Wartime Israel deports two shills for the other side -- British Labour MPs
The affair reveals not "the horrors of Gaza" but the true horror of the state of British politics
The row over the two British Labour MPs who were refused entry to Israel and deported as undesirables is truly a parable for our poisonous times.
The MPs, Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang, tried to enter Israel in order to visit the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria, aka the “West Bank”. The Israelis said they intended to spread “anti-Israel hatred” and put them on a plane back to Britain.
Cue a diplomatic row and much foaming about denying free speech and how this was a shocking insult to politicians. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, declared: “I have made clear to my counterparts in the Israeli government that this is no way to treat British parliamentarians.”
The hypocrisy is epic. As others have pointed out, previous Labour governments banned two parliamentarians from the UK, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, who campaigns against Islamism, and Moshe Feiglin of Israel, who has supported Israeli annexation of the disputed territories and Gaza.
Yuan Yang herself has pressed the British government to ban the Israeli government members Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. In 2017, more than half the current Cabinet demanded that President Donald Trump should be banned from addressing MPs during any state visit to Britain. And in 2018, Lammy himself declared that Trump was “not welcome” in Britain and should be barred from entry.
Those working themselves up into a fury over the two MPs protest that they were on a fact-finding trip. No they weren’t. They intended to visit only those who would give them more ammunition for their hate-campaign against Israel. They had no intention of asking Israel’s government or military about the agonising war Israel is being forced to fight, nor about the fate of the hostages.
Their trip was sponsored by two groups that are viscerally hostile to Israel, the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding and Medical Aid for Palestinians. Both groups promote the demonisation of Israel based on falsehoods and distortions — a key strategy by the Palestinian Arabs to destroy Israel altogether.
Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) not only promotes sanctions against Israel but also has a history of abhorrent attitudes and associations. In a complaint to the Charity Commission in 2018, UK Lawyers for Israel stated:
MAP has links with and funds NGOs that are linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). PFLP is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UK as well as the USA, EU, Canada, Australia, Israel and other countries. PFLP is involved in suicide bombings, hijackings, and assassinations, amongst other terrorist activities targeting civilians…
MAP’s founder and honorary patron, Dr Swee Ang, has distributed and encouraged others to distribute an openly antisemitic video by David Duke, the white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard. In 2014 Dr Swee Ang circulated a link to Duke’s video entitled “CNN, Goldman Sachs and the Zio Matrix”.
In the House of Commons, Scottish Labour MP Melanie Ward denounced Israel’s barring of the MPs as “disgraceful” and said it “smacks of racism”. Ward, however is the former CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians, and when she was adopted as a candidate for her parliamentary seat told MAP she would enter parliament to fight the Palestinians’ corner.
And the two MPs themselves are cut from the same cloth. Dispassionate and objective they are not.
YNet reports that Yang has denounced “the horrors in Gaza” and claimed “this war has been the deadliest on record for journalists, who fear being targeted while working”. She omits to note, of course, that one after another these “journalists” have turned out to be Hamas terrorists with a microphone.
Yang has also supported the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant — in brazen contradiction of the court’s own rules — in her words, to “prevent future atrocities in Gaza.” She also praised UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini for his “brave work, despite so many obstacles, to ensure aid reaches where it's needed in Gaza” — while ignoring the aid agency’s extensive ties to Hamas.
This, however, is mild compared to Yang’s fellow deportee. In recent months, Abtisam Mohamed alleged that “numerous organisations have found that ethnic cleansing is taking place in northern Gaza,” and claimed Israel was “using starvation as a weapon of war.” Untrue. There is zero ethnic cleansing; the Israelis have moved the Gazans to places of relative safety to escape bombardment, and are now helping those Gazans who are desperate to leave Gaza, but were previously prevented from doing so by Hamas, to leave it. The Gazans remain conspicuously well fed. The people who have been starved are the Israeli hostages.
On March 18, a day after Israel resumed airstrikes, Mohamed said that “Israel violated the ceasefire and killed 356 Palestinians, most of them women, children and the elderly. It bombed tents, homes and shelters indiscriminately. Families were buried under rubble, bodies are everywhere and the world remains silent.”
Untrue. As Honest Reporting discovered, Hamas has now quietly abandoned its systematic claim that 70 per cent of the fatalities in Gaza were women and children, and has recorded instead that of all fatalities between the ages of 13 to 55, which is the general combat age for Hamas fighters, 72 per cent are male. It has also admitted that many of those listed as war fatalities in Gaza actually died of natural causes or hadn’t died at all.
