British Conservatives Suspend Candidate for Anti-Semitic Facebook Slur
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Version 0 of 1. The British Conservative Party suspended a candidate for a seat in local government on Monday after she posted an anti-Semitic slur on Facebook over the weekend. In an exchange on the social network, the candidate, Gulzabeen Afsar, 31, suggested that the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband, was unfit to succeed the leader of her party, Prime Minister David Cameron. “Just can’t take Mr. Ed Miliband seriously!!” Ms. Afsar wrote. “DC has what it takes to be the future PM.” When another Facebook user asked that she show some respect for Mr. Miliband, Ms. Afsar replied, “never ever will I drop that low and support the Al Yahud,” using Arabic for “The Jew” to refer to the Labour leader. The comments were later deleted from Facebook, but not before bloggers and journalists at Britain’s Jewish News made screenshots. Mr. Miliband, an avowed atheist, is the son of Jewish intellectuals who came to Britain as refugees from the Nazis but was not raised in an observant household. He told London’s Evening Standard in 2010: “Obviously I’m Jewish; it is part of my identity, but not in a religious sense.” At the time, he observed that British voters, unlike Americans, did not seem interested in whether or not candidates for elected office are religious. “I think that’s rather a good thing and it speaks well for us as a country,” he added. Despite her suspension, Ms. Afsar will remain on the ballot in next week’s election as a Conservative candidate for a seat in the town council of the English city of Derby, BBC News reported. However, the party’s local leader, Philip Hickson, emphatically withdrew his support and promised to move ahead with a disciplinary procedure that could lead to Ms. Afsar being expelled from the Conservative Party. “The comment was offensive and totally unacceptable and cannot be tolerated under any circumstances,” Mr. Hickson said in a statement posted on Facebook. Ms. Afsar, who did not reply to a request for comment, had promised to tackle “antisocial behaviour” if elected. A volunteer for Britain’s Disaster Emergency Committee, she achieved local prominence in 2010, when she led an effort to raise money for flood victims in Pakistan from the Pakistani community in Derby. The incident comes as the Conservatives are attempting to win back support in England from voters attracted by the nationalist message of the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, which wants to withdraw from the European Union and curb immigration. Opposition parties have described the UKIP campaign as xenophobic. Earlier this month, a Labour candidate visiting a village school outside Derby was startled by words of support for UKIP from a 10-year-old boy. Asked why he supported UKIP, the boy said, “to get all the foreigners out of the country.” Mr. Cameron made an impassioned effort to dispel the notion that immigrants are not welcome in a speech on Saturday about British identity. “We’re a shining example of a country where multiple identities work,” the prime minister said. “A country where you can be Welsh and Hindu and British; Northern Irish and Jewish and British.” The message of Mr. Cameron’s speech was overshadowed, however, by a gaffe, in which he seemed confused about his own identity, at least in relation to the tribal world of British soccer fans. At one point in the speech, the prime minister seemed to forget which professional soccer club he supports, speaking of his love for West Ham, a team in London, rather than Aston Villa, a Birmingham club he has called himself a fan of in the past. That the two teams wear similar uniforms might explain the mix up, though it seemed to suggest that the politican’s affinity for his club was not very strong. The prime minister’s flub was widely ridiculed on social networks, where the term #Villagate became a trending topic. Mr. Cameron once explained that he became a fan of Aston Villa at the age of 13, when his uncle, who was the team’s chairman at the time, took him to a match. Many of Mr. Cameron’s detractors, like Alastair Campbell, the former Labour communications director, suggested that the slip was evidence that his professed allegiance was a sham — part of an effort to appeal to working-class voters and play down his wealthy background. |