How did an alleged Hamas supporter, who appears to have been filmed saying he wants to see Jews killed en masse, manage to waltz into the UK? A Palestinian man named Abu Wadee arrived on a small boat last week. Yesterday, he was arrested. Apparently, he is planning to seek asylum – and no one would be surprised if he were granted it.
Wadee may have originally come from Gaza, but he is hardly a refugee fleeing war. He actually left Palestine before Hamas’s attack started the war on 7 October 2023. Prior to this, he was allegedly a member of the so-called Tyre-Burning Unit, a group of militant extremists who would routinely chuck firebombs, rocks and other homemade projectiles at the Israeli soldiers stationed on the border with Gaza.
Fears about Wadee were initially aroused by his own prolific social-media use. He has spent the past few years drifting across Europe, posting videos on TikTok to his 170,000 followers (his account was only recently suspended). His Facebook page features images appearing to show him brandishing weapons and videos in which he apparently says he’s willing to ‘die for the sake of Allah’. In one particularly harrowing video, posted on Facebook last September, he seems to be praying for the death of Jews: ‘Allah, kill them one by one, and don’t leave a single one. Allah, destroy them completely, disperse them completely and make the Earth fall from under their feet.’
It beggars belief that someone like Wadee could ever end up in Britain. He has now been arrested by Immigration Enforcement, but the Home Office initially refused to confirm what it knew about his background and even whether he was roaming free. Given that Home Office officials have previously admitted that they don’t actually know the whereabouts of large numbers of asylum seekers, it was not unreasonable to assume that Wadee could well have been wandering the UK unimpeded.
Nor would it be a great surprise if Wadee’s asylum plea is eventually accepted. In recent weeks, there have been numerous cases where even convicted criminals and extremists have been granted asylum in the UK on spurious ‘human rights’ grounds. Last year, an ISIS propagandist from Sudan was not only able to successfully claim asylum, but also British citizenship. Even after British intelligence services discovered his terrorist sympathies, he was unable to be deported under the European Convention on Human Rights, because he could potentially face torture and persecution in Sudan. This was despite the fact that he had been routinely travelling back and forth between Sudan and the UK for years.
Worse, demonstrating support for a terror group can sometimes help to bolster, rather than hinder, an asylum claim. Just last month, a Nigerian woman who tried and failed eight times to claim asylum was given the right to stay in the UK on her ninth attempt – only after she joined the Indigenous People of Biafra, a terror group proscribed by the Nigerian government. The judge even acknowledged that she had joined up ‘solely to create an asylum claim’, but let her stay anyway.
Britain’s border crisis is now a ticking timebomb. Our incompetent, virtue-signalling elites have failed to secure our borders and have allowed our asylum system to be routinely abused. This can only end in tragedy.
Lauren Smith is a staff writer at spiked.