In February, Mohamed called for a boycott of “goods from Israeli settlements.” After the ICC issued its arrest warrants, she urged the UK government to “reassess its relationship with Israel,” saying: “There must be accountability and justice for war crimes, no matter who committed them or where.” Two weeks after the October 7 atrocities, Mohamed described the situation in Gaza as a “humanitarian catastrophe”.
These two Labour MPs tried to enter Israel, during a war Israel is waging against those who openly declare their genocidal intentions against it, in order to promote a narrative designed not to criticise but to defame, demonise and delegitimise Israel as part of a strategy for its destruction. And then Labour MPs have the gall to whine about freedom of speech?
Does no-one in the Labour party recoil in horror and shame that such vile individuals are now Labour members of parliament? But of course, the terrible thing is that so many Labour MPs and others think the same as they do about Israel. No fewer than 70 MPs across the parties were moved to pose for a group photograph in parliament’s Westminster Hall to express their support for Mohamed and Yang.
And that’s because those in the Arab and Muslim world bent on Israel’s extermination have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in having fried the minds of the entire progressive world and liberal political elites, who have swallowed the lies and turned Israel into the bogeyman of the world — all for fighting colonialist aggressors intent upon destroying Israel and murdering Jews.
What country engaged in a desperate war against extermination on seven military fronts — and with an eighth front consisting of the delegitimisation campaign — would allow in people who are promoting the side of the exterminators?
The two MPs claimed to be a parliamentary delegation. They were not. Their sponsors had never registered them as such with Israel, the country into which they were entering. The Conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, has pointed out that the two MPs went against the advice of their own government. For on its website it states plainly that if MPs travel to Israel they could be refused entry if they have called for sanctions and boycotts against it.
Badenoch deserves plaudits for her robust, calm and evidence-based support of Israel’s right to control its border, which she has maintained against hysterical and insulting barracking from the Labour benches. The extent to which people seem to lose their reason on the subject of Israel was further illustrated by the behaviour of Iain Dale, an LBC radio presenter who was interviewing Natasha Hausdorff, the legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel.
Hausdorff attempted to correct a number of misrepresentations about the barred MPs that had been made on Dale’s show. As she pointed out one falsehood after another — no, Israel had not stopped being a democracy; no, the MPs weren’t an official parliamentary delegation; no, this wasn’t about free speech but about peddling smears and falsehoods which meant Israel was entitled to view the presence of these two MPs as not conducive to the public good — Dale became more and more agitated.
It was indeed all about free speech! he declared. The two MPs hadn’t gone there to stir up hatred! Hausdorff’s claims of misrepresentation were disgraceful! She had insulted both him and his previous guest!
When Hausdorff pointed out that Britain had barred parliamentarians such as Geert Wilders, Dale spluttered that there was no comparison because Wilders was a racist. When she pointed out that Israel’s rules prohibit entry for people who have called for a boycott, Dale declared “no normal democracy behaves in this way”. When she speculated that the whole incident might have been a PR stunt to create a diplomatic incident, Dale called this a “disgraceful allegation with no proof at all”. When she said that in previous interviews Dale had never allowed her to correct misrepresentations without telling her she was being rude, Dale cut her off and ended the interview.
Which, considering his ringing support for free speech, was a little ironic.
There’s another alarming issue here. Some people have questioned why these two MPs — one representing Sheffield Central, the other Earley and Woodley in Berkshire — were spending time posturing abroad over an issue of no concern to their constituents. But according to the MPs, their constituents want them to get involved in the Middle East.
That’s almost certainly because of the increasing number of Muslim voters for whom “Palestine” is an issue which not only concerns them but which they think therefore should properly involve their MP, along with mundane issues such as the cost of living or the state of the health service.
A number of British MPs now represent a growing constituency for whom the Islamic world supersedes British domestic interests.
A group of 20 predominantly Labour MPs and peers recently launched a campaign to build an airport in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. The group included Tahir Ali, MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley — in a city where strikes by garbage collectors have left the streets covered in rat-infested piles of trash.
In Parliament, MPs spent more than an hour and 17 minutes discussing the removal of the two MPs from Israel — nearly double the amount of time spent discussing the possible closure of Scunthorpe steelworks earlier in the day.
It’s not just that so many MPs have lost their minds over Israel. They are beginning to abandon the nation that parliament represents.
Britain. The state of it.
*** My new book The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and Why Only They Can Save It, can be bought on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk