A Financial Times article on the Labour Party’s efforts to hold on to dozens of seats with sizeable Muslim populations in tomorrow’s election airbrushed the antisemitism plaguing one of the parties fielding the candidates. The piece (“Labour deploys activists to shore up vote in Muslim areas”, July 2), by Anna Gross and Jim Pickard, focuses primarily on the Workers Party of Britain (WPB), led by George Galloway.
In fact, Galloway himself – a terror supporter, conspiracy theorist and apologist for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad, who’s peddled antisemitism most of his career – is described in the FT piece as merely a “firebrand left-wing politician”.
Concerning Galloway’s Workers’ Party, the article informs readers that, in Oldham East, “Workers party candidate Shanaz Saddique is threatening to take a sizeable bite out of Labour’s vote…”, while neglecting to note that, on Instagram, Saddique said “Israel is behaving like Nazi Germany.” However, that’s just the tip of the iceberg concerning the extremist candidates representing WPB, a radical left party whose platform cites the “positive historical legacy of the Soviet Union”.
As The Times reported last month, Galloway’s party continues to back more than a dozen candidates – representing a tenth of the party’s slate – who’ve engaged in antisemitism or expressed support for Hamas. For instance, Kamran Khan, a candidate in east London, said Zionist Jews are “rapists”, “child killers” and support paedophilia. Khan also mocked Holocaust Remembrance Day, calling it a “galactic load of victimhood”, claimed America is controlled by a “Jewish mafia” and suggested that anyone who learnt about Jewish history would become a Nazi.
Dr Mehmood Jamshed, the Workers Party candidate for Mitcham & Morden, claimed on X that Hamas’s October 7 massacre was a “false flag operation” in which “no one was killed”. Chris Williamson, the party’s deputy leader, and co-host, with anti-Semite David Miller, on the Iranian PressTV show ‘Palestine Declassified’, praised the Oct. 7 attack as an “audacious military offensive by Palestinian freedom fighters”. He also accused Jews of “shrieking about supposed antisemitism”, which he characterised as a “deflection attempt” to cover up for “bloodthirsty Zionist fanatics…engaged in a genocide in Palestine”.
Colin Tasker, the WPB candidate for Dover & Deal in Kent, said that Zionist “scum” control Labour leader Keir Starmer. Jody McIntyre, who’s challenging Labour’s Jess Phillips in Birmingham Yardley, similarly suggested that Starmer is a puppet of Israel. Choudhry Yasir Iqbal, standing in Blaenau Gwent & Rhymney, said Israel is behind ISIS’s creation, and that Zionists are “behind most of the atrocities around the globe”. And, Harry Boota, the candidate in Bradford South, once said that “world financial institutions are controlled by Jews”.
Mez Derak, the Workers Party candidate in Finchley and Golders Green, shared an an article in 2019 describing Passover as “the celebration of the mass murder of children by an immoral and incompetent God.”
Also, see this X post thread by CAA for information about additional WPB candidates who’ve promoted antisemitism.
Who are the @WorkersPartyGB presenting as some of its parliamentary candidates for the general election?
Let’s take a look. pic.twitter.com/CEXwM6Ieta
— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) May 29, 2024
In addition, the FT article quotes a representative from a campaign group called The Muslim Vote (TMV), which is promoting dozens of pro-Palestinian candidates in the general election, including the ones who’ve engaged in antisemitism cited above. The article fails to note TMV’s support for extremist candidates, the fact that top officials at the group have criticised the government for proscribing Hamas as a terror group, and that one TMV advisor, Anas Altikrit (the director of the Hamas-affiliated Muslims Association of Britain) justified the Oct. 7th massacre. Altikrit also said, concerning Hamas’s attack, that the taking of hostages was a “very important part” of any “act of resistance” and that Israel was “mimicking” Nazis.
The importance of FT’s glaring omission centers on the fact the unprecedented antisemitism in the UK since Oct. 7 has been fueled by the same extremist and antisemitic rhetoric about Israel, Gaza and Hamas that WPB candidates have been promoting.
The FT’s elision of the disturbing, but entirely predictable, anti-Jewish animus within George Galloway’s party represents another disturbing example of the media’s failure to take seriously the racism and illiberalism that threatens the safety of British Jews.
