A man of Jewish descent is demanding an apology after pop singer Lily Allen labelled him a “Nazi” for not supporting mass migration and told him to be “twice as ashamed” because he is Jewish.
Ms. Allen hit the headlines earlier this week after the BBC made a film about her visiting the Calais ‘Jungle’ migrant camp in northern France, where she apologised “on behalf of my country” to an Afghan migrant there.
A man known as Malcolm took issue her comments on Twitter, insisting he and the nation had nothing to apologise for. “The antics of that no mark @lilyallen!! Where the F does she get off [sic] apologising for the UK! Not in my name, you idiot!” he wrote on the social media site.
Ms. Allen responded: “Your grandchildren will be apologising for you and your hatrid [sic] in years to come just like the Germans do for the Nazis.”
He then explained: “I am a Jew with family that perished in the Nazi death camps! Your comparison is offensive!”
She declined to apologise, instead claiming the man was even guiltier by virtue of this ethnic and religious background: “Then you should be twice as ashamed.”
Explaining his original Tweet on the Jon Gaunt show, Malcolm said: “I was disgusted. It was typical BBC. It was the tears… not taking a grasp of the situation.”
Reacting to Ms. Allen’s insults, he said: “What Lily Allen doesn’t know is that I’m a Jew that had relatives – grandparents and aunts and uncles – that perished in the holocaust, in the Nazi death camps.”
“I want an apology from her – the way that she apologised for the UK”, he added.
Unrepentant, Ms. Allen dismissed criticism today, claiming it is “delusional to think it is beyond a tabloid newspaper to take quotes out of context or indeed make them up entirely to support narrative.”
Despite Ms. Allen’s attacks on Britain, the Afghan migrant she apologised to on behalf of the country, Shamsher Sherin, later thanked the British army for coming to his country to fight the Taliban.
He told the Daily Mail that Britain “didn’t make any problems for me in Afghanistan”.
Reacting to this revelation, Ms. Allen compared the British military to Islamic State terrorists, and once against apologised on behalf of the nation.
“ISIS kill innocent people… they cause horrific pain and destruction across the world [and] so do we. I’m sorry for that”, she wrote in a statement.
Revealed: The father of the Jungle boy who made Lily Allen cry is an ex-Islamist fighter who sneaked into Britain in a lorry, claimed asylum from the ‘terror’ of Afghanistan – and then went back there on holiday
Father of boy who moved Lily Allen to tears was fighter for Afghan warlord
Hazrat Gul Sherin was an officer in the private army of a brutal local leader
He fled fearing for his life from from US and UK-backed Northern Alliance
Sherin entered the UK on the back of a lorry and was allowed to remain
The father of the migrant boy controversially championed by Lily Allen sneaked into Britain in the back of a lorry to claim asylum – then returned to the country he fled in terror for a three-month holiday after being given the right to stay here.
Hazrat Gul Sherin, whose son Shamsher appeared with the tearful pop star last week as she ‘apologised’ on behalf of Britain for bombing his country and putting him ‘in the hands of the Taliban’, came to the UK illegally in 2005, having fled war-torn Afghanistan.
His decision to flee the country was prompted not by the Taliban but because as a leading supporter of a brutal Islamist warlord – and an officer in his private army – he was afraid of the US and UK-backed Northern Alliance.
After seven years, Sherin was given indefinite leave to remain in the UK, then promptly returned to Afghanistan to visit his family.
Hazrat Gul Sherin, father of the Afghani boy who moved pop star Lily Allen to tears, was loyal to a brutal warlord and fled to the UK to claim asylum – on the back of a lorry
The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the 49-year-old was a commander in the Islamist group Hezb-e Islami, led by the Butcher of Kabul, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
In the early 1990s, Hekmatyar’s group of fundamentalist Sunni Muslim Pashtuns clashed violently with other mujahideen factions in the struggle for control of the capital, Kabul.
Hezb-e Islami was blamed for much of the terrible death and destruction of that period and was accused of appalling human rights abuses, including the assassination of intellectuals and throwing acid in women’s faces.
The civil war led to Hekmatyar’s fall from grace and he quickly became one of the most reviled men in the country. And in 1996, when Hekmatyar went into exile, Sherin also began to lead a quieter life.
But his allegiance to the Butcher of Kabul was remembered years later when the Northern Alliance swept to power. It is for this reason that he said he left his wife and four young children in Afghanistan. Sherin now lives in Birmingham and is hoping that 13-year-old Shamsher will be able to join him from Calais soon.
Miss Allen, 31, took a break from recording her new album to volunteer in a charity warehouse at the squalid Jungle camp, where 10,000 migrants live while trying to find ways to sneak into Britain. She told Shamsher: ‘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.’
Yet the boy’s father, from Jalalabad, revealed the startling truth behind his journey to the UK in an interview with The Mail on Sunday. To reach Britain, he hiked across eight countries before being stowed away by traffickers in a fruit lorry.
He spent seven years living on benefits in Birmingham before his claim for asylum was accepted in September 2012. He then went back to Afghanistan, flying in via Pakistan, for the first of two three-month visits to the very country that had put him in fear of his life.
Picture of Shamsher Sherin, who Lily allen apologised to on behalf of the whole UK, taken in Afghanistan ten years ago with his father Hazrat Gul Sherin and his sister
After 11 years in the UK, he can barely speak English. Speaking through an interpreter, Mr Sherin said: ‘I was not escaping the Taliban. I had been a commander for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Hezb-e Islami for many years and was put in charge of the village of Shershia in Jalalabad.
