Police sacked hate crime adviser who warned force favoured Muslims over Jews

From the Telegraph

Bradford panel chairman accused of ‘inflammatory’ comments after speaking out over Islamist’s attack on synagogue

The chairman of a policing scrutiny panel was sacked after she complained that officers were avoiding the “elephant in the room” of Islamist extremism in a meeting about an anti-Semitic terrorist attack.

After last October’s attack on a synagogue in Manchester, the woman accused West Yorkshire Police of trying to appease Muslims rather than focusing on the Jewish community.

She was told she was being removed as chairman of the Bradford Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel because of her “divisive and inflammatory” comments, which had prompted complaints from Muslim police officers taking part in the meeting.

It followed another incident in which she was accused of “hate speech” by members of the police force for defending the public’s right to criticise the Prophet Mohammed.

The woman, a retired academic in her 60s, told The Telegraph that the letter informing her of her removal from the security panel “sounded like a threat” because the senior officer who wrote it implied that complainants had been demanding her personal details and that consideration had been given to whether she had committed a hate crime.

She suggested the letter had been written “for the Muslim men who complained to get him to shut me up – and he did as they asked”.

The former panel chairman, who has asked not to be named, is now seeking a formal apology from Sir John Robins, the West Yorkshire Police Chief Constable.

She is being helped by the Free Speech Union and its founder, Lord Young, who suggested the force was “more concerned with protecting the feelings of Muslim community leaders than protecting Jews from terrorist attacks”.

The distinguished academic was approached in 2022 to volunteer on the scrutiny panel. . . She was later elected as chairman, but within months Muslim police officers began demanding her removal.

In April last year, the panel reviewed the case of a man who had been charged with a hate crime after he rang a police helpline and told the Muslim call handler that the Prophet Mohammed was a paedophile, citing disputed historical evidence that Mohammed married a six-year-old called Aisha and consummated the marriage when she was nine.

The panel chairman argued that, while what the man had said was “deeply unpleasant”, it was not a crime, because criticising a religious figure is not a criminal offence. A panel of lawyers agreed with her and the case was downgraded to a non-crime hate incident, but it led to calls from West Yorkshire Police staff for her removal.

Read the e-mail exchanges calling for her removal for merely stateing the truth. Mohamed did consumate his ownership of little Aisha when she was 9 years old. Her own testimony in the ahadith says so. 

## does not seem to think calling Muhammad (the Prophet of Islam) a paedophile is a Hate Crime or even a Hate Incident. She has stated that the Prophet married a 9 year old ######## and she is clearly being not only influenced by the right wing media/social media but is in fact propagating their statements…I believe she has made her position untenable

## made a number of comments that I found deeply troubling. She stated, “We all know which community is behind the attack,” and insisted we “need to address the elephant in the room”. She went on to blame political developments over the past 10 years for the incident and asked which key locations we would be focusing on…########…despite this, ######## pressed further, saying, “Come on just say it, you won’t be paying attention to any churches.”…her comments showed no consideration for others on the call, particularly Muslim colleagues…

I don’t know the lady in question…some of the wording used on the meeting today, I noted in my daybook; “there is one community that this is coming from”, “just say it how it is, we are not stupid”. It appeared she was insinuating that the hate towards the Jewish community was from the Muslim community only and Muslims (2 billion or so worldwide) themselves. She also mentioned “the Elephant in the room”, again insinuating that “Muslins” were the the Elephant in the room.

Three of the six complaints about the woman were made within the space of two and a quarter hours on Oct 3, the day of the meeting and the day after the attack on the synagogue.

She was informed of the decision to remove her in a letter from Bradford District Commander Richard Padwell, who said that her comments in the meeting were “not being recorded as a hate crime” and “nor will I be providing your personal details to those community members who have concerns about comments you made on 2nd October”.

The woman felt the letter had sinister overtones by even mentioning hate crimes or personal details.  She was interviewed by the Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson

It was in October last year, when two men were killed in a terrorist attack at a synagogue in Manchester, that Elaine (who has asked for her name to be changed) realised the awful truth about West Yorkshire Police. Even after the attempted mass murder of Jews, officers in Bradford prioritised the feelings of Muslims and censored any criticism of Islam.

