Thank you, Britain, for fighting Taliban
Calais boy speaks after Lily Allen’s tearful ‘apology’
THE teenage refugee in Calais who Lily Allen apologised to ‘on behalf of my country’ thanked Britain yesterday for fighting the Taliban.
Shamsher Sherin, 13, reduced the singer to tears during a BBC interview to highlight the plight of unaccompanied children living in the squalid Jungle camp.
After learning of his struggle to reach Britain, Allen said: ‘We’ve bombed your country, put you in the hands of the Taliban and now put you in danger of risking your life to get into our country. I apologise on behalf of my country. I’m sorry for what we have put you through.’
Her comments provoked an online backlash, but she went further yesterday when she compared British action in the Middle East to Islamic State.
The 31-year-old wrote on Twitter: ‘Isis kill innocent people by the way, they cause horrific pain and destruction across the world, so do we. I’m sorry for that.’
But Shamsher, who fled Afghanistan to avoid conscription by the Taliban, told the Daily Mail he was grateful to the British servicemen who had fought to try to rid his country of the Islamist insurgents.
He said: ‘The British Government didn’t make any problems for me in Afghanistan.’
Asked what he thought about British military attacks on the Taliban in the country, he beamed and said: ‘I was happy.’
The son of a vegetable seller, Shamsher grew up in Jalalabad, the capital of the Nangarhar province in the East of Afghanistan, which is dominated by Taliban fighters. He said: ‘My family were threatened many times by the Taliban.
‘They kidnapped me and brought me to the Taliban training centre and gave me jobs to try to make me a fighter. They target children.’
In their desperation to flee, his family sold their home to raise the funds to escape from the area.
Shamsher left Afghanistan about nine months ago and began a gruelling six-month trek halfway across the globe.
He walked most of the journey, but he also used about £5,400 to take buses, motorbikes and cars as he travelled through Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Italy before finally arriving in France three months ago.
Now he spends nights alone in a tent in the Jungle. He is one of between 800 and 1,000 unaccompanied children in the shantytown facing an uncertain future when it is bulldozed this month.
‘I’m so worried about that,’ he said. ‘Where will we go?’
His says his father, Hazrat Gul Sherin, went on ahead of him to set up a home for the family, and now lives in Birmingham.
But in the chaos of escaping Afghanistan he said he lost contact with his whole family.
Shamsher is two months into the lengthy process of applying to move to the UK. But due to the hold-ups he said he has also tried to jump on lorries to get to Britain.
He said: ‘Life here is very hard. It is very cold, especially at night.
‘I hope I can make it to England as soon as possible.’
Allen’s apology for the nation to Shamsher, broadcast on BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire programme this week, prompted a wave of negative comments online.
She said: ‘It just seems that at three different intervals in this young boy’s life, the English in particular have put you in danger.’
But some viewers claimed her apology was ‘ridiculous’.
Richard Hughes tweeted: ‘ You should be ashamed of yourself, apologising on behalf of a nation and its people. Just who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Trekked halfway across the globe’
Poor Lily Allen. All the pop singer wanted to do was visit the refugee camp in Calais and draw attention to the plight of the orphans stuck there. And what did she get for her troubles? Nothing but abuse on social media. Which is still ongoing.
Then, yesterday afternoon, she walked out of the campfire pot and into a raging inferno when she compared the British Army — and perhaps even the British people — to Islamic State.
‘ISIS kill innocent people . . . they cause horrific pain and destruction across the world [and] so do we,’ she concluded.
At which point, any sympathy I had for her swiftly evaporated.
For Lily is not misunderstood, she’s just another indulged idiot who fondly imagines herself to be a daring and provocative political voice. And this year, we have had a bellyful of them. The story so far . . . Darling Lily got a fabulous manicure, put on an ever-so-serious, no-make-up face and took a camera crew with her to visit ‘The Jungle’ camp in Calais. (There ain’t much in the way of practical work a gal can do with those nails, but never mind.)
It looked quite good when Lily was filmed ladling out the soup for five minutes. Then she met a 13-year-old Afghan boy hoping to join his father in Birmingham.
The 31-year-old mother of two started crying, which must have been very confusing for the little boy, not to mention scary — but at least she didn’t sing.
Lily went on to apologise ‘on behalf of my country’ for his situation.
She said: ‘We’ve bombed your country, put you in the hands of the Taliban and now put you in danger of risking your life to get into our country. I’m sorry for what we have put you through.’
Uproar ensued. Some thought it rather self-aggrandising of Lily to speak for the nation and air her simplistic views as if they were shared by us all — though her fans were pleased she had done so. However, the general consensus was that she was naive and silly, especially when she blamed the Conservatives for everything, which she always does.
Those with genuine grievances, who have good cause to worry about the numbers of migrants who want to come to the UK and increase the burden on an already struggling system, were dismissed as ultra-nationalist, swivel-eyed lunatics.
‘Those are problems caused by Tory cuts, not migrants,’ she blithely tweeted.
oh, God! Just when we think we simply couldn’t bear another moralising celebrity cramming their Playskool views down our throats, along comes Lily to torment us.
She joins the likes of singer Charlotte Church and actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who are united in their sense of aggrieved righteousness, bomb-proof piety and belief that the Government can do no good.
What is it they want? To put Jeremy Corbyn in charge of the crisis? If so, we can all start singing sea shanties now and watch the good ship UK sink without trace.
Lily thinks that her trip was a triumph because she went there to raise awareness. ‘Job done,’ she tweeted, displaying her front-page coverage. She believes the value of public figures in the entertainment or arts world in speaking out is in starting a conversation — not providing an answer.
But all the conversations Lily starts are about Lily. No one is talking about the refugees. Instead, everyone is talking about her hot-housed martyr complex.
The truth is that life has been grim for Calais migrants long before Lily Allen turned up to ‘shine a light on the situation’. A great number of celebrities have already visited the camp, which has been seething with journalists for months.
Home Secretary Amber rudd is poised to scoop up hundreds of the most vulnerable children and bring them here.
HAS Lily Allen helped that process? Not really. It is patronising and self-indulgent to publicly cry over someone else’s misfortune when you can walk away, back into your own comfortable life. She later said she would be willing to take a refugee into her own home — an admirable sentiment. Yet, given her history of drinking and drug-taking — and the fact that she was photographed unconscious at a festival earlier this year — isn’t it unlikely she’d be allowed to?
She should get her own house in order before lecturing everyone else on what they should be doing.
Crucially, the British military do not deserve to be equated with the murdering cowards of the death cult ISIS.
Everyone knows that. Except Lily Allen. of course.