‘I had a profile then. Everyone was scared and could not say anything but when the Western-backed government took over from them, the villagers realised I had no power and turned on me and our house was shot at. We fled over the border to Nasar Bagh in Pakistan but somebody snitched on me and a bomb was planted at the local mosque intended to kill me.
‘I was injured in the blast and have three bits of metal in my body still. We had to move again to Tira and it was then I knew I had to escape to build a better future for my family.
‘My father had some money and sold land and I used that to make my way to Britain. I did not know anyone there but I heard they had the best human rights in Europe. It was very hard to leave. My wife Noorbabo had just had our fourth baby but I had no choice if I was to look after their future.’
Lily Allen has been criticised for her tearful apology to the young Afghan boy, who promptly thanked the UK for fighting the Taliban, and whose father is revealed to be an ex-fighter
Of all the warlords who took part in the civil war which killed 50,000 people in Kabul alone between 1992 and 1996, Hekmatyar was considered the most extreme and labelled a ‘war criminal’ by the post-Taliban Government of Hamid Karzai.
His dwindling band of supporters were said to have provided Osama bin Laden and his cronies safe passage to Pakistan after 9/11 and launched attacks on Allied troops but by then, Mr Sherin insists, he was ‘selling vegetables and trying to live a peaceful life’.
He said that he first became involved with the notorious warlord at 15 when he joined the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation. By the age of 21, he had become a commander in charge of 70 men.
‘I was very good at shooting at planes,’ he explained. ‘Gulbuddin would give us the guns and the orders and I was in control of the area. We would sometimes be told to attack other villages.’
Allen met the former fighter’s son, Shamsher, in Calais’ Jungle. She broke during the Victoria Derbyshire show feature. It can now be revealed that the boy’s father fought in Afghanistan
Millionaire pop star, with a new album expected to be released before Christmas, broke down while talking to the son of Afghan fighter-turned-asylum-seeker Hazrat Gul Sherin
Of his escape to Britain, he said: ‘I paid about £6,000 to the smugglers. They took a group of us overland. We would lie low in forests by day and travel at night. It was hard.
‘I came into Britain in the back of a lorry packed with fruit. There were three of us in there and the first we knew we were in Britain was when the lorry was opened and the police were there.’
The Jungle camp in Calais where Allen visited for the BBC feature. Shamsher, 13, wishes to enter the UK as his father did
He spent 12 days in prison and applied for asylum before deciding to settle in the Alum Rock area of Birmingham, where he shared a house with other Afghans.
I WILL BE WITH YOU SOON DAD, SAYS SON
The teenage refugee who met Lily Allen in the Calais camp spoke to his father on the phone after The Mail on Sunday tracked him down.
In the call, Shamsher Sherin, 13, told Hazrat Gul Sherin: ‘I’ll be with you soon.’
The boy showed The Mail on Sunday a family picture of his father shortly before he fled Afghanistan more than ten years ago with him and his sister, Robina, now 12.
The picture was then sent to Sherin by phone.
Shamsher said he wants to be reunited with his father and for the rest of his family in Afghanistan to join them later. ‘I would like to go to school and study,’ he added.
Speaking of his determination to cross the Channel, he said: ‘I have tried every day for one month to get on a lorry.’
The youngster has been sleeping in a tent in the camp for more than two months after his family paid traffickers to smuggle him to Europe from Afghanistan.
‘It was very tough,’ he said, ‘but I was safe and I am thankful to Britain for that. It was a much better life. I would not want to go back. I was given £42 a week to live on and after seven years I was granted my right to remain. I was very happy and managed to get work on building sites.’ It is work he still does.
But he was missing his family who had returned to Jalalabad now their hated head of the family had gone.
‘It was a risk to go back but I so wanted to see my family, I had to do it. I was too scared to spend more than ten minutes in any one room, you could not go safely to the mosque and you thought anyone with a puffa jacket was about to blow up.’
His next trip back, from December to March this year, was even more alarming. ‘Now Daesh (IS) have moved into the province and you had them and the Taliban fighting each other with the Government forces also involved. My wife had become scared that Shamsher would be turned into a suicide bomber. The Taliban tried to take him off to one of their training camps so my wife raised money through the family to pay for him to escape as I had done.
‘When I got over there in December, no-one knew where he was. We feared he had been taken by Daesh.’
Then, three weeks ago, he received a message from a woman in the Jungle saying Shamsher was safe.
‘I spoke to him and felt great pride that he had made the same journey as me,’ he said. ‘I told him to stay in France and not to risk his life climbing on to lorries because we will soon be together the official way.’
Shamsher Sherin, aged 13 pictured having a brief telephone conversation with his father Hazrat Gul Sherin in Birmingham. He has never heard of Lily Allen
And after the news that children in the Jungle with relatives in the UK are to be brought to Britain, a beaming Mr Sherin said: ‘I know we will soon be together and then, we hope, the rest of the family will join us in time.’
As for the millionaire pop star who had put his son into the spotlight, ‘I have never heard of her,’ he said.
And on Lily’s view an apology was required for the UK’s role in Afghanistan, he said: ‘This is her opinion. I am just an illiterate guy. I do not know who is the cause. Just that the Americans and Europeans supported the Northern Alliance against the Pashtun people.’
‘We have to take responsibility’: Lily Allen after Calais visit
Sources: Breitbart and DailyMail