Also we shouldn’t take lectures from the woke left about the problem of extrapolating from terrible crimes to demonise entire communities. The vast majority of these people just want a new, peaceful life, and they should have every right to apply to enjoy such a life. No, this is not about demonising all asylum seekers in the UK. We need an honest, frank discussion about this new phenomenon of asylum seeker turned terrorist. That’s one life for every year Britain had provided him with a new, safe home, as commentators pointed out. Their British-born, British-educated son, when he was 22, blew himself up at an Ariana Grande pop concert in 2017, taking 22 innocent lives. Abedi’s Libyan parents were given refuge in the UK. Not an asylum seeker, no, but the son of asylum seekers. Then there was Salman Abedi, the bomber of the Manchester Arena. Hassan arrived illegally in the UK in 2015 and was allowed to stay temporarily, in foster care. It failed to detonate properly, meaning it merely injured 30 people, rather than killing scores, as Hassan had intended. Eighteen-year-old Iraqi Ahmed Hassan placed a crudely devised ‘bucket bomb’ on a tube train. In 2017 an asylum seeker carried out the Parsons Green tube attack. He repaid Britain for this permission to remain by going to a park and using a kitchen knife to stab people in the head, neck and eye, all while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. In 2012 he claimed asylum in the UK and in 2018 he was given permission to stay for five years. Last year’s Islamist mass stabbing in Reading was also carried out by an asylum seeker. He reportedly converted to Christianity while in the UK in 2017, though it is not known what religion he was practising at the time of his botched terror attack. Such a cowardly crushing of public discussion of why some asylum seekers turn so violently against the country where they ostensibly want to be citizens threatens to make the problem even worse than it already is.Īl-Swealmeen is understood to have been an asylum seeker with Iraqi and Syrian heritage. You’ll be branded a racist or an Islamophobe even for raising it.

There’s a culture of denial around this problem. In recent years asylum seekers or refugees in the UK have carried out, or attempted to carry out, grotesque acts of ideologically motivated violence against Britons, against their host nation.

Not a huge trend, no, but a trend nonetheless. And even though many people would prefer not to talk about this, that makes him part of a trend. But there’s something we do know about al-Swealmeen: he was an asylum seeker.

The who the seeker the who