Muslims won’t be fooled by George Galloway any more

It is a measure of how conspiracy theories have triumphed in the darkest corners of the left that, when the Labour candidate for Rochdale started banging on about Jews, his rivals in the George Galloway campaign thought he was making a smart political move.

Azhar Ali had been taped putting forward two anti-Jewish fantasies.

In these paranoid circumstances, Galloway and his supporters think his victory is inevitable

First, he declared that the Israeli state had allowed Hamas to massacre Jews. Ali was not quite engaged in the modern equivalent of holocaust denial – that would have meant pretending the massacres never happened. Instead, Israel was meant to have ‘deliberately’ permitted the mass murder, rape and abduction of Jews because it wanted a pretext to devastate the Gaza Strip.

Not content with that, Ali moved closer to home: in a recording he appears to imagine that there was a conspiracy of Jewish journalists targeting a pro-Palestinian Labour politician.

James Giles, Galloway’s campaign manager seemed impressed.