Imran Patel has to take anger management courses. If he had screamed, “Jesus is Lord, I’m going to kill you, motherf***er,” he would probably have become the occasion for a good deal of media handwringing over religious fanaticism and violence. As it is, however, the non-Muslim judge just lectured him about how he was making Islam look bad. In other words, it was just another day in the suicidal, willfully blind West, as the Islamic culture of violence that Imran Patel’s words manifested was once again downplayed, and denied.
“Man who threatened to kill sentenced,” by Lauren Priestley, New Zealand Herald, June 17, 2015 (thanks to The Religion of Peace):
A man who held a large knife to a driver’s throat and threatened to kill him while yelling an Islamic exclamation will be in jail for less than a year.
Imran Patel, 25, was sentenced at the Auckland District Court today for assaulting and threatening to kill a man after an altercation while he was driving on Dominion Rd.
The road rage incident occurred in February when a driver made a late lane-change in front of Patel’s car.
Patel allegedly gestured the driver back and then ran across the road and held a knife – measuring 20cm when it is open – to the driver’s throat yelling, “Allahu Akbar” [Allah is the greatest], and, “I’m going to kill you motherf***er”.
He had pulled the driver out of his car when police officers arrived and arrested him.
It came just six weeks after Patel was sentenced for being involved in intimidating a former New Zealand Muslim Association president at his Sandringham home, where one man yelled “jihad will start from here” at him.
Judge Claire Ryan said Patel’s actions had brought shame to the Islamic community in New Zealand.
“You do your community no service by this public display of anger, calling on the name of Allah and waving around a knife,” she said.
“You’re behaving like this right at a time of great upheaval in the world where things can be misinterpreted and taken out of context. You are the public face of Islam that people see and they get the wrong idea.”
Yeah, because we all know that anyone who commits violence in the name of Islam is misinterpreting it and taking it out of context. Everyone knows that very well — except, alas, the Islamic jihadists.
Judge Ryan sentenced the man to 10 and a half months’ imprisonment and challenged him to not appear in court again, saying: “Prove me wrong.”
Crown prosecutor Eliza Walker argued for a 15-month sentence because of the seriousness of the offending and the fact the incident took place just six months after his last sentencing.
She said it showed Patel hadn’t taken any heed of the judge’s warnings and his offending had now escalated.
On top of that there was “no indication of remorse” from Patel, Ms Walker said.
But Patel’s lawyer David Young said it was “nothing more sinister” than road rage.
He argued that a shorter sentence should be considered for Patel because his client was a hard-working man who was doing “considerable soul-searching”.
Patel had the knife with him because of his delivery work and his temper got the better of him, Mr Young said.
“It is a situation of road rage where his anger got the better of him. It’s nothing more sinister.
“He’s hit a bump on the road, gone through difficult times, done some soul searching and hopefully he’s come out of it now,” he said.
Patel was originally sentenced to 14 months’ imprisonment, but time was taken off because of his early guilty plea which prevented the victim from having to testify in court.
Judge Ryan also ordered Patel to undertake an anger management or anti-violence course to combat the “extremely worrying signs” she saw in him.
That’ll fix things right up.