Corbyn’s new equalities supremo is MP suspended in anti-Semitism storm
A LABOUR MP who was suspended after being accused of anti-Semitism has been made a shadow equalities minister.
Naz Shah was barred after she shared controversial posts on social media, including one that said Israel should be relocated to the US.
It comes as Labour continues to face criticism that it has not addressed allegations of anti-Semitism in the party.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made the Bradford West MP his shadow minister for women and equalities in a mini-reshuffle this week, but immediately came under fire for promoting someone who was suspended two years ago over questions about anti-Semitic comments.
Mrs Shah, a 44-year- old mother of three, was stripped of the parliamentary whip and barred from party activity for three months in 2016 while an investigation was carried out. She was suspended after a Facebook post in which she shared a graphic of Israel’s outline superimposed on to a map of the US. It had the headline: ‘Solution for Israel-Palestine conflict – relocate Israel into United States’ and Mrs Shah’s comment: ‘Problem solved.’
She also posted a tweet with a link to a blog which claimed Zionism had been used to ‘groom’ Jews to ‘exert political influence at the highest levels of public office’. A Twitter post later emerged in which she urged supporters of the Palestinians to vote in an online poll on Israeli military action, claiming that ‘the Jews are rallying’ to skew the result.
Mrs Shah admitted she was ‘ignorant’ about discrimination against Jews and said she was determined to win back the community’s trust. In an interview with the BBC at the time, Mrs Shah insisted she ‘wasn’t anti-Semitic’ but conceded ‘what I put out was anti-Semitic’.
Following the row over her comments, she stood down temporarily from the Commons home affairs committee – but later rejoined after she was reinstated by the party.
She recently hit the headlines after she was forced to take part in a key Brexit vote in a wheelchair after being discharged from hospital.
In August last year, she was widely criticised for sharing an online post that said the sex abuse victims in the Rotherham Asian grooming scandal should ‘shut their mouths for the good of diversity’. She later apologised, saying it was a ‘genuine mistake’.
She also attacked fellow Labour MP Sarah Champion for writing in The Sun that Britain had a ‘problem with Pakistani men targeting vulnerable white girls’. Mrs Shah said the comments were nothing more than ‘blanket, racialised loaded statements’ which stigmatised the Pakistani community.
The Labour reshuffle – carried out because of MPs taking maternity leave – also included Mike Amesbury becoming shadow employment minister, Justin Madders taking on labour and health and social care, and Jo Platt becoming shadow minister for the Cabinet Office.
‘It was a genuine mistake’