To Promote Community Harmony?

Fatima, indeed. There is only one Lady of Heaven for me. Support for absolute freedom of expression has certainly not been a prerequisite for holding government advisory positions in the past, and would in any case seem to include support for peaceful protest, but be that as it may.

The Lady of Heaven has been written by Sheikh Yasser al-Habib of the London-based Mahdi Servants Union. Among other things, that organisation questions the credentials of what it sees as the unduly moderate Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei. On 10th March 2018, armed with daggers and batons, four members of the Mahdi Servants Union climbed onto a first floor balcony of the Iranian Embassy in London, where they replaced the Iranian flag with their own.

Under its previous name of the Khodam Al Mahdi Organisation, it was a registered charity from 21st July 2010 to 10th April 2012. In each of its three years of legal existence, the KMO declared that its income and its expenditure were both exactly £25,000. Thereafter, it continued to raise money and it even bought a property, causing the Charity Commission to deregister it once and for all on 7th April 2014. Meanwhile, in 2013, in spent £1.2 million on converting into a mosque a church in the Buckinghamshire village of Fulmer. By 2021, it was making a feature film with a reported budget of $15 million.

I would like to see The Lady of Heaven. I have no truck with the likes of 5Pillars. At the same time, we should ask ourselves how and why Yasser al-Habib and the Mahdi Servants Union, which are entirely British-based as is their Fadak television station, were being clasped to the bosom of the cultural and political Establishment. Does merely being opposed to the dreadful people who were currently running Iran, while also being opposed by the likes of 5Pillars, guarantee that no further questions will be asked? They will continue to be asked here.