RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Rampant anti-Semitism in Rochdale and beyond is being fostered by an unholy alliance of the Hard Left and militant Islam - and Starmer is like a rabbit trapped in the headlights

What is it with Rochdale? This former textile town on the outskirts of Greater Manchester used to be known as the birthplace of Gracie Fields and a punchline on the end of the classified football results read by James Alexander Gordon.

Rochdale, NIL.

It was also famous as the parliamentary seat of that novelty Northern nonce, Cyril Smith, who blazed a trail for the predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs convicted of committing serial sex offences against under-age girls a few years ago.

Nice one, Cyril.

Smith was a Liberal, but most of us of a certain age would think of Rochdale, were we ever to think of it at all, as one of Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’ citadels, a Lowry painting of a working-class Labour stronghold from those miserable British New Wave black-and-white movies of the 1950s and early 1960s, which were such a feature of wet Sunday afternoons on the BBC when we were growing up.

The last time Rochdale hit the political headlines was when Gordon Brown was forced to apologise for raging against a ‘bigoted woman’ called Gillian Duffy, who had the audacity to question him about the rising level of immigration during the 2010 general election campaign.

The idea that Azhar Ali’s vile, racist slur was a slip of the tongue, on a par with Gordon’s ‘bigot’ outburst in the midst of one of his regular, impromptu phone-throwing tantrums, is simply preposterous, writes Richard Littlejohn

The idea that Azhar Ali’s vile, racist slur was a slip of the tongue, on a par with Gordon’s ‘bigot’ outburst in the midst of one of his regular, impromptu phone-throwing tantrums, is simply preposterous, writes Richard Littlejohn

Coincidentally, Gordon was brought out of his box this week to condemn Rishi Sunak for ‘degrading’ and ‘dehumanising’ remarks about Keir Starmer’s refusal to acknowledge that women don’t have penises.

(And there’s another one of those sentences which I thought I’d never read, let alone write.)

Today Rochdale is front-page news again because the Labour candidate in the upcoming by-election claimed that Israel deliberately allowed the October 7 Hamas massacre to happen in order to justify invading Gaza.

This is the kind of paranoid conspiracy theory that in other circumstances would get someone sectioned under the Mental Health Act and confined to a room with rubber walls, wearing a jacket which buttons up at the back.

But until last night Azhar Ali, the archetypal Corbynite headbanger Starmer is supposed to have banished, remained the offical Labour candidate.

Starmer only panicked and withdrew the party’s support because of the embarrassment caused by the Mail’s exposure of Comical Ali’s repellent views.

Yet Ali remains on the ballot as the Labour candidate, because it’s too late to reprint the papers.

A destroyed house in Be'eri Kibbutz, Israel which was attacked by Hamas on October 7

A destroyed house in Be’eri Kibbutz, Israel which was attacked by Hamas on October 7

Anyway, the argument went right up until Starmer pulled the plug, Ali had apologised. So that’s all right, then. The insincerity was breathtaking.

I’m reminded of the old joke about the Australian wedding.

Just before vows are about to be exchanged, the vicar tells the assembled congregation: ‘The wedding’s off. The best man has just (had sexual relations with, fill in your own euphemism) the bride.’ As the guests are shuffling out of the church, the vicar rushes back and tells them: ‘No worries. The wedding’s on again. He’s apologised.’

The idea that Azhar Ali’s vile, racist slur was a slip of the tongue, on a par with Gordon’s ‘bigot’ outburst in the midst of one of his regular, impromptu phone-throwing tantrums, is simply preposterous.

His remarks were made at a formal meeting of the Lancashire Labour Party. There’s no evidence of anyone present taking him to task. Indeed, Labour’s International Development spokesman Lisa Nandy was happy to join him on the stump just hours after he was forced to apologise.

Ali might still win as an independent. Labour isn’t putting up anyone else. The result is only in doubt because Palestinian fanboy ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway is also standing on a nakedly anti-Israel ticket in Rochdale, where 30 per cent of the electorate is Muslim. Galloway was kicked out of Labour by Tony Blair after calling on British troops to disobey orders during the Iraq war.

He has since stood against Labour in various guises and with mixed results, from Bradford to East London.

