Earlier this month, David Rose reported that Azhar Ali, a Labor party candidate in an upcoming British by-election, had been a trustee of a mosque that had brought several visiting preachers who expressed enthusiasm for terrorism. Some of Ali’s own vile comments about Jews and Israel also came to the surface and the party’s leader, Keir Starmer, at last expelled him. Starmer responded more quickly when Graham Jones, another Labor candidate for parliament, made similar remarks. Are the two incidents, and especially the party’s clumsy, foot-dragging reaction to the first, a throwback to the leadership of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, on whose watch anti-Semitism festered in the party’s ranks?
Rose observes:
One of the most depressing aspects of all this is something that is still too difficult to mention in sections of polite society: that the places where politicians are most likely to say vile things about Jews are those with large Muslim populations, where far too many voters have been conditioned by preachers such as those who give Jew-hating sermons at the Sultania mosque.
It’s a fact that “rock-solid” Ali was once a campaigner against extremism, and advised New Labor governments about it for five years. So if we were to be charitable, and prepared to conclude that he may merely be unprincipled, we could observe that he happened to think some inflammatory comments about Israel would help him get selected and win him votes.
The case of Jones, is, if anything, more depressing still. It suggests that despite the vigilance exercised by Starmer, there are far too many on the old, white, “anti-imperialist” left who instinctively assume the worst of Jews and Israel, and ultimately share the view that the Jewish state is a “settler-colonialist” entity that, ideally, should not exist.
And who is going to replace Ali in the by-election? Most likely the vicious George Galloway, a Workers Party of Britain candidate who has declared in print, “I glorify the Hizballah national resistance movement.”
Read more on Jewish Chronicle: https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/complacency-dithering-and-chaos-shame-on-labour-nkc8l1p5