The three Tower Hamlets schoolgirls and Azmal Alam (Poplar schoolboy murdered )
Neighbourly | 24.02.2015 15:23 | Anti-racism | Culture | Indymedia | London | World
It is a very odd plea as it leaves out the local Tower Hamlets Council from any
expectation that it must discharge the duty to provide support to the local population with the £Billion plus budget that the public already allows the Council to claim from a variety of established sources
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/24/muslim-girls-isis-teenage-east-london
It is a very odd plea as it leaves out the local Tower Hamlets Council from any
expectation that it must discharge the duty to provide support to the local population with the £Billion plus budget that the public already allows the Council to claim from a variety of established sources
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/24/muslim-girls-isis-teenage-east-london
Lets assume that this Guardian article has been commissioned and published by those who are aware of what 'the East End' is like.
Lets assume that they are aware of the hundreds of British Statutes (Acts of Parliament) and Statutes-derived powers that are available
to employees of local borough councils such as Tower Hamlets Council. Lets accept that the Guardian does in fact (collectively, editorially) believe in making Society safe, secure and genuinely informed.
If all these three assumptions/premisses are true then the question is - what reason stopped the writer from dealing with the overwhelmingly
pivotal failure of the local Council?
Isn't it true that Tower Hamlets has, and has had for more than a decade, elected councillors the majority of whom are also Muslim?
If this is true then what has the Guardian to say to justify the total
absence of Tower Hamlets the local Council from what has been
discussed in relation to these three schoolgirls and others like them?
What have the Councillors ever done to represent the population
by taking active, rigorous, sustained part in the debate about all aspects of the issues that are now agitating so many people both in the East End and elsewhere and for ver valid reasons?
If you look at the records of the Council itself, you will find that
most minutes of committee meetings (in the years before the Council was
changed from being led by a collegiate leadership into an elected-executive-mayor-controlled one) are absolutely empty on the key issues and topics and that the nearest that Tower Hamlets Councillors ever came to engaging with the voters (in the period outside of a vote-begging weeks immediately before any election) had nothing at all to do with what
the debate here has been about.
It may surprise a Martian but people in Tower Hamlets are not
surprised that their local Council is a dead deaf dire den of
pettiness among councillors.
As from the first week of February, Tower Hamlets Council has been in the news about a range of allegations against the executive mayor.
These allegations are not about his silence on the issues we are
referring to here.
The allegations are about rigged votes in May 2014.
If you look at the list of names that have featured in any media
reports about Tower Hamlets, you will find a mixture of Labour and ex-Labour ones as well as the one unmistakable Conservative, Peter Golds.
They have been engaged in encounters and rivalries at various times making allegations against one another about a set number of
topics, mostly to do with alleged Muslims extremism against unidentified members of the public and about alleged homophobia.
But nowhere will you come across any Tower Hamlets Councillor, either in the current batch or in the previous ones dating all the way back to 1986 (when Labour was defeated for the first time by the SDP ‘Focus Team’ led by Eric Flounders) who has made it their democratic duty to report to the Council on what was going on on Council housing estates.
It is not a side issue.
Tower Hamlets still has dozens of social housing estates
where the atmosphere has been out of control and oppressively, dangerously anti-social. This is true now and this is true going back to the
1990s.
Tower Hamlets Councillors know this.
Tower Hamlets Council staff know this.
The Metropolitan Police Force funded to protect the people in Tower Hamlets has known this.
The MPs have known this as well.
So why is it that none of the above "authority" groups has made any
noise about what goes on on the housing estates?
What do the young people do?
What guidance do they receive?
What did Tower Hamlets Council have to say when a gang of schoolboys, all Bangladeshi, all Muslim, all brought up in the East End, murdered another
boy - a pupil at the Langdon Park secondary school in Poplar - with identical religious, cultural and social backgrounds?
Tower Hamlets Council did not even pass a motion deploring the murder far less condemning it
Imagine what the Tower Hamlets Councillors would have done if, by some additionally tragic difference and twist in the makeup or composition of the group of the murderers, any of those guilty of the crime happened to have been white.
The Guardian, rightly, would have reported the outburst of outrage of Tower Hamlets Councillors at the highly tense situation that would rapidly develop across the East End of London following a murder of a Bangladeshi boy
by a mixed group or by a white group.
Yet the Guardian has not pointed this silence out and the murder took place a year and half ago.
That suggests that the Editorial Policy of the Guardian is based on the acceptance of intra ethnic intra faith atrocities like the murder of the Langdon Park Schoolboy Azmal Alam.
How, then, is that acceptance different from the atrocities which are being reportedly perpetrated by the Isis and others (of current and contemporary descriptions)?
How do the three Bethnal Green Academy School-girls differ in their
reported acceptance (through ‘grooming’ or otherwise - q.v. Sara Khan, BBC TV Monday 23 February 2015) of an internecine culture of mutual brutality and violence from the actual murder of Azmal Alam by a gang of fellow
Bangladeshi youths less than 2 years ago in the same Borough of Tower Hamlets?
Where are the records - there are none, the writer has checked over and over again - of what scripted pontificatory pronouncements were issued by anyone on behalf of Tower Hamlets Council, which is situated within one mile of where Azamal Alam was murdered?
Does Tower Hamlets Council take Community Safety seriously?
If it does, why has there been this big blank about Azmal Alam and all the detailed and lethal implications his murder has for not just the immediate
family of the victim but for all of Society?
Answers must be sought and sought truthfully urgently
Neighbourly