The prosecution said Ahmed was not on trial for being antisemitic, but rather for stirring up racial hatred.
By World Israel News Staff
A Grenfell Tower volunteer was sentenced to 11 months in prison on Friday for blaming Jews for the deadly fire that destroyed the building.
Some 72 people were killed in the fire in a west London residential tower on June 14, 2017. Experts later identified the cause as a malfunctioning fridge-freezer on the fourth floor.
Nonetheless, Muslim aid worker Tahra Ahmed, 51, blamed the Jews.
Just four days after the tragedy, Ahmed posted on Facebook that victims of the fire were “burnt alive in a Jewish sacrifice.”
“I’ve been at the scene, at the protest and at the community meetings and have met many of the victims… some who were still in the same clothes they escaped in,” she wrote.
“They are very real and genuine, their pain and suffering is raw and deep and their disgusting neglect by authorities continues.
“Watch the footage of people trapped in the inferno with flames behind them. “They were burnt alive in a Jewish sacrifice.”
The post went on to link Grenfell to an antisemitic conspiracy that she spread the previous January, The Independent reported.
Another police investigation found that Ahmed’s Facebook was rife with antisemitic content, including a theory aiming to tie the Jews to the Twin Towers destruction in New York on 9/11.
After a trial at the Old Bailey, Ahmed was found guilty in January on two counts of stirring up racial hatred, according to the BBC. On Friday she was sentenced to 11 months in jail.
Ahmed appeared shocked when she understood she was going to prison. “This whole thing is a sham — what is happening to me. For basically two Facebook posts I’m being hung drawn and quartered in a place where murderers are tried,” she said.
Ahmed claimed that the Jews she referred to in the posts were those who belonged to a criminal “cabal” of “the evil elite who are orchestrating everything in order to divide and conquer the world” and that she was not referring to the “common Jew.”
“I have Jewish friends. Nobody ever said ‘Tahra that didn’t come across well,'” she said.
Prosecutor Hugh French said Ahmed’s posts had “crossed the line as to what is acceptable in a liberal society,” the Daily Mail reported.
In his closing speech, defender of the prosecution Benjamin Newton said, “Not everyone who writes something offensive on social media [is prosecuted] because there is a line. She is not on trial for being antisemitic.
“Even if she was, if she came before you and said, ‘Actually, I am predisposed against Jewish people,’ it is not a crime.
“The prosecution has to prove to you that she is guilty of stirring up racial hatred,” he said.