Labour still has an anti-Semitism problem

In a recording made at some point last autumn, published by the Mail on Sunday this weekend, Ali can be heard telling a meeting of the Lancashire Labour Party that Israel deliberately allowed Hamas to massacre Israeli citizens, as a pretext for an invasion of Gaza. Ali told his fellow Labourites that Egyptian and American intelligence agencies both warned their Israeli counterparts days before 7 October that there was ‘something happening’. Apparently, in response, Israel ‘deliberately took the security off’ its border. And it ‘allowed that massacre that gives them the green light to do whatever they bloody want’, Ali said. In other words, a would-be Labour MP was arguing that the Jewish State effectively orchestrated atrocities against its own people – all in pursuit of its supposedly ‘genocidal’ aims in Gaza.

That right there is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. It accuses Israel of greenlighting the massacre of its own citizens. It draws on old tropes about Jewish bloodlust, but presents them in modern ‘anti-Zionist’ garb.

For a party that has supposedly rid itself of anti-Semitism, this doesn’t look good, to put it lightly. After all, Ali wasn’t just mouthing off in private, among friends. He gave vent to his cranky theories at a meeting of local Labour members. And none of them – as far as we can tell – so much as raised an eyebrow at the time. Indeed, a couple of months later, those same Labour members chose Ali to be their candidate for this month’s Rochdale by-election.

After the story broke over the weekend, Ali was quick to say sorry. ‘I apologise unreservedly to the Jewish community for my comments which were deeply offensive, ignorant and false’, he said. Quite how someone can go so quickly from believing that Israel was behind the 7 October massacre to declaring such a belief ‘offensive, ignorant and false’ is unclear.

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Read also:  Labour withdraws support for Rochdale candidate Azhar Ali over Israel comments, BBC

Rampant anti-Semitism in Rochdale and beyond is being fostered by an unholy alliance of the Hard Left and militant Islam – and Starmer is like a rabbit trapped in the headlights by Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail

There’s a reason why Labour is pandering to Islamists by Charles Moore, Telegraph: ‘The fact he said what he did is not proof that Mr Ali has joined the lunatic fringe. It is, unfortunately, evidence that in Rochdale Labour politics, it is not a fringe at all. By speaking as he did, he must have seen those anti-Semitic elements as powerful and wanted to advance his candidacy by placating them.’

When Gaza came to Rochdale – Inside the nastiest by-election in modern history by Michael Crick, UnHerd