“I could not believe what I was hearing,” Elaine recalls. “I was taking part in this emergency Teams meeting hosted by West Yorkshire Police that day after the horrific attack on the synagogue. It was chaired by a white female inspector. She was very fair, very strict and didn’t take any nonsense, but she was under constant pressure from the Muslim men in the meeting…

“The whole meeting wasn’t about what it should have been about. [It should have been about], ‘How can we protect the Bradford synagogue and the Jewish population?” Instead, she says, much “[was about], ‘We Muslims need protecting because we are now at risk of anti-Muslim reprisals.’” (She) says there was a “clear contradiction” between Muslim members of the panel claiming “immediate victim status”, as well as their insistence that “we don’t yet know the identity of the attacker”.

The woman police inspector who was chairing said: “Our activities are intelligence-led. There is no intelligence of any danger to any mosques.” She repeated that fact several times. “But the men kept on about how worried they were, [saying]: ‘Our women are too afraid to go out, and we need police protection and CCTV.’”

Although there was a promise of police presence “for a while” at the Bradford synagogue, in more than an hour’s discussion, the terrorist atrocity in Manchester was barely mentioned, Elaine says. She reckons the meeting was about half Muslim and half non-Muslim, but “even the non-Muslim people, especially those from the council, were taking the Muslim line”.

She was appalled by the “accepted perspective” of the meeting. “They were totally flipping the argument from ‘Jews are at risk’ to ‘Muslim safety must be our focus’. It was shocking,”

The next day, the Teams meeting reconvened, but the white female police inspector had been replaced by a Muslim male inspector. (No explanation was offered for the change at the time.) He began by saying that “all places of worship in Bradford” would now be monitored, Elaine says. By then, they knew the identity of the Manchester terrorist, Jihad Al-Shamie, a Muslim of Syrian descent. Surely, the job of the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel should be to discuss ways to address the problem of extremism within parts of the Muslim community?

Elaine was astonished when it became clear that, despite everything that had been said the previous day, additional security measures would now be put in place for mosques. ” . . . I’m sure that lobbying had gone on,” she says.

“Of course, I was intimidated. I knew that I was sticking my head over the top, but I had such a sense of injustice about the victims and the rest of the Jewish community that I knew I had to speak out. To have stayed silent in order to keep in line with a false narrative about the synagogue attack putting Muslims at risk would have been unconscionable.”

She deliberately chose her words with care, telling the meeting that the people there represented all communities in Bradford. She said they had to address “the elephant in the room. We know who the attacker is and what community he comes from. We’ve got to be able to address this openly, and if we can’t do it here, there’s no hope.”

Another meeting had been planned for the following Monday, but Elaine didn’t get the usual notification ahead of time. She soon found out why – she had been sacked. An unpleasant letter from Chief Superintendent Richard Padwell, the district commander for Bradford said complaints had been raised by six separate individuals (community members and police officers) who had been on the Teams meeting.

My first impression when I met Elaine in a Leeds hotel is of robust, good-humoured decency – a warm, exceptionally clever woman in her 60s possessed of a wry wisdom and moral toughness we associate with plain-speaking Yorkshire folk.

Elaine tells me she enjoyed the panel’s unpaid work, which drew on the cultural and diplomatic skills she had developed as a consultant on complex security issues in the Middle East and the higher education sector.

In November 2024, Elaine was driving into Shipley when she passed a large electronic sign by the side of the road – the type usually reserved for announcements about speed limits and accidents – flashing the message: “Have you been a victim of Islamophobia?” She emailed a police contact to establish who was behind the sign saying: “I think it’s highly divisive and deprioritises all other sorts of ‘hate crimes.’” She never found out who was responsible.

