British police answerable to Israel?

It sounds like a typical storm in a tea cup, but this latest over-reaction has more serious undertones: Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair has ordered an urgent inquiry into why a Muslim police officer and member of the diplomatic protection group, PC Alexander Omar Basha, whose wife is Lebanese, had been allowed his request not to be on duty at the Israeli embassy during the brutal Israeli onslaught on Lebanon. We do not know the full details of the request yet, but his superiors who approved the temporary reassignment must have agreed with his concern of feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.

Requests of this nature are nothing unusual. Of course, a police officer is expected to put his duty before his personal convictions. However, an officer might feel that being posted in a confrontational role in a neighbourhood where he has relatives might lead to reprisals on his family or he might ask not to have to deal with certain situations after a personal trauma of a similar nature, for example the death of one of his own children. It is honourable of an officer to state conflicts of interest, and the service is usually flexible enough to respond to them. Decisions of this kind are taken regularly within the force and are not usually questioned. A call for an inquiry by the top echelon of the force indicates political pressure behind the scenes.

There has been no inquiry into the July 7 bombings in London yet. There has been no inquiry into the bungled up Forest Gate raid, although we have since learnt that two million pounds were spent in pursuing a false lead. There would be no calls for an inquiry had a Jewish officer asked not to be posted guarding a mosque or an Arab embassy nor if a Muslim officer had asked to be excused from carrying out a raid on a mosque. But throw the name Israel into the ring and everybody will jump to attention. Britain is at risk of yielding to the Israeli lobby and becoming its lackey just like America.

When Charles de Menezes was executed by anti-terrorist police on an underground train we learnt that the new shoot-to-kill policy adopted under operation Kratos was modelled on training the elite SO19 firearms officers received from Israel. Until the fatal incident the public had been kept in the dark about the police training link between the two countries and the change in policy. These are worrying trends. With the new powers given to the police by the government on the basis of a hyped up terror threat to Britain, the country is gradually turning into a police state. With its sensitivity towards everything Muslim it is not too far-fetched to imagine that the police itself is coming under Israeli occupation, no longer answerable to the people it was intended to serve, but to outside interests.