Photo of Sir Keir at ‘boycott Israel’ rally hits his antisemitism purge
SIR Keir Starmer’s bid to be the man to rid Labour of antisemitism was challenged last night over his appearance at a meeting which included a call to punish ‘Israeli racism’.
The Labour leader spoke at a 2015 meeting of the Camden Palestine Solidarity Campaign which backs a boycott of Israeli goods to punish the country for its treatment of Palestinians. Sir Keir, then his party’s candidate for the local Holborn and St Pancras seat, was pictured against a banner proclaiming ‘Kick Israeli Fascism out of Fifa’.
That was part of a Palestinian bid to have
Israel suspended from the world football body over claims that it banned the free movement of Palestinian players for training and matches.
Embarrassingly for the Labour leader, details of the meeting emerged on the eve of today’s key vote at the Labour conference on instituting a new complaints process for antisemitism cases and other complaints.
Tory MP Andrew Percy accused Sir Keir of ‘shameful hypocrisy from a leader of a party that has only recently been found to have discriminated against its own Jewish members’, adding: ‘Those who argue for boycotts of Israel have helped fuel anti-Jewish racist attacks and have contributed to making British Jews feel unsafe in their own communities.’
Labour said last night Sir Keir had never supported a boycott of Israel and had also never supported the campaign to expel the country from Fifa.
The party also denied that it was implementing a ‘foreign flags ban’ at the Brighton conference. Sources said foreign flags would be confiscated to prevent a repeat of the party’s 2018 rally where activists unfurled Palestinian flags, but a spokesman insisted there were no plans to ban them.