Melanie Phillips
Substack, Feb. 16, 2024
“The government’s concern is genuine. But while it wrings its hands, it is staring in horror at a crisis of anti-Jewish hatred that’s now out of control.”
The war in Gaza is prying open a potentially game-changing fissure in British politics that has wider implications for the western world.
Last weekend, a recording surfaced of a meeting of the Lancashire Labour Party in late October. It revealed that Azhar Ali, who was subsequently selected as the Labour Party candidate for a parliamentary by-election that will be held in Rochdale later this month, said Israel deliberately allowed the October 7 pogrom to occur in order to give itself “the green light” to invade Gaza.
Despite this blood libel, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who has pledged to rid the party of antisemitism, said he was satisfied that Ali had made a genuine apology for the statement. Nearly two days later, after it emerged that Ali had also blamed people in the media “from certain Jewish quarters” for Labour’s suspension of one of its MPs for using the phrase “between the river and the sea,” Starmer stripped Ali of Labour support. This was too late to stop Ali from standing in the by-election. Since Labour has withdrawn its endorsement, the party now has no candidate.
This chaos is potentially disastrous. Rochdale is 30 per cent Muslim. Also standing for election, as the candidate for the Respect party, is the demagogic, virulently anti-Israel George Galloway — who was himself expelled from the Labour Party in 2003 for opposing the “war on terror”. He is now well-placed to capitalise on the explosive Muslim hostility to Israel and win the seat.
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