A Palestinian stands on top of a mosque destroyed in an Israeli strike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2024.
LABOUR councillors in two London boroughs have been suspended and face disciplinary action for backing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Lambeth Council’s Labour administration suspended four of its councillors today, including Jewish councillor Martin Abrams and a Hindu representative, for supporting a motion calling for a ceasefire.
Mr Abrams is an outspoken Jewish pro-Palestinian activist and spokesman for the left-wing Momentum campaign group.
He said: “My vote for the ceasefire motion was a matter of conscience for me.
“My great grandparents were persecuted and driven from Eastern Europe over 100 years ago in the pogroms of Kiev and came to this country as refugees with nothing, leaving and losing many close family in the process.
“It is exactly this history of persecution of my close ancestors in Europe over the ages that meant I was brought up to always stand with the oppressed and against oppression and when I say never again, I mean never again: for everybody.”
A Momentum spokesperson said:“This is an outrageous attack on a Jewish Labour councillor for having the temerity to stand up for the people of Gaza.
Despite the furore, the recent attack on London mayor Sadiq Khan by the now-suspended Conservative MP Lee Anderson should come as no surprise. In much the same way, neither should we be surprised at prime minister Rishi Sunak’s failure to call out what Anderson said as being anything other than blatant Islamophobia. When it comes to the Conservative party, we have been here before. For them, this is Islamophobia 101.
The recent controversy began when Anderson – who was until very recently the party’s deputy chairman – told GB News that Sadiq Khan had “given our capital city away to his mates”. As he went on, “I don’t actually believe that the Islamists have got control of our country, but what I do believe is they’ve got control of Khan, and they’ve got control of London”.
Since then, Anderson has doubled down, adding: “when you think you are right, you should never apologise because to do so would be a sign of weakness”.
Anderson has lost the whip, but beyond that the message coming out of the Conservative party has been tempered. Sunak has failed to even acknowledge Anderson’s comments as Islamophobic, let alone condemn them as such, saying instead: “I think the most important thing is that the words were wrong, they were ill-judged, they were unacceptable.”
The Conservatives’ problem with Islamophobia
In recent years, the Conservative party has struggled to disentangle itself from various allegations that it is Islamophobic. In 2018, the Muslim Council of Britain presented the party with a dossier detailing near-weekly incidents involving various party members.
For those such as the former party chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, the dossier was merely the tip of the iceberg. Noting how experiences of hate and discrimination are notoriously under-reported she claimed at the time that Islamophobia is “widespread [in the party]…from the grassroots, all the way up to the top”.
In the same year, former prime minister Boris Johnson referred to Muslim women who choose to wear the full-face veil as “letterboxes” and “bank robbers” in an article for the Telegraph. He dismissed the comments as little more than a gaffe but the allegations prompted the then home secretary Sajid Javid to ask his rivals during a BBC Conservative leadership debate to commit to an external investigation into Islamophobia, whoever the next leader might be. All, including Johnson, agreed.
Once Johnson had secured the party leadership however, the investigation was shifted away from Islamophobia onto discrimination more widely. Doing so enabled the party to distance itself from the very reason why such an investigation was deemed necessary in the first place: claims of widespread Islamophobia.
Quibbling over definitions
Another way the Conservatives – and indeed others – have chosen to deny allegations of being Islamophobic is to claim that they do not have a definition for Islamophobia and therefore cannot assess whether comments such as Anderson’s are Islamophobic. Such a premise is of course a farcical, straw man argument.
Like all other discriminatory phenomena – from racism to homophobia – plenty of definitions have been put forward that could be adopted by the Conservatives. They could simply look to the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, which in 2018 made history by putting forward the first working definition of Islamophobia in the UK. In its report Islamophobia Defined, it posited that “Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness”.
Despite this definition being adopted by Labour, the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and various local governments across the country, the Conservative party announced it was not intending to adopt the definition on the basis that further consideration was necessary.
Continuing to deny the existence of an appropriate definition is, at this point, a convenient way to avoid being accused of being Islamophobic. As I put it in my 2020 book Reconfiguring Islamophobia, all the debate around definitions achieves is to afford detractors permission to do nothing about the problem itself.
Attacks on Sadiq Khan
Opposition parties were immediately critical of Anderson’s comments. But while the Labour party Chair Anneliese Dodds described them as “unambiguously racist and Islamophobic” and the Liberal Democrat London mayoral candidate Rob Blackie castigated the MP for “spreading dangerous conspiracy theories”, it is interesting that no one has highlighted how attacking Khan specifically is becoming an alarmingly common political tactic.
This was nowhere more evident than during Zac Goldsmith’s 2016 London mayoral campaign. Branded “disgusting” at the time, Goldsmith published a piece in the Mail on Sunday with the headline: “Are we really going to hand the world’s greatest city to a Labour Party that thinks terrorists are its friends?”. Goldsmith went on to paint rival Khan as a security risk, claiming he had past links with extremists and that he supported Islamic State. Sound familiar?
