Labour still has an anti-Semitism problem

Then there’s the other candidate, or ex-candidate, for the Rochdale by-election, the one nobody is talking about. The Green party hopeful, Guy Otten, had his party’s support withdrawn last week and he decided to pull out over tweets he had written, some of them up to ten years ago. The one which really narked his Green colleagues, apparently, was this: ‘The Quran is full of war, slaughter, rape and pillage, with genocide and slavery as well. It’s not fit for the 21st century.’

Hmm. How to put this? I have to say, as a description of the gorier bits of the Quran it’s not terribly wide of the mark, is it?

If, by contrast, Mr Otten had said of Islam’s holy book: ‘It carries tales of debauchery, decadence, class A drugs and S&M orgies which would not seem out of place in a biography of Iggy and the Stooges’, then people might have genuine grounds for complaint. Mr Otten also asked, presumably rhetorically, in a tweet more recently: ‘Isn’t genocide what the Palestinians and others seek for Israel?’

Mr Otten is a humanist and does not have much time for Islam, or for religion in general. If he had directed his wrath at the Christian church instead, he’d probably be on course for victory right now. But you can’t diss Islam, or go against the apparent view that Hamas are cuddly, peaceable little squirrels being persecuted by an evil fascist state.

Labour’s paroxysms over its own candidate, Azhar Ali, have been a source of great hilarity, and rightly so. It is now perfectly clear that Sir Keir Starmer is utterly incapable of making a decision without reversing it 180 degrees, usually the following day. Starmer first ordered Ali to make an apology, which was risible even by today’s standards of objectively dishonest public apologies.