‘GENUINE MISTAKE’ TAKES US FOR FOOLS

ONE person with seemingly no intention of surrendering his CBE is Tan Ikram, 59, a judge awarded that honour in 2022 for ‘ services to judicial diversity’.

Last month, Ikram, on the professional networking site LinkedIn, ‘liked’ a post by a barrister called Sham Uddin.

Uddin’s post declared: ‘Free Free Palestine. To the Israeli terrorist both in the United Kingdom, the United States and of course Israel, you can run, you can bomb but you cannot hide — justice will be coming for you.’

Earlier, Uddin had posted the grotesque anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that the massacre of well over 1,000 Israeli Jews on October 7 was ‘a false flag operation’ — that is, a plot by Israel, rather than the terrorist group Hamas. The discovery of these facts caused understandable unease within judicial circles because Ikram is also the judge who decided ‘not to punish’ three women who, seven days after the massacre, took part in a protest in central London while wearing images of paragliders (which is how some Hamas terrorists crossed into Israel to carry out their slaughter).

It was after the Mail on Sunday published the pictures of this incident on its front page, under the headline ‘You Ghouls’, that the police launched a public appeal which led to the arrest of the three women — Heba Alhayek, Pauline Ankunda and Noimutu Taiwo — under the charge of ‘ inviting support for a proscribed organisation’.

Judge Ikram’s decision to give them a conditional discharge, partly on the grounds that ‘emotions ran very high on this issue’ was in any case odd: this was not a heat-ofthemoment action; it involved downloading images and printing them out beforehand for public display.

In light of what subsequently emerged about Tan Ikram’s social media activity, this is nothing less than a damaging blow to public confidence in judicial impartiality.

Yet last Friday, the Crown Prosecution Service, having hastily reviewed Ikram’s behaviour in respect of the case, declared, without explanation, that it would take no action.

The only thing Ikram has said, via a statement issued by the Judicial Office, was: ‘I didn’t know that I’d liked that post. If I did, then it was a genuine mistake.’

What does that mean? That he didn’t understand the meaning of the words he had ‘liked’? Or that his finger pressed the ‘like’ icon as a result of some involuntary muscular spasm? We are all being taken for fools.