It appears that Abjol Miah, the candidate for the Lib Dems that they’d put up in the Shadwell ward of Tower Hamlets council, was just too scummy for even the Lib Dems to countenance tolerating. A few day ago this blog published a story, based on an article previous published by Guido Fawkes, about how Miah, who had shared anti-Semitic videos by former KKK leader David Duke, had been put up as a Lib Dem candidate.
However, it seems that the Lib Dems have finally realised that Abjol Miah is such a scumbag that even the Lib Dems, those eternal Janus-faced political opportunists, are finding that they cannot stomach. Either that or the massive amount of criticism the Lib Dems have got for choosing a man who Tweeted his belief that ‘Jews are joining ISIS’ and that American leftist celebrity is a ‘Zionist Jew’ along with sharing KKK-aligned videos, has made the Lib Dems realised that Miah is a scumbag. Fair enough, lots of parties can make mistakes in candidate appointments, but the Lib Dems should have known, through well documented coverage of Miah’s association with the Islamist group IFE and with the extremism-linked East London Mosque, that he is a scumbag.
Guido Fawkes is now reporting that the Lib Dems have decided to drop Miah as a candidate for their party. This in my view is a welcome thing for the Lib Dems to do but they shouldn’t have selected this scumbag as a candidate in the first place.
Guido said:
Earlier this week Guido reported on the Liberal Democrat candidate for a local by-election in the rotten borough of Tower Hamlets. Their candidate, Abjol Miah, had shared deeply anti-Semitic content including a video by former KKK leader David Duke. He also tweeted alleging Jews are joining ISIS, and “Zionist Jew Bill Maher“.
After Guido’s article, the Lib Dems quietly suspended Miah as a candidate and a member of the party and have suspended their Shadwell campaign altogether. So far the Labour Party look to be sticking by their hate preacher fan candidate in the same election…
Even though the Lib Dems have dumped Miah, the party is still coming out of this with an enormous amount of egg on both of this duplicitous party’s faces. The reason is this. It is not as if Miah has hidden his Jew hatred and neither has he hidden the fact that he is a fan of Islamist politics and of entryism into ostensibly mainstream political parties. The well respected centre-Left blog Harry’s Place for example has been aware of Miah’s dodgyness since at least 2010. If the press and centrist blogs can be fully appraised of why Miah is a scumbag then why on Earth were the Lib Dems not so appraised? I suspect that there may have been elements within the Lib Dems who may have been fully aware that Miah is a scumbag but realising that he is a scumbag that is popular with local Muslims in Tower Hamlets, put him up as a candidate anyway.
Whilst it is good that the Lib Dems have dumped Miah, I will not credit them with making the right moral decision for solid moral reasons. I suspect that the Lib Dems are being highly cynical here and may not have cared at all about Miah’s dodgyness, but they do care about the negative attention that choosing Miah as a candidate has brought them. The abandonment of Miah is little to do with doing the right thing, but merely damage limitation. Sadly I don’t think that this is the end of the political road for the appalling Miah, I suspect that at some point down the line he will end up either as a Labour candidate or as a candidate for some Islamic communal party, although unfortunately these days it is getting harder and harder to tell the difference between Labour and any overtly Islamic party.
