about what made Mo-Hammered go and attack Jews so far from his home. It could be madness but then it could be a fair bit more. What I do know is that the possibility that Mo-Hammered’s attacks might have been inspired by Islamic scripture and radicalisers should be discussed much more than it seems to have been discussed. Personally I’d like to know if there is a potential problem out there with radicalised mentally disturbed Muslims being pointed in the direction of areas with a large Jewish population by some person or persons unknown, if that is what has happened here.

It looks likely that Mo-Hammered is going to get a custodial sentence and even if you disregard the religious aspect of this case and treat it as a random attack, which is difficult in this case due to the commonality of the victims, then it would be the right outcome as random street attacks are appalling things that can wreck the lives of their victims. There has been no suggestion that any of the victims of these attacks were engaged in any sort of altercation with Mo-Hammered prior to the attacks, he just attacked random Jewish Londoners. People who were going about their lawful daily business ended up on the receiving end of Mo-Hammered’s violent delusions and got quite severely physically attacked. Random street attacks no matter who the victim or perpetrator are should be punished severely precisely because of their random nature. We can’t have people being attacked in the street for no good reason, it makes our streets and our towns and cities even more unsafe than they are already and increases the general fear of such attacks. However with the Mo-Hammered case the attacks were clearly not entirely random, they targeted Jews and few seem to be asking pertinent questions about why a person from a town with a long and ignominious reputation for Islamic extremism, ended up in Stamford Hill attacking random Jews. As much as I try I can’t completely buy into the idea that Mo-Hammered was just a shitfaced madman, I can’t help but think that his place of origin, the nature of the attacks and the victims, make this something other than merely a case of someone who is intoxicated losing it mentally and going on a rampage. I can’t shake the feeling that there might be something more behind this case than what has been reported.