An Unholy Alliance: Muslim Fundamentalists and the Far-Right
What a disgraced Plaid Cymru candidate tells us about Anti-Semitism
The Welsh nationalists’ hopes of being seen as progressive with a Muslim woman were quickly dashed when she appeared to side with Britain’s most infamous Holocaust denier. Sharifah Rahman wasn’t the stereotypical Plaid Cymru candidate. The Welsh nationalists were undoubtedly proud of their diversity when a hijab-wearing Muslim woman was selected to represent the regionalist party in the Cardiff South and Penarth constituency, away from Plaid’s Welsh-speaking heartlands where they appear to be focusing their campaigns.
She was nominated and confirmed as a candidate, but it all went wrong: it later emerged that Rahman appeared to have endorsed some extreme statements on social media.
Since October 7th and the Israeli response, she’d liked multiple antisemitic tweets, including from the former leader of the British National Party, Nick Griffin. The far-right politician tweeted about Israel, suggesting that the Jewish country has no right to exist and describing it as a “terrorist state.” Some would argue that criticizing Israel is not prejudice against Jews – which is true – but under internationally agreed definitions, denying the country’s right to exist can be. Of course, when this criticism of Israel comes from Griffin, it’s not coming from a good place.
The revolting man has always been a firm believer in a Jewish plot to take over the world. In his disastrous Question Time appearance, Griffin was confronted over his Holocaust Denial, his association with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan and his infamous quote “Adolf went a bit far.”
To many people, it would seem strange for a left-wing Muslim like Rahman to agree with the former leader of the BNP: he’s no friend of Muslims. The BNP used to oppose Islamic extremist groups like those led by Anjem Choudary and talked about Muslim gangs abusing girls in the North of England. There are legitimate concerns around these issues but with Nick Griffin, it comes from a place of racism – he is even on video comparing black people to monkeys.
However, antisemitism has proved to be a common ground between Islamists and their former BNP tormentor: Griffin recently appeared on a podcast for the Islamic hate website Five Pillars, discussing Zionism and the far right. Worse still, the man also has a history of meeting with officials from Hezbollah, an antisemitic terrorist group attacking Israel to this day.
Griffin is not the only white nationalist who finds himself agreeing with Islamic extremists. His old friend, former KKK leader David Duke is another example. In 2017, Duke retweeted Linda Sarsour, the Muslim activist who organized mass anti-Trump protests. Sarsour has made multiple antisemitic statements accusing Jews of being supremacists and having dual loyalty and Duke clearly agrees with her.
He recently appeared at multiple events claiming to be supporting Palestine alongside a new generation of far-right influencers including Nick Fuentes. This unholy alliance between Islamic supremacists and white supremacists goes back a long time. In 1961, American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell and ten of his followers were invited to a conference organized by the black supremacist group Nation of Islam.
Although they were two opposite extremes, they had two important beliefs in common: separation of the races and hatred of Jews. This alliance between National Socialists and radical Islamists didn’t start in America. Although Hitler had contempt for Arab people, some Arab nationalists joined Nazi Germany as part of the Axis Powers during the Second World War.
The antisemitic regime in Iraq was one such example, fighting the British Empire with support from Germany, Italy and Vichy France. After the Allied victory and the collapse of Rashid Ali’s pro-Nazi government, the Iraqi people turned on the Jewish population of Baghdad in a pogrom that killed nearly two hundred people, injured a thousand more and destroyed nine hundred Jewish homes.
Hitler also met with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who assured him they were uniting against common foes: the English, the Jews and the Communists.
Some may say that Rahman may have liked Griffin’s tweets without knowing who he was or understanding that they were antisemitic – since his disastrous appearance on Question Time and now that the BNP barely exists, he has faded into obscurity. However, the Plaid candidate can’t plead ignorance when she liked a tweet describing Hamas as the resistance. After the horrific attacks on October 7th, we all know that the terrorists’ violence against civilians is not a legitimate form of resistance and they can hardly claim to be freedom fighters when they’re supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, one of the most repressive regimes in the world.
This isn’t the first time this has happened to Plaid Cymru. In 2019, the party featured a burqa-wearing Muslim woman in their political broadcast, with the caption “Wales, it’s us.”
