Labour’s Afzal Khan claimed he was “mortified” for “accidentally” sharing antisemitic social media post but didn’t remove it for six months after apologising
The Labour MP, Afzal Khan, who claimed that he was “mortified” for “accidentally” sharing an antisemitic social media post, nonetheless did not remove the post for six months after apologising.
Mr Khan, who serves as the Shadow Immigration Minister, said that he was “sincerely sorry about this genuine accident” when it was revealed last year that he had shared a post referencing an “Israel-British-Swiss-Rothschilds crime syndicate” and “mass murdering Rothschilds Israeli mafia criminal liars” on Facebook in 2015. But only after being asked by The Telegraph in the past few days as to why it remained on his Facebook page was it removed.
Mr Khan was recently confronted by Gideon Falter of Campaign Against Antisemitism at a Chanukah party over his record, eventually leading to Mr Khan’s exit from the party.
During the 2017 general election, Mr Khan was criticised for sharing a comment on Twitter stating that “The Israeli government are acting like Nazi’s [sic] in Gaza.” The common breached the International Definition of Antisemitism, which lists “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” as an example of antisemitism.
The words apparently derived from the headline of a blog post that Mr Khan was sharing. Of that incident, he said: “I did not then — nor do I now — endorse the content of the article I tweeted. I have a long track record of fighting racism, including antisemitism. I was new to Twitter and made a mistake, which I apologised for.”
On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Labour Party candidates for Parliament in the 2019 general election accounted for 82 percent of all incidents of antisemitic discourse by parliamentary candidates.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.
