Lutfur Rahman (right) and close friends

Is there a passage in the K’ran that advises ‘Vote early and often’?

In Afghanistan yesterday, electors turned out in force to vote for a new Government, the head of which faces multiple fraud charges. The said Hamid Karzai stood not just for the Presidency in the last election, but also accused of widespread vote-rigging. The UN condemned it as ‘deeply flawed’, but Mr Karzai remains President. His first act on being elected was to clear all the election inspectors out of the country.

The chief opposition to Mr Karzai, the Taliban, are more open about their disdain for democracy. They boycotted the election, and also threatened women and bombed it just to be sure nobody was in any doubt about their position. Thus the BBC called Afghanistan’s elector’s ‘brave’. The term ‘unjustifiably optimistic’ might be more apt. The usual accounts of multiple voting dogged the election from start to finish.

Closer to home, exactly the same ballot-stuffing, dead-person voting and voting-card thefts are taking place in the attempt by Lutfur Rahman to be selected as Mayor candidate for Tower Hamlets on the ‘Labour’ ticket. As the irrepressible Andrew Gilligan describes, Mr Rahman is a corrupt Islamist using the Labour cover as a means of stitching up the last bit of East London politics not already controlled by the Mosque there – which is itself a focus of hard-line radical Islam. A leftie comment threader condemned the Gilligan series of articles, saying such things were a matter for the police, not the media. I suppose if you read The Guardian, it would be quite easy to reach such a conclusion.

The Gilligan articles are genuinely disturbing, and I commend the whole series to you. Even more disturbing, however, is the Establishment’s keen desire to deny that any of it is happening. No doubt the police have told them that to do something about it might lead to social unrest.

In the world of Islam, ‘honest election’ is an oxymoron. I’m getting quite a few threatening emails now, and the odd accusation of being Islamophobic. Bollocks. I am merely reporting empirical facts – and reaching the obvious conclusions based on them.

Related: What do the Fluffies want to do with Turkey now?