Not content with spending his time campaigning for an airport in Pakistan, Labour’s Tahir Ali has now called for Britain to invade Israel. The Birmingham Hall Green & Moseley MP used a Commons debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to urge the British military should wage war against the Jewish state. Quite the escalation in the backbench foreign-policy portfolio.
After hearing calls for Hamas to disarm, Ali interjected:
On the issue of disarmament, should we not also be calling for Israel’s disarmament, given the atrocities that have been committed? Previous governments have intervened in the Middle East to take action on human rights abuses and protect international trade routes. Is it not about time that military action was taken against Israel as well?
Ali was not the only Labour backbencher competing to produce the debate’s most deranged contribution. Bradford East MP Imran Hussain demanded that the government ‘end all remaining arms sales to Israel and, in particular, close the F-35 loophole’.
He complained: ‘We must ensure that no equipment of UK origin directly or indirectly supports genocide in Gaza, or war crimes anywhere in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The scale of death and suffering caused by the right-wing Netanyahu government’s genocide in Gaza demands urgent and further immediate action.’
Responding to the bizarre intervention by Ali, Israel’s Minister of Diaspora and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, said: ‘Tahir Ali sounds more like a member of al-Qaeda than a member of the British Parliament. In his case, remigration is the most appropriate solution.’
Sigh. Mr S wonders just how lower the Labour Party can sink?
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