A Muslim lawyer who was suspended from her job at the Crown Prosecution Service has been awarded a “record payout” for racial discrimination. Halima Aziz had joked at a security check that “she was being treated like a friend of Bin Laden”. She was suspended and accused of inciting racial hatred, but cleared of all allegations in 2002.
In a similar story, a Muslim police worker has been awarded compensation after colleagues accused him of being a terrorist sympathiser. Notice that The Telegraph reporter, Richard Edwards, decides to inject a totally unrelated fact — that this Muslim police worker was given close to £14,000 compensation, whic hsi more than was given to one of the families of the victims of the July 7 terrorist attacks. What does the decision of an employment tribunal have to do with the awards issued by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA)? And what does it have to do within the context of this story? If the article had been some kind of analysis about awards issued by employment tribunals and the CICA, it may have made some kind of sense (though only if there was an analysis of cases similar to those involving the Muslim police worker, i.e. cases brought on a religious or racial basis). But here it seems Richard Edwards had decided that some vague reference to Muslims and terrorism was enough to make some point (a stab at ‘political correctness’, ‘multiculturalism’, ‘liberalism’, etc.) by invoking the payout awarded to one of the the families of the July 7 terrorist bombings.
Another Asian (Muslim) police officer who was suing the Metropolitan Police Service for racial discrimination has lost his case.
Related: The Met’s race troubles.