So too does the Conservative party have a history of laying claim to Islamist extremists infiltrating other parts of British society. Michael Gove, during his time as education secretary, launched an investigation into claims “Muslim hardliners” were taking over state schools in Birmingham, despite the letter that made the allegations being immediately dismissed as a hoax by the police. In 2015, Theresa May, while home secretary, took it even further, launching a campaign against “entryist” infiltration across vast swathes of the public and third sectors by Islamist extremists.
While there should be no hierarchy when it comes to hate or discrimination, the reality is that when it comes to Islamophobia, the scrutiny directed at other forms of prejudice is undeniably absent. What can be said and alleged about Muslims in political (and public) spaces cannot be said about other religious groups and communities.
It should be shocking that the prime minister cannot even acknowledge Anderson’s comments as Islamophobic – but it isn’t. It’s just another example of the sheer disregard and utter contempt that is shown by political leaders towards this problem.
Far-right parties and politicians are mounting election campaigns all over the world in 2024. Join us in London at 6pm on March 6 for a salon style discussion with experts on how seriously we should take the threat, what these parties mean for our democracies – and what action we can take. Register for your place at this free public session here. There will be food, drinks and, best of all, the opportunity to connect with interesting people.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres speaks at the opening of the 55th session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland on February 26, 2024. (Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
“Today’s warmongers cannot erase the clear lesson of the past,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres. “Protecting human rights protects us all.”
The head of the United Nations said Monday that countries and groups involved in wars around the world are “turning a blind eye to international law” and imperiling the lives of millions of innocent people, including many children.
“The rule of law, and the rules of war, are being undermined,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in remarks to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Guterres pointed specifically to conflicts raging in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan and lamented that the U.N. Security Council has frequently been “deadlocked” in the face of mass atrocities, “unable to act on the most significant peace and security issues of our time.”
“The council’s lack of unity on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and on Israel’s military operations in Gaza following the horrific terror attacks by Hamas on 7 October, has severely—perhaps fatally—undermined its authority,” said Guterres, who delivered his address less than a week after the U.S. used its veto power for the third time since October 7 to tank a Gaza cease-fire resolution at the U.N. Security Council.
“Flouting international law only feeds insecurity and results in more bloodshed.”
Guterres’ speech marked the start of the Human Rights Council’s first high-level session of 2024. The U.N. chief said at the session that the world “urgently” needs a “new commitment to all human rights—civil, cultural, economic, political, and social—as they apply to peace and security, backed by serious efforts at implementation and accountability.”
Toward that end, Guterres announced the launch of a “systemwide United Nations Agenda for Protection” under which U.N. bodies “will act as one to prevent human rights violations, and to identify and respond to them when they take place.”
“Flouting international law only feeds insecurity and results in more bloodshed,” Guterres warned. “Human rights conventions and humanitarian law are based on cold, hard reality: They recognize that terrorizing civilians and depriving them of food, water, and healthcare is a recipe for endless anger, alienation, extremism, and conflict.”
“Today’s warmongers cannot erase the clear lesson of the past,” he added. “Protecting human rights protects us all.”
Around the world, violence is increasing.
We must not become numb to appalling & repeated violations of international humanitarian & human rights law.
Violations by one party don't absolve the other from compliance.
Guterres’ address came after Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said in separate analyses published Monday that Israel is blatantly disregarding an interim ruling handed down last month by the U.N.’s highest legal body, the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Israeli forces have killed more than 3,400 people in Gaza since the ICJ’s January 26 ruling, and nearly 30,000 total since their assault on the Palestinian enclave began following a deadly Hamas-led attack on October 7.
“Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying a callous indifference to the fate of Gaza’s population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said places them at imminent risk of genocide,” Heba Morayef, Amnesty’s regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.
“Time and time again,” Morayef added, “Israel has failed to take the bare minimum steps humanitarians have desperately pleaded for that are clearly within its power to alleviate the suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
In his remarks Monday, Guterres warned that an Israeli ground assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah “would not only be terrifying for more than a million Palestinian civilians sheltering there; it would put the final nail in the coffin of our aid programs.”
“International humanitarian law remains under attack. Tens of thousands of civilians, including women and children, have been killed in Gaza,” said Guterres. “I repeat my call for a humanitarian cease-fire and the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages.”
As Lee Anderson doubles down on his controversial comments made over the weekend, when he claimed “Islamists” had got “control” over London and that the mayor, Sadiq Khan had “given our capital city away to his mates”, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay, said:
“Sunak needs to recall his pledge to act with integrity and challenge the divisive and dangerous rhetoric being used by some of his MPs.”
“We need our leaders to work for unity rather than creating division. For some time, senior Conservative Muslims have been raising concerns about the extent of Islamophobia in their party and criticizing the failure of the leadership to tackle it. Sunak needs to make clear that there is no place for such views in his party, and to instigate an immediate review of Islamophobia.”
