Labour’s Radical ‘Moderate’ The party’s mayoral candidate in London gladly shared a stage with extremists.By Sohrab Ahmari
http://www.wsj.com/articles/labours-radical-moderate-1462383144
Londoners head to the polls on Thursday to decide who should succeed Boris Johnson as their next mayor. With the Paris and Brussels attacks fresh on voters’ minds, Islamism and terror have emerged as central themes of the campaign. And Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate, is struggling to distance himself from his party’s growing radicalism.
The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.
For days Labour’s “anti-Semitism row” has dominated U.K. headlines. The proximate cause was a series of TV interviews by Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. Coming to the defense of a Labour MP accused of anti-Semitism, Mr. Livingstone claimed that Hitler had been a Zionist. “A real anti-Semite,” he said, is someone who hates all Jews, not just those in Israel.
Mr. Khan quickly distanced himself from Mr. Livingstone, who has since been suspended from the party. “Sadiq has said repeatedly that he is disgusted at the growing problems of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party,” a spokesman told me. He added that Mr. Khan opposes the so-called boycott, divest and sanction movement targeting the Jewish state, adding that “we must not turn our face against Israel.”
The party’s mainstream blames Mr. Corbyn for this state of affairs. They’re right—up to a point. Mr. Corbyn came from the party’s red-flag-waving fringes. Labour reflects Mr. Corbyn’s ideological preferences now that he has moved to the center of party power. But other, more respectable Labour figures paved his path. Sadiq Khan was one of those figures, rising to prominence toward the end of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure as a voice of the party’s anti-antiterror wing.
Mr. Khan in 2004 shared a platform at a pro-Palestinian conference with Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, which at the time boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day. Another speaker was Ibrahim Hewitt of Interpal, which in 2003 was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations for funneling funds to Hamas, an allegation the U.K. pro-Palestinian charity denies. CONTINUE AT SITE
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