The firs part of this article is a cross-post from Mark Baynes’s Love Wapping blog.
[For a bit of context, my opinion of Ohid Ahmed hardened in August 2008 at a big screen showing in Victoria Park of the Beijing Olympics closing ceremony. Only some 100 residents turned up and they all sat around on the grass mingling with each other. In the middle of all this, the council had erected a small marquee with a fenced off garden specially for ‘VIPs’. With free food and drink of course. In that marquee were three councillors, two of whom are now Lutfurites, Rofique Ahmed and Ohid Ahmed. Not once throughout the entire event did any of them set foot outside to talk to residents. For them, it was just about prestige and freebies. It was mentioned in a report for the East London Advertiser at the time.]
Here is Mark Baynes’s piece.
Deputy Mayor Cllr. Ohid Ahmed health scare update
I am sure that residents of Wapping take a great interest in the health and general wellbeing of our elected representatives.
So it is with great relief that I can report that Tower Hamlets Deputy Mayor Cllr Ohid Ahmed has got over his recent bout of flu.
“What flu?” I hear you asking.
The flu that prevented the Deputy Mayor from turning up to the St Katharine’s and Wapping Community Safety Walkabout on Friday 22 November at 4pm.
Cllr. Ohid Ahmed was on the list of attending officers but after a slight delay we were told that he had flu / was feeling unwell so the walk went ahead without him.
And very interesting it was too.
No need for concern
Since then the state of the Deputy Mayor’s health has been of some concern to us here at Love Wapping so it was great to discover via the wonders of Facebook that Cllr. Ohid Ahmed was looking fit and well only a few hours later that very same day!
A fit and well Cllr. Ohid Ahmed at a dinner on the evening of Friday 22 Nov 2013
In fact he had recovered from his flu so quickly that he was pictured enjoying dinner with friends at the Marriott Hotel, Grosvenor Square, London. (For those of you not on Facebook we borrowed the pic, but we are sure no one will mind given the circumstances.)
Trees are good
Oddly enough this dinner was for Trees for Change, a campaign to plant 30,000 trees in Africa. Great idea.
Wapping Woods has quite a few trees too so let’s hope that next time there is a Community Safety Walkabout in Wapping the Deputy Mayor is fit enough to attend.
UPDATE:
I’ve now had a look at Ohid’s Facebook page and see that this meal at the Marriott in the West End was a “pre-GPU meal”.
The GPU is the Islamic Global Peace and Unity event that’s been taking place at the ExCeL centre this weekend. Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell has condemned those, including Boris Johnson, who have sent messages of support for it because its list of speakers contains the names of seven “extremist clerics”.
By way of example he picks out one:
The Sheikh claims the toleration of homosexuality is a sign of social regression:
“For those who have been around for a little bit longer than those who are eighteen or nineteen, look at how this own society and culture has evolved in the way it looks at homosexuals. In our own time, I remember as a kid in the eighties, which gives you an idea how old I was, growing up in the eighties I grew up, OK? I remember how homosexuals were looked down upon and the names that were given to these people, and how disgusted the average masses were with that segment of society. Now look, now look at how we have regressed, not progressed.”
http://tifrib.com/yasir-qadhi/
He says Jews control Islamic studies and want to destroy Muslims:
“You go to America, you find that 95% of the Islamic Studies professors are Jews, you know that? 95% of Islamic Studies [sic] are Jews. And 0% of Judaic Studies [sic] are Muslims. I am not advising any Muslim to waste his time studying Judaism but I’m saying, why are Jews studying Islam? There is a reason, not that they want to help us, they want to destroy us […] they want to bring about doubts, look at the doubts that exist, look at the divisions, the discord, look at the disunity, look at all these ideologies that are being spread (4). Know that the Yahood [Jews] and the Kuffar [Infidels] like this type of thing.”
Also on the list of speakers (the first name on the list, in fact) is Lutfur Rahman (who is not an extremist cleric). Actually, Lutfur was given star billing at the end of the conference, speaking this evening just after a Saudi princess.
So you can understand just why it was so important for his deputy, Ohid Ahmed, to drag himself off his deathbed and head to the West End hotel (by cab, I wonder…)
Trial by Jeory 