Twitter cartoon row MSP reported to police
A LEADING Nationalist MSP has been reported to police over her retweeting of an anti-Semitic cartoon.
The co-chairman of the Judeo-Christian Alliance (JCA) yesterday called in Police Scotland over an image Sandra White shared with thousands of her Twitter followers.
Elliot Davis spoke to two officers to raise concern over the bizarre cartoon which has been compared to the ‘very worst of the Nazi propaganda’.
Senior officers will examine the complaint before deciding if a full-scale investigation should take place.
The MSP, who is co-convener of the cross-party group on Palestine at Holyrood, has insisted she did not mean to retweet the image. But it is
‘Slow to issue public condemnations’
understood at least two of Mrs White’s Glasgow Kelvin constituents have also reported her to the police.
Mr Davis, former manager of pop group Wet Wet Wet, said there were serious questions over Mrs White’s claim that she accidentally retweeted the anti-Semitic image.
He added: ‘She is in a position of power, a member of the Scottish parliament and she has taken the time to retweet an inherently “Jew-hate” image. In any other profession someone who had done such a thing would have resigned, so why should Sandra White, as an MSP, be any different?’
Police Scotland was last night unable to confirm the complaints had been made because of a time-lag before they are entered into the official database.
Mr Davis, 56, of Kilmarnock, who first spoke of his concerns in yesterday’s Mail, said retweeting required the Twitter user to ‘engage in the process’ and the social media website has safeguards which make it hard to retweet by accident. The prospect of a police investigation is a blow for Nicola Sturgeon who backed Mrs White’s explanation that she had not intended to spread the image online.
A petition calling for Mrs White to quit, launched by Glasgow resident Jonathan Manevitch, has amassed more than 1,100 backers. It condemns her ‘endorsement of blatant racial bias towards Jews’.
The cartoon circulated by Mrs White depicted six piglets, representing Britain, the US, Israel and terror groups IS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram, suckling from a large sow with the word ‘Rothschild’ written on it.
An image of a bank with a Star of David on it was also emblazoned on the sow, alongside depictions of presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush with the Star of David on their faces.
The growing number of critics calling for Mrs White to go comes as the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (ScoJec) warned of its concerns about anti-Semitism on social media.
In a recent meeting with Community Safety Minister Paul Wheelhouse, ScoJec raised its fears about anti-Semitism in Scotland.
The group said: ‘There are still too many incidents taking place, particularly on social media, and we have evidence that many are not reported to the police.’
An online statement by the group said that ‘since a significant number of incidents have been related to events in the Middle East, the current outbreak of stabbings in Israel may make a further spike in anti-Semitism in Scotland more likely’.
But ‘although the community has received some level of comfort from the high level of detection by Police Scotland and several successful prosecutions,’ the group said, it had told the ministers about the ‘widespread concern that the Scottish Government had been slow to issue public condemnations’ of some anti-Semitic murders.
An SNP spokesman said Mrs White had re-tweeted the image by mistake, later deleted it and apologised for any offence caused.