To be clear, when people are having debates about independence and of course, during sporting events like the Euros, national and regional identities are visible: we should be open to the idea of having multiple identities, whether it’s being Muslim and Welsh or being black and English.
This is not legitimate criticism of the Israeli government, it’s antisemitic conspiracy theory nonsense. However, she was later selected as a candidate for the Senedd, to the outcry of some Jewish groups.
Likely, condoning casual racism from people like Al-Faifi and more prominent figures such as former leader Leanne Wood emboldened a more hardline antisemite, Rafah, to represent Plaid in the election.
Going further back, in 2012, a woman in Cardiff beat her son to death for failing to memorize verses from the Quran. Her little boy was just seven years old. What Cardiff shows is that we see these problems with people being overly religious and intolerant even in the smaller Muslim communities and now that radical Islam is creeping into British politics.
It would seem that Plaid Cymru are so determined to outdo Labour as the party of political correctness, that they selected Muslim women as candidates without sufficient vetting or in al-Faifi’s case, turning a blind eye to her controversial past. Throughout the general election campaign, news outlets have exposed Reform UK candidates for troubling or even racist statements on social media. Still, many in the mainstream media are not reporting in the same detail on the antisemitism and extremism coming from the left-wing parties.
There are lots of parties to the left of Labour - George Galloway’s Workers Party, the Greens, and the regional nationalists – who are campaigning largely on Israel and Palestine and as a result, attracting activists and candidates who are antisemitic and dabbling in all sorts of extremism.
The Jewish Chronicle exposed three prospective candidates for sharing posts on social media that had antisemitic connotations. One of them issued an apology and withdrew her candidacy before the election and another was subsequently dropped by the party for comparing Israel to the Nazis. The other, Chris Brody, remained a Green Party candidate despite making similar comments and suggesting that the October 7th attacks were a “false flag.” He has finally been suspended and accused of sexual assault.
The JC also exposed a fourth candidate who claimed Israel paid Hamas to attack the Nova Festival on October 7th and he was subsequently suspended and replaced. An investigation by The Times found that as many as twenty prospective parliamentary candidates for the Green Party made inflammatory statements about Israel since October 7 many of them speaking positively about Hamas and conspiratorially about the Jewish state and the Daily Mail presented them with evidence against a councillor who spread false rumours about a Jewish chaplain at Leeds University.
Yes, some of these people have been suspended but others have not and are still standing. Contrast this with some of the other people who the Greens removed more quickly: in 2012, a Christian woman on Brighton and Hove City Council was removed from the Green group because she did not support gay marriage. More recently, the Greens have expelled activists in rows over alleged “transphobia,” dropped a prospective candidate for the Batley and Spen by-election for anti-gay comments he made on social media as a teenager and their candidate in the Rochdale by-election was suspended for “Islamophobic” tweets from ten years before.
The Greens’ man in Rochdale, Guy Otten, a humanist vocal in his atheist views, had tweeted that the Quran was not fit for the 21st century and that antisemitism was “alive and well in Islam.” This was enough for the man to be disowned by his party after it was too late to nominate someone else.
The Greens – like so many on the left – are very concerned about what might offend gay people, what might offend trans people, what might offend Muslims, but don’t care so much about what might offend -and indeed alarm – British Jews. So many people who claim to be “woke” see racism everywhere and antisemitism nowhere.
Of course, there are British Muslims and other people on the left who mean well and are concerned for the plight of the Palestinians who do not realize that they have said something racist or endorsed an antisemitic statement.
But we should also be aware of the threat from radical Islam and far-left politics as it’s just as bad as the Jew-hating far right.
Of course, people can have multiple identities and campaign on numerous issues in an election, but it is important to remember that some radical Muslims and hardliners on the far left see these smaller parties as mere empty vessels for their toxic agenda now that Keir Starmer has purged many antisemites from Labour. For a healthy democracy, the next Labour government should face strong and diverse opposition from MPs with diverse backgrounds and political beliefs, but they and their rivals must also guard their left flank or else they risk becoming everything they hate.
Whilst a more diverse parliament may seem desirable – and perhaps inevitable – voters should be careful to vote for moderate Muslim candidates who leave behind the radical interpretation of their religion, not those who are so extreme, that they align themselves with the BNP.