The case of the ‘paraglider girls’ just keeps getting worse, exposing a criminal-justice system that seems to have become riddled with bias and Israelophobia.

A mixture of bias, ignorance and cowardice has been exposed at every level of the criminal-justice system

On Tuesday, a judge at Westminster Magistrates Court essentially let three women – Heba Alhayek, 29, Pauline Ankunda, 26, and Noimutu Olayinka Taiwo, 27 – off with a slap on the wrist, after they were charged with terrorism offences.

Last October, they were spotted on a Palestine protest displaying images of paragliders, just seven days after Hamas fighters on paragliders flew into southern Israel before murdering and raping their way through a music festival and several kibbutzim.

The women were found guilty. But the judge – deputy senior district judge Tan Ikram – showed considerable leniency, sparing the trio prison and giving them a 12-month conditional discharge. The maximum sentence would have been six months in prison. ‘You crossed the line, but it would have been fair to say that emotions ran very high on this issue’, he said.

This was bizarre, to put it lightly, given the British state’s – and this particular judge’s – increasingly punitive behaviour where offensive speech is concerned. In 2022, Ikram sent police constable James Watts to prison for 20 weeks after he shared racist jokes in a WhatsApp group. It seems that disgusting jokes made in private are worthy of jail time, but what the CPS described as the ‘glorification’ of racist terrorism on the streets of London is not.

Those of us who were cynical enough to imagine that some political bias might have played a role here have now, it seems, been given further reason to believe this. Ikram, it turns out, ‘liked’ an anti-Israel post on LinkedIn three weeks ago. The post, shared by a man with a fondness for spouting anti-Israel conspiracy theories, called Israel ‘terrorist’ and repeated the ‘Free Palestine’ slogan.

Ikram may now face disciplinary action, given judicial guidance plainly states that judges who are known to have strong views on a particular subject should consider recusing themselves from related cases. Social-media guidance also warns that liking posts ‘can convey information about yourself and your views’.

He says that he liked the post by accident. Even so, this isn’t the first time that he has chosen to express his views. As Laurie Wastell noted on Coffee House yesterday, Ikram gave a talk to American law students in February 2023, in which he appeared to boast about the harsh sentence he handed down to Watts: ‘I gave him a long prison sentence. The police were horrified by that.’

In that talk, at College of DuPage in Illinois, he went further, airing all the fashionable talking points about race, policing and the justice system. According to a write-up in the student newspaper, Ikram even – hilariously – raised the issue of ‘how judges, like him, could be suffering from unconscious bias when sentencing people’.

Of course, the bias Ikram is alleged to have shown in the case of the ‘paraglider girls’ doesn’t appear to be ‘unconscious’. This looks very much like a judge punishing some racist speech crimes more leniently than others, based on his publicly expressed views and sympathies.

Look, I’m a free-speech absolutist. Short of direct incitement to violence, I don’t think any statement – no matter how disgusting – should land someone in the dock. But the double standards stink to high heaven. They reveal a two-tier criminal-justice system that treats anti-Semitic speech with kid gloves, while coming down ever-harder not only on other forms of racist speech, but also on relatively innocuous, un-PC speech.

This isn’t just about one judge or one case. In 2020s Britain, you can call for jihad against Israel on the streets of London without having your collar felt. But if you’re a feminist misgendering someone, or a veteran sharing a spicy anti-Pride meme, you can count on being manhandled into the back of a police van.

The soft touch applied to London’s pro-Hamas – sorry, ‘pro-Palestine’ – demos isn’t an accident. A mixture of bias, ignorance and cowardice has been exposed at every level of the criminal-justice system. People who have made openly anti-Semitic statements have even been found to be working with the authorities.

In November, the Metropolitan Police were forced to cut ties with Attiq Malik, chairman of the London Muslim Communities Forum, after he was revealed to have chanted ‘From the river to the sea’ and railed against ‘global censorship by the Zionists’. (The Met is reportedly still working with his organisation.)

How all this must horrify British Jews, as they reel from the anti-Semitism that has flooded Britain, online and on the streets, since 7 October. The message from our criminal-justice system is now loud and clear: all forms of racism are awful, but some are less awful than others.