Anti-Israel past of Labour local council candidates

VLABOUR IS FIELDING candidates with a history of alarming statements about Israel in the local elections, two years after Sir Keir Starmer pledged to tear antisemitism out of the party “by its roots”.

The Labour candidate for Wandsworth Council, Martin Linton, was forced to apologise in 2010 after he said the “long tentacles of Israel” were reaching into British politics.

While he was a Labour MP for Battersea, Mr Linton said: “There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends.”

Speaking to the Islam channel, Mr Linton also denied that Hamas was a terror group.

He said: “I think ‘terrorist’ is the wrong word to use about an organisation that is fighting against a military occupation.

“Some of the actions that Hamas have taken could be described as ‘terrorist’ in the true sense of the word, actions that target civilians, but then so too could actions taken by the Israeli defence forces, who, after all, killed far more civilians during the recent war than Hamas did.”

Appearing on Press TV, he defended Palestinian “blood libel” cleric Raed Salah after he was deported from Britain.

Mr Linton said: “I think they arrested the wrong one. I think they should have arrested [Israeli opposition leader] Tzipi

Livny and let Sheikh Raed come here and speak his mind.”

The Labour candidate for Westminster City council, Murad Qureshi, met Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh with a Labour delegation in 2011, posing for a photo with the terror chief.

And in 2016, he apologised after liking and sharing a tweet that claimed, “you can get away with deeply offending anyone in this country as long as they’re not Jewish”.

At the time, the then-London Assembly member said: “I apologise for any offence caused by this retweet. The views it contained were wrong and do not reflect my own.” He told the JC this week that no further action was taken by Labour or the Greater London Authority.

In a blog post written in 2013, Mr Qureshi also questioned the “legal basis” for putting Nazi Adolf Eichmann on trial, saying: “l am not sure the Eichmann trial can be held up as a model of due processes”.

He told the JC that he had been “responding to a 2013 Economist editorial recommending the Eichmann trial as a model for the trials of individuals accused of war crimes in Bangladesh... I was not expressing sympathy for the Nazi war criminal Eichmann and would never do so.”

About his trip to Gaza, Mr Qureshi said: “I did not endorse Hamas or its leadership on this visit and have not done so before or since.”

Mr Linton and Labour were contacted for comment.