Rupa Huq (Lab.), Salim Alam, Jon Ball (LibDem), Tom Sharman (Green) last night.
Angie Bray, Conservative MP for Ealing Central & Acton, refused to attend last night’s West London PSC event Palestine is Still the Issue.
The event was held at St Mary’s Church, Ealing and was hosted by Salim Alam, chair of West London PSC. The rather unpleasant Mr Alam once threatened to knock a camera I was holding out of my hands.
The remaining panelists were three challengers for Angie Bray’s Ealing Central & Acton seat at the upcoming general election this May: Rupa Huq (Labour), Jon Ball (Lib Dem.), Tom Sharman (Green).
Huq, Ball and Sharman were all anti-Israel automatons. Their party leaders would have been proud. All three were ready to confine Israelis to hell just as long as they won themselves some votes last night.
Sharman wanted Britain to stop supplying weapons to Israel and to stop buying weapons from Israel. He said “Israeli weapons are road tested on the Palestinians and so they are attractive to the British government”.
Ball started off by saying he wasn’t an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian issue but then went on to call for a boycott of “settlement” goods and for “ending the arms trade with Israel”.
He did, however, reject economic sanctions against the whole of Israel but not on the ground that such action was wrong but on the ground that it would only “fuel the collective paranoia of the Israeli government and its supporters overseas” and make them more hardline and right-wing.
Huq, meanwhile, was obsessed with Ed Miliband being Jewish. It was something she repeatedly mentioned without explaining the relevance.
Her second main obsession was that Israel is, apparently, starving the Palestinians of water (see clip below). She said “they’re basically shutting off the water supply to the Palestinians”. Lies and utter nonsense from a woman who attended Cambridge University.
During the Q&A an elderly woman quoted Albert Einstein in the 1930s about making peace with the Arab communities. She then said she was saddened that “the Jews are not smart enough to understand this”.
It would have been the decent thing for Huq, Ball and Sharman to have called her out on her anti-Semitism but maybe they were worried that might cost them votes.
Finally, Alam announced that UKIP had not been invited to speak at the event because they were the antithesis of what the PSC stood for. That’s ironic because PSC events are some of the most racist and anti-Jewish one could attend being on a par with those held by far right extremists.
For example, I once attended another event chaired by Alam also in a church. Afterwards I recorded one of that event’s attendees mocking the way Jews died in the Holocaust. The sickening statement released afterwards by the West London PSC said that she had been “harangued”.
And one of the guest speakers that night was the Reverend Stephen Sizer who recently posted a link to his Facebook suggesting Israel was behind 9/11.
So while Huq, Sharman and Ball all lowered themselves by contributing to yet another sickening PSC hatefest Angie Bray’s refusal to attend was the only dignified response.
RichardMillett's Blog 
Well done Annie Bray! Good on her!
How does it serve you well that a Member of Parliament who sides unquestionably with Israel does not turn up to put its case? Lack of facts? Lack of conviction? Lack of a chance to retain her seat?
There no cause to serve in such meetings. Better let the apparently few haters remain with themselves.
Hi Doddy
Maybe, just maybe, she had something more important to do like helping a constituent or a member of her family if she had a night off from Parliament. Anything is better than attending an event where the audience is so against Israel and nothing that she would say would change their mind. And she might have attended had this event not been put on by the despicable PSC whose events in the past have contained anti-Semitism.
Limited attendance, it seems.
What a blinkered, defensive take on a meeting of concerned constituents ignored by their Israel Lobby, bought and paid for MP.
Good joke!
And just what evidence does Doddy have for what is nothing but a smear, and, should she be so inclined, a potentially actionable smear at that?
Is that silence I’m greeted with?
Does anybody have the actual pounds’ worth of arms trade between Israel and Britain? and as a percentage of Israel – GB trade and as a percentage of all GB exports?
I heard that Israeli-made helmets will protect British soldiers. Must be high-tech ones, with GPS, augmented reality, automatic target detection options,
Thank you as ever for this Richard.
What did you make of last night’s question time?
Phil
Stop picking on Stephen Sizer:He went to a conference in Iran you know! And they love Zionists in Iran! As he says on his blog:
“I very much regret and apologise for the distress caused by the reposting on Facebook of a link to an article about 9/11 from Wikispooks. It was particularly insensitive in that last week coincided with Holocaust Memorial Day. I removed the link as soon as I received adverse feedback, and realised that offence had been caused. I have never believed Israel or any other country was complicit in the terrorist atrocity of 9/11, and my sharing of this material was ill-considered and misguided. At the request of the Diocese, I will be suspending my use of all social media and blogs with immediate effect and until further notice.”
So there!