New Manchester Mayor Worked With Terror-Linked Muslim Groups to Shut Down Police Surveillance Programs

Mayor Andy Burnham at the vigil service for the Manchester bombing victims

In a just world, the newly elected mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, would be under arrest for collaboration, or perhaps as an accessory to murder.

The Muslim population of Manchester is close to, if not now over 20%. The Labour Party almost certainly received the large majority of that vote in the mayoral election, three weeks ago. 

From Conservative Review:

...Before becoming mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham demanded an end to “toxic” counterterrorism programs on Islamic extremism. In fact, it was a centerpiece of his campaign as the Labour Party’s candidate for the mayoral slot. 

The programs to combat Islamic extremism in Britain created “a feeling in the Muslim community that it is being spied upon and unfairly targeted,” Burnham said in June 2016, demanding an end to the surveillance of radicals. “My fear is that [the] Prevent [program] is so toxic now that it will need to be scrapped." 

Later that year, Burnham continued to propose even more dangerous ideas. In September 2016, he argued that Muslims should be allowed to bypass police when reporting hate crimes. “In the midst of all these figures we’ve seen, we know that it is Islamophobia that is absolutely the most virulent strand of this hate that is coming forward,” Burnham said. 

He added: “There’s a lot of people in this country not necessarily at risk from ‘Islamic extremism’ but it’s far-right extremism." 

In his efforts to shut down counterterror programs, Burnham worked side by side with fringe Islamist groups to advance his agenda. 

Andy Burnham was elected Manchester’s mayor on May 5. Less than three weeks later, his city has suffered a massive Islamic terror attack that killed scores of innocent teenage girls. All indications appear to say that Burnham will continue to engage in willful blindness and coddle radical Islamists, much to the detriment and safety of his citizens. 

The Conservative review also reports that Burnham stridently denied that the suicide bomber was a Muslim. Read the rest here.

From Breitbart (April 10th, 2017):

A senior Labour MP vying to be the first elected mayor of Greater Manchester has shared a platform with a Muslim pressure group accused of being led by “extremists”, after implying Muslims should not work with police. 

Andy Burnham, a former cabinet minister, appeared at a mayoral hustings organised by the “anti-Islamophobia” group Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) on Saturday, The Times reports. 

MEND regularly works with members of CAGE, which has supported terrorists and calledJihadi John a “beautiful” man. The group is led by Azad Ali, an Islamist who lost a libel battle with a newspaper that said he was “a hardline Islamic extremist who supports the killing of British and American soldiers in Iraq by fellow Muslims as justified”.

MEND director Mr. Ali has also written on his blog of his “love” for Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda cleric closely linked to terrorist plots including the September 11 attacks, and described al-Qaeda as a “myth”.