Lutfur Rahman cabinet member: 'I luv my weapons'

Oh dear – here’s the social networking website that Cllr Rania Khan forgot! The picture above, of a rather ferocious-looking hand dagger, is taken from Rania’s pages on the “Hi5" site. In the caption beneath it, Lutfur Rahman’s cabinet member for culture declares: “This is wat i m takin about. I knw its not lady like, but i luv my weapons.”

However many “weapons” has Rania got, I wonder? The one in the pic alone is almost certainly worth two years if she’s caught with it in the street…

There's also a delightful outbreak of homophobia (completely unprecedented on Planet Rahman, of course.) Beneath a shot of a young man with his arm round another one, Rania tenderly declares: "My cozn's gone batty brav." Batty is of course slang for gay in leading progressive circles, such as school playgrounds, English Defence League demonstrations, and the vocabularies of Lutfur Rahman supporters. And I'm sure the reason the two lads are holding a rose in their picture can't be anything to do with mocking other people's sexual orientation.


Other pictures on Rania’s site include one of the extremist cleric Zakir Naik, banned from Britain after saying that “every Muslim should be a terrorist,” and Rania herself with publicity material from the hardline Islamic Human Rights Commission, which busies itself with attacking the prosecution of such notable victims of British imperialism as – er- Abu Hamza. Visit soon before she takes them down!

Rania was a keynote speaker at last month's Fem 11 conference; one of the top subjects on the agenda was defeating violence against women. The possession of instruments of violence by women, however, seems to be something she's held rather more mixed views on.

Let’s hope Rania has grown up a bit since posting these pics – they are six years old. But when she put them up, she was only a few months off becoming a councillor. And her ghastly English is almost as bad for someone who’s supposed to be promoting high cultural standards. None of it will do much for Lutfur’s attempts to deny his links to Islamic extremism. Is there a single member of the mayor's inner circle, I wonder, who is not a complete embarrassment?