In 2009 Lord Ahmed, a Labour peer was sent to prison for just 12 weeks ( but served just 16 days) after he smashed into a stationary car, having sent a series of text messages while driving his Jaguar on the M1 at 70mph. The other driver died. Personally I regard that sentence as a joke. 16 days for killing someone because you were driving recklessly? I would have been thinking in terms of years.
But Lord Ahmed thinks that he was hard done by. In an interview given a year ago on Pakistani TV, which cropped up this week the total shit said that he was given a harsh sentence only because of a conspiracy by Jews “who own newspapers and TV channels”. The judge, he added, had been specially chosen because the Jews wanted to punish him for supporting the Palestinian cause.
This murder trots out the sort of nonsense you might expect in the Protocols of Zion, he pedals lies in a way aimed at inciting hatred against Jews and the Labour party is okay with that? To be fair it has suspended him but if he did indeed say this then Labour must either boot him out or it too is signing up to what is just unacceptable.
The problem is that in deluded lefty circles anti-Semitism is cool. Not the sort that denies the holocaust. It is not yet acceptable to pretend that Auschwitz did not happen when munching your bruschetta in Islington. But David Ward MP (Lib Dem) is still a member of that party despite saying that the holocaust was comparable to the situation in Gaza. As I have noted before that trivialises the greatest act of genocide of the 20th Century (if not all time) and is just abhorrent.
The left collectively has a choice. Either it decides that it is fine to bait the wicked Jews, incorporates the Protocols of Zion into 2015 manifestos and states that trivialising the murder of 6 million men, women and children is fine. Or, it shows a genuine commitment to an equality and nondiscriminatory agenda and tells folks like Ward and Ahmed that with their views they have no place in British politics.
They will not. The Lib Dems and Labour will fudge the issue. Too many of their core supporters loathe Israel with a passion. And too many of that number extrapolate that into a loathing of with wicked Jews which involves spouting conspiracy theories and hatred as if they were discussing the weather or whether West Ham will defeat Chelski this weekend.