Sadiq Khan only Labour Party candidate to emerge unscathed from anti-Semitism scandal
It is fair to say that Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada and one of the most active pro-Palestinian activists working today, had a bad weekend.
When hearing that Sadiq Khan, a British Member of Parliament and Labour Party standard-bearer had won the elections by a landslide, transforming the child of an immigrant Pakistani bus driver into London’s first Muslim mayor, he posted “Ugh. New London mayor Sadiq Khan supports promoting apartheid Tel Aviv as ‘cultural hub.’”
Well, yes. Not all Muslims think alike. In fact, Sadiq Khan, a former Minister of State for Communities, may be the only Labour party candidate to emerge unscathed from the anti-Semitism scandal that convulsed United Kingdom’s left in the last week of the crucial vote.
Justin Cohen, news editor for London’s Jewish News which broke the story that Abunimah found so distressing, says that “Khan impressed everybody. He ran a clean, pro-active campaign that never let a story gain control of the narrative.” Speaking to The Media Line, Cohen added, “When it comes to Israel, Khan appears to have come a long way. In 2009, during the Gaza conflict, he was very active in lobbying for sanctions against Israel. But during this campaign he’s been very consistent in saying he opposes BDS unequivocally.”
Acknowledging that some Israel supporters might worry whether someone who had the approach he did in government could change mind again, Cohen said that “the important thing is what he does now, with his mandate as mayor. If he pursues in office everything he promised during the campaign, it will be fine.”
The surprise choice for the Labour Party candidate for mayor, Khan won the election by a huge margin. While London’s Muslim population amounts to just over 12% of the total, Khan won the support of almost 57% of the city’s voters.
More remarkable still, his victory was personal, and came, according to many observers, despite and not because of the support of his party, which in the final weeks of his campaign seemed to fall apart at the seams over the issue of anti-Semitism.
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First, another Labour MP, Naz Shah, was revealed to have uploaded radically anti-Israel posts onto her Facebook page. Then, Ken Livingstone, a close ally of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the last party member to hold the mayoralty for which Khan was vying, embarked on a rant lasting several days in which he argued that Adolf Hitler initially supported the Zionist cause.
Corbyn himself notoriously referred to members of the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends,” and has yet to retract the statement.
Both Shah and Livingstone were suspended. By then the Labour Party was in a free fall, and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron saw an opening to attack Khan for his supposed association with anti-Semitic extremists.
The tactic quickly backfired, harming instead the Conservative mayoral candidate, Zac Goldsmith, scion of a family of Jewish billionaires.
“I would say that if Khan seems unscathed by the Labour meltdown, that’s because he is unscathed,” says Hugo Rifkind, a columnist and leader writer for The Times of London. “He’s not close to the Corbyn/Livingstone section of the party and never has been – he was in fact very close to the last (irrelevantly Jewish) leader Ed Miliband,” Rifkind told The Media Line.
“The Conservative campaign certainly tried to tie him to Corbyn’s bit of the party, but the facts don’t really bear it out. As a result, they ended up looking as though they were attacking him for merely being Muslim. Which, in my opinion, they were. It was ugly, and backfired, and deserved to.”
“Indeed, he was swift to denounce Ken Livingstone, and generally makes very positive comments about Israel….He certainly doesn’t have that scary Israel obsession which marks out the loony Corbynite left.”
Cohen believes that Khan should, and will, conduct a policy that is friendly to Israel within the confines of his remit, “which does not really include international relations or commentaries about the Middle East peace process as such. Voters here, for example, voted much more on Khan’s proposals regarding the housing crisis than on any matter relating to Israel.”
“One thing he could do is lead a trade delegation to Israel, which is something that on a few occasions he has said he would like to do. That would send a powerful message about the importance of Israel-UK trade links and expand on what [outgoing mayor] Boris Johnson already did when he lead a delegation to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.”
In another indication of disarray in the Labour Party, Naz Shah, whose heartfelt apology to the House of Commons was eclipsed by Ken’s greater scandal, seems to have been completely sidelined.
Gary Spedding, a cross-party consultant on Israel and Palestine, and an activist both in the Palestine solidarity movement and against anti-Semitism on the political left, told The Media Line that Naz Shah, “when called out for her mistakes, held herself accountable, apologized and took almost immediate action to correct these mistakes. Her apology was wholesome and very meaningful to the Jewish community.”
“The Labour Party,” he continued, “handled the Naz Shah incident very poorly in my opinion…. Her suspension from the party went too far – especially when one takes into consideration her apology and the steps she took to almost immediately engage with the Jewish community on these issues.”
The politician Shah replaced in her constituency was none other than George Galloway, whose “toxic and divisive politics caused untold damage to Muslim and Jewish relations in the city and elsewhere,” Spedding added.
More or less ignoring the magnitude of Khan’s victory, the Labour Party has appointed a commission of inquiry to investigate what many believe is rampant racism within its ranks.
Cohen offers Corbyn some free advice: “The inquiry is a starting point. He has to do so much more. He has been at the forefront of the pro-Palestinian cause for years, and almost everyone whom he suspended started as a pro-Palestinian activist, but then crossed the line into blatant anti-Semitism.
What Corbyn could do here, because of where he’s come from, is show real leadership by actively saying that there is a problem on the left in Britain and in his party and in the pro-Palestinian movement, and declare that he intends to act.”