For three years, Elaine served dutifully on the Hate Crime Scrutiny Panel, eventually becoming chairman. Despite winning a vote to lead the panel, there was a clear reluctance to tell her so and to depose the incumbent (a Muslim man). It was only after repeated nagging over several months that Elaine’s appointment was finally confirmed in December 2024. “It’s my understanding that, when I was chair, Bradford was the only police scrutiny panel in West Yorkshire not to be chaired by a Muslim man,” she says.

“I was frightened,” Elaine says. “And I don’t frighten easily. I have worked nationally and internationally at a very high level, including lots of work at the UN in Geneva and Washington DC on biosecurity. All my teaching has been about how scientists can protect their work from terrorists and their own governments.

“I’ve been contracted by the Ministry of Defence and the US State Department for multiple pieces of research. I’ve travelled for this all over the world. I even taught biosecurity to Iraqi weapons scientists in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussain for the US state department, for goodness sake!  . . .”

Elaine points out that she has taught in the Middle East and former Soviet states. “I’m used to dealing with difficult matters in sensitive situations. Yet, here in Bradford, the most basic, anodyne comments and questions are shut down and accused of hate crime. Supported by the police! What on earth? It is really shocking to realise that our taxpayer-funded police service is, in effect, in the hands of Muslim activists. I am not saying they are all extremists, of course not. But it is totally unacceptable to see the police behaving like this.”

It is utterly outrageous actually. It makes me think of something a senior source at Essex Police said to me: “What you have to bear in mind is what the police fear most is the Muslims kicking off.”

In his letter, Padwell conceded that her offence (ahem) “is not being recorded as a hate crime”.

What came next, though, is truly chilling. After saying that he would “not be sharing the circumstances of your departure with other community members on the scrutiny panel”, Padwell added: “Nor will I be providing your personal details to those community members who have concerns about comments you made on Oct 2.”

“It sounded like a threat. . . Why would he mention sharing my details unless people had asked for them? Who wants them and why? It’s really horrible. It does knock you off balance. It does. Because you know you’re a decent, law-abiding person and suddenly you’re being treated as if you’re the opposite.”

She immediately contacted the Free Speech Union, who flew into action, lodging a subject access request for Elaine with West Yorkshire Police. They uncovered a number of troubling remarks from “deeply offended” Muslim officers.

Lord Young of Acton, the general secretary of the Free Speech Union, says: “You couldn’t ask for a clearer example of two-tier policing. West Yorkshire Police seems more concerned with protecting the feelings of Muslim community leaders than protecting Jews from terrorist attacks.

Lord Young is right to place Elaine’s case in a much wider context. Historically, West Yorkshire Police has faced multiple accusations of appeasing Muslims at the expense of the wider community. Like turning a blind eye to rape gangs to avoid provoking “community tensions”, aka upsetting Muslims. (Bradford has, quite remarkably, largely escaped scrutiny for industrial-scale depravity by Pakistani-origin men, and may yet turn out to be the worst of all.)

In Bradford, a senior officer in the very police force that was denounced for not protecting a Batley Grammar School teacher from Islamist intimidation and threats, has punished Elaine for drawing “inappropriate” attention to “the elephant in the room”, even as it becomes a herd of raging pachyderms.

West Yorkshire is, notably, the force whose Chief Constable John Robins said last year that he wants discrimination against white British job candidates to be legal in order to boost the number of ethnic minorities among his officers and across the country. . . . Meanwhile, religious language has become commonplace in meetings and around the force’s headquarters, to her bafflement. “…the police are too scared of seeming racist to object.”

One grain of hope, perhaps, lies in the fact that Reform UK and the Conservatives – both of which have been challenging the state’s capitulation to Islamism – stormed to first and second place in the Bradford local elections on May 7. Those who hate the separatism in places like Bradford, and the refusal of public institutions to tackle it, are not going gentle into that good night.

Elaine… says she knows that she will probably be recognised from this article and that may put her in danger. But, in Yorkshire, they make their women strong like their tea, thank goodness. . . she coped splendidly with Saddam’s weapons scientists, but was brought down by a toxic and cowardly Chief Superintendent.

“Don’t you worry about me, love, keep holding their feet to the fire,” she says laughing. As long as there are Elaines, Britain will never die.