When the fake chemical attacks and ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ letters became public knowledge, I thought that this would be one of three main things, a self attack by a Muslim group in order to gain public sympathy, a genuine violent anti Islam group or a lone nutcase operating on his or her own. At the height of the furore over this story a couple of years back both the Left and various Islamic grievance mongers seemed to be plumping for the scenario that this was the work of some ‘far right’ group and engaged in a high degree of hyperbole about this scenario.

But, as the perpetrator of these incidents has been gaoled for twelve years at The Central Criminal Court, we see that this was not a member or operative from some organised political group, but instead a lone nutcase. There was no ‘vast far right conspiracy’ involved in this, just a stupid and unbalanced individual. This is exactly the conclusion that I came to the more I examined the case prior to the arrest of the perpetrator David Parnham aged 36.

Let’s face it we don’t exactly have an example of the master terrorist here, merely a man who is on the autistic spectrum who did stupid and criminal things completely off his own bat and there seems to be no others involved in these incidents. All the sperging out that groups like Tell Mama did and which the press and politicians such as Sajid Javid did at the time was both pointless and misplaced. These incidents did not as various Islamic ‘Wormtongues’ claimed at the time represented a rising tide of Islamophobia, they were instead the work of one lone nutcase. Those who have tried to make political capital, favourable to Islam, out of these incidents have been shown to have been dishonestly spinning like a top, as there was no organisation behind these incidents, just a man on his own doing his own twisted thing.

It’s telling that although there have been suspicions that Parnham has been feigning mental illness and was said by the judge not to have been suffering from a psychotic interlude at the time of the offences, Parnham will still serve either the whole or part of his sentence in a secure mental hospital. Whilst a significant sentence is justified for sending hoax chemical weapons and threats of violence, it should not be forgotten that Parnham was not the ‘violent Islamophobic group’ that the Left and Muslim groups were looking for, or hoping to find, in order to bolster their narratives.