We need to talk about Ahmed Mohammed. He’s a Sudanese asylum seeker in the UK, and this week he was spared jail after being convicted of threatening a person with an offensive weapon in a public place. The public place was Speakers’ Corner in London, and the victim was a Christian preacher. In May last year Mohammed dragged the follower of Christ from his stepladder and threatened him with a knife. ‘I’m going to stab you’, he barked.

The trigger for his blind rage was the preacher’s plea that he let Christ into his life. ‘What would you like to happen in my life?’ Mohammed had asked the preacher. ‘I would like to have the Lord in your life,’ came the reply. According to the prosecution, this was the ‘catalyst’ for Mohammed’s wrath. He went immediately to fetch his knife, so enraged was he by this expression of Christian faith in a Christian nation.

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Amazingly, it gets worse. Mohammed, who’s been in the UK since 2012, has 29 previous convictions for 67 offences. Three of those offences were thefts committed just weeks before he threatened a man for daring to give voice to Biblical beliefs. Then comes what I believe is the darkest........

© The Spectator