An MP – a minister – steps down because of threats from Muslim extremists:
A minister has said he is stepping down at the next election after becoming the subject of death threats and intimidation over his pro-Israel views.
Mike Freer, the parliamentary under-secretary for courts and legal services, will leave parliament after incidents including an alleged arson attack on his constituency office last month.
The MP for Finchley & Golders Green told the Daily Mail that he felt “lucky to be alive” after narrowly escaping a confrontation with Ali Harbi Ali, who murdered the Conservative MP Sir David Amess in October 2021.
The killer visited Freer’s constituency office with the intention of killing him before targeting Amess. Last month’s fire at Freer’s constituency office was “the final straw”, the MP said. The circumstances surrounding the incident remain unclear.
Freer, 63, later received an email saying that he was “the kind of person who deserved to be set alight”.
Freer said he had a serious threat against his life in 2011 when the group Muslims Against Crusades told him to “let Stephen Timms be a warning to you” and urged supporters to target him. Timms, a Labour MP, was stabbed by an al-Qaeda sympathiser in 2010 but survived.
A sitting MP stepping down because of threats from the far right, or white supremacists…what a uproar there'd be. But this….just a small piece in the back pages.
Update:
In a turn of events that's nothing short of horrific, Mike Freer, the Tory MP for Finchley and Golders Green, is being forced to step down. Why? Because he's found himself in the crosshairs of Islamist extremists. These thugs, blinded by hatred, wrongly assumed he's Jewish. It's… pic.twitter.com/vxrcZVS9ZW
— Darren Grimes (@darrengrimes_) January 31, 2024
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