A woman flees after  Hamas terrorists descended on the Supernova Festival in southern Israel and killed 260 people

A woman flees after  Hamas terrorists descended on the Supernova Festival in southern Israel and killed 260 people

One can only assume that Ali’s insane rant about Israel encouraging genocide against its own population was designed to counter the threat of Galloway splitting the Left-wing vote.

It would be easy to dismiss this madness as an internecine squabble in a faraway constituency about which we know little, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain on Czechoslovakia before the outbreak of World War II.

But the ructions in Rochdale are merely symptomatic of a wider, and deeply troubling, development in British politics. Whoever thought that a by-election in a suburb of Greater Manchester would be fought not on the state of the NHS, or the price of fish, or whatever domestic issue you care to mention, but on taking sides over a war in the Middle East?

But come the General Election later this year, that’s going to be the stark reality in many constituencies across Britain.

There are now estimated to be around four million Muslims here, who could determine the outcome in a number of seats, especially in the inner cities and across the North and Midlands.

The fact that a third of voters in Rochdale are Muslim gives you some idea of how mass immigration has changed this country’s demographics in so many areas.

Of far greater concern is the rampant anti-Semitism being fostered by an unholy alliance of the Hard Left and militant Islam, something I first identified as long ago as 2007.

In a Saturday Essay for this newspaper, and a documentary for Channel 4, I warned that anti-Jewish sentiment, once the preserve of the Far Right, was now coming from the opposite political direction.

Back then, it was bubbling away under the surface, everywhere from radical mosques in the West Midlands to fashionable Guardianista dinner parties in North London’s Islington and Camden, Starmer’s heartland.

Today it’s front and centre, on the streets in Central London and elsewhere. If it’s Saturday, it must be ‘From the river to the sea’ time in Trafalgar Square.

Richard Littlejohn's column in the Mail in July  2007 warning of a 'sinister reversal of history'

Richard Littlejohn’s column in the Mail in July  2007 warning of a ‘sinister reversal of history’

Anti-Semitism infests our college campuses. In Leeds, an Israeli university chaplin and his family have been forced into hiding after receiving death threats.

In Birmingham and Manchester, Jewish students are being terrorised, while the ultra-sensitive police are reluctant to make arrests because it might upset ‘community relations’.

Even 17 years ago, the evidence was there if anyone cared to look. In Manchester, I visited King David School, where Jewish pupils had to be protected by fences, CCTV and full-time security guards. Special patrols were mounted to protect worshippers walking to and from synagogues.

Which brings us full circle back to Rochdale, where we came in. Re-reading that Saturday Essay, I was reminded that I’d also interviewed Lorna Fitzsimons, the former Labour MP for the seat.

During the 2005 general election, she was one of a number of MPs targeted for their support of Blair’s war in Iraq. An outfit calling itself the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC) — basically a couple of brothers with a fax machine above a kebab shop — published leaflets ‘accusing’ her of being Jewish, even though she isn’t.

Ms Fitzsimons told me: ‘They said I was part of the world Neocon Zionist conspiracy. I think it’s deeply insidious and worrying that they felt there was so much anti-Semitism in the local community that it would galvanise the vote.’

In the event, she lost her seat by a few hundred votes and was convinced the MPAC smear campaign swung it. As Gerry Adams said of the IRA in other circumstances, the anti-Semites haven’t gone away, you know.

They’re out there in Rochdale, campaigning openly, whether rabble-rouser Galloway or the now former Labour candidate Azhar Ali. Gordon Brown called a Rochdale voter a ‘bigoted woman’. Until the Mail blew the whistle, Labour’s official candidate was a bigoted man.

Starmer, the man who would be our next Prime Minister and whose own wife is Jewish, may have acted belatedly in a blind funk but he is trapped like a rabbit in the headlights of an accelerating juggernaut. There’s more of this to come.

My documentary was timed to commemorate the anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, where Jews and trades unionists combined in 1936 to halt a march by Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists through the East End of London.

Today, pro-Hamas fascists are given a police escort to parade through Central London every week, spouting hatred and death to the Jews. Islamism and anti-Semitism is on the march, lockstep, in modern Britain. Today Rochdale, tomorrow the world.

Heaven knows what Gracie Fields would have made of it.

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