Ex Bradford Mayor, “Greater Israel” and Stupid Antisemitism

Watch these three minutes of sheer lunacy below. It is unlikely that you will have seen a more obvious example of antisemitic craziness (and no, it appears not to be Larry David having a Borat type laugh at the expense of stupid antisemites).

Stupid as it is, this brings us immediately to the heart of antisemitic conspiracy theory and its underpinning of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist conspiracy theory. After 9/11, the widely held accusation was that 4,000 Jews (not Zionists) were warned not to go to work in the Twin Towers, because Mossad was controlling Al Qaeda. Today, that shifts seamlessly into Mossad running ISIS.

If you didn’t watch Brother Nathaniel above, here are some quotes. (1.36) “Nobody creates chaos  better than Jewmerica”. (2.02) “ISIS is good for The Jews and the lies and evasions keep pouring in”. (2.54) "Its Jews for Jihadists, that’s why it keeps gaining ground”.

Brother Nathaniel comes to us courtesy of the below Facebook posting from Khadim Hussain, the  former Lord Mayor of Bradford and former chair of Bradford Council of Mosques, currently suspended from the Labour Party whilst two other offensive posts by him are being investigated.  Click on the WHATSUPIC.COM article that Hussain endorses and you will find Brother Nathaniel.

Khadim Hussain may well be ignorant of the origin of the above graphic. It is, however, the standard depiction of how conspiracy theorists allege “Greater Israel” will conquer the Levant. Often, its use is explicitly antisemitic, such as when appearing in an Iranian state edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It appears here in Britain in “Satanic Voices”, by David Musa Pidcock, then leader of the Islamic Party of Britain. This book alleges that Salman Rushdie’s "Satanic Verses" was a plot by: “the big finance promoters of the New World Order…the historic and modern conspiracies of freemasonry and Zionism”. (You can see a scapegoat theme developing here.)

Returning to Khadim Hussain’s WHATSUPIC.COM, their Greater Israel article also includes brief videos of General Ramsey Clark and Norman Finkelstein as well as Ken O’Keefe, a reformed ex-US marine who now occupies the wilder fringes of the ‘anti-war’ left alongside Gilad Atzmon.  As usual, O’Keefe is angry, very angry. WHATSUPIC paraphrases him quite accurately, as follows:

“Ken explains the concept of ‘The Greater Israel Project’ and the balkanization of surrounding countries as a means of destabilizing them…The head of the snake, the system of power, is headed by the financial system. The bankers rule the Earth through the private control of the issuance of money, debt-based money…an INFINITE supply of money which means that they can buy anything and anyone so we see that the world governments are nothing but puppets of bankers who control their money supply. The bankers at the top of this pyramid are psychopaths.”

O’Keefe’s use of the word “snake” is striking (see above image). His depiction of bankers could be far left, far right or Islamist: but he avoids using the word Jew, so we can see that it is far left, even if the Greater Israel and global power accusations sound horribly familiar from other ideological strains.

O’Keefe’s interview comes from Press TV. This is the same Iranian state broadcaster that George Galloway, Ken Livingstone, and Jeremy Corbyn have all worked with.

None of this proves that Khadim Hussain is an antisemite, but it does prove that he is guilty of spreading at least one conspiracy theory that is rooted in antisemitism: both of itself and within its wider contexts of “Greater Israel” trash talk and blaming Jews, or Zionists, for whatever the latest ill is that befalls Muslims, be it Salman Rushdie, 9/11 or ISIS.

Neither is this the only time that Khadim Hussein has blamed Israel for ISIS. Indeed, one of the two items he is being investigated for by Labour is on exactly this subject and actually appears on his Facebook page immediately before the above WHATSUPIC article. The other item under investigation is his retweeting a pro-Black Lives Matter image that includes the words “Hitler killed 6 million Jews…your school system only tells you about Anne Frank and the 6 million Zionists that were killed by Hitler…”. 

Note how the words change from “6 million Jews” to “6 million Zionists”. Did Khadim Hussain even notice this in his rush to press retweet?

And yet Khadim Hussain has helped Bradford Synagogue. Other social media postings by him show attempts to distinguish Jews from Zionists. We can be cruel and thank him for such small mercies, but more useful would be to sincerely grapple with what this means about the ignorance surrounding antisemitism in Britain today, both within parts of the Labour Party and within parts of Muslim communities.

Khadim Hussain’s protestations against his Labour suspension have been strong and forthright (see here). The easy route here is to call him self-deluded, but the far harder and surely more constructive course of action, is to try and at least explain where he (and others) have gone wrong in their search for easy answers to our complex world.