Below are some collated quotes and a few notes for context
On 9th November 2022, a post was published on Cllr Ali’s Facebook page which read: “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine.” In the comment section, another user wrote: “The Zionist government is reenactment of Hitler’s Holocaust. The difference is then we we’re [sic] defending humanity now wiping (Muslims) Hamas from the face of the earth.” Cllr Ali’s account ‘liked’ this comment.
According to the International Definition of Antisemitism, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is an example of antisemitism.
On 10th October 2023, a video was shared on Cllr Ali’s Facebook account from his TikTok account, which appeared to be in response to Keir Starmer’s description of the 7th October assault as “an appalling attack on Israel, a terrorist attack.”
In the video, Cllr Ali is heard saying: “Now, this is exactly the type of person Keir Starmer is. He’s an extreme zionist. He’s a supporter of Israel.” Further, he is heard saying: “Yeah, all they’re saying is black and brown people don’t matter as long as these white supremacists in Israel can do whatever they want in order to establish their colonial power, in order to take over the indigenous population, in order to extract the resources that they want, in order to kill and to maim and to destroy whatever culture that was there before in order to establish their western colonial power.”
A comment was published on his account which read: “I’ll remind you that this did’’t [sic] start a few days ago, it’s been 75 years of occupation.”
75 years (which is around the age of the Jewish state) is a reference to Israel’s entire history, indicating that its very existence is illegitimate.
On 17th October 2023, a video was shared on Cllr Ali’s Facebook account from his TikTok account, in which he appeared to respond to claims that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza by stating: “This isn’t an act of self defence, this is an act of pure revenge. This is an act of bloodthirst. So the Israelis are thirsty for blood and they’re going to get their pound of flesh. And until they get their pound of flesh, they’re not going to be happy. You can see the fanatics out there celebrating every death, every death strike.”
Whilst many news outlets were quick to blame Israel for the hospital strike, subsequent analysis indicated that the cause of the explosion was a misfired missile by a terrorist organisation from within Gaza. The phrase “pound of flesh” was popularised by the Jewish villain of the Shakespeare play The Merchant of Venice.
“There’s a lot of racism on the left” Here he was talking about getting on in the Green Party
“Remember Israel is a colonial settler, colonial occupier. it’s been trying to erase the history and trying to erase the legitimacy of a native population. You’ll see the Western media support Israel. You see Western propagandists, the media, presenting some kind of victim narrative. They’re not victims, they’re occupiers
The European colonialist (Israel) is one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why they don’t the European people don’t want to let it go. They use the weapon of anti-Semitism so effectively that anyone who criticizes Israel is labeled an anti-semitic.”
This is from a You Tube video. He is saying that Jews don’t belong in Israel because they are Europeans. It is an oft-repeated antisemitic trope that Ashkenazi Jews are not proper Jews, but Europeans, or from Kazan.
In fact Israeli Jews are almost evenly divided between Ashkenazi and Sephardic/Mizrahi. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews share a common Middle Eastern/Levantine genetic core, dating back over 2,000 years, with admixtures from their respective diaspora host populations.
Leeds Councillor, Mothin Ali reminds us that immigrants are people, “like my father and grandfather who came here to build this country literally back up from the ashes”
He doesn’t see the hypocrisy in bemoaning a fictitious European colonisation of Western Asia and being supportive of an Asian colonisation of Western Europe. Like many others, he even believes that immigrants built the UK. Ashes indeed!
Mothin Ali: The Greens “still are a white middle class party” “It’s changing, it’s changing rapidly. But that still exists. That is a problem. That’s one of the problems I faced.” The Greens don’t give out that detail about their membership, so he may well be right. On the other hand the Greens just elected a leader who was privately educated until he was 16.
In this story below, Mothin Ali caused a Jewish rabbi to go into hiding, and makes no apologies for endangering the man’s family.
The Times reported that Rabbi Deutsch had been working as a student chaplain at Leeds University at the time of the 7 October attacks in 2023. An Israeli citizen, he was called up as a reservist for a tour of duty with the Israel Defence Forces. Rabbi Deutsch reportedly acted as a guard for food and ammunition convoys entering Gaza during his service.
In September, The Times newspaper reported, external that Rabbi Deutsch left his Leeds home under advice from West Yorkshire police following a deluge of threats linked to his work with the IDF. Speaking to the Times, Rabbi Deutsch blamed Ali, who is a member of Leeds City Council, for playing a key role in amplifying the attacks through his posts on social media.
The campaign reached Mothin Ali, a British Green Party candidate for local elections in Gipton and Harehills, who spoke about Deutsch in a TikTok video, saying: “This creep, that’s the only way I can describe him, is someone who went from Leeds to Israel to kill children and women and everyone else over there.”
“You should be protecting students from this kind of animal,” Ali continued.
Several hours after Ali’s video was posted, hundreds of threats began reaching the Deutsch family. In a statement, the Green Party refused to condemn Ali, saying that he was exercising his free speech rights.
“You should be protecting people. You should be protecting students from this kind of animal, because if he’s willing to kill people over there, how do you know he’s not going to kill your students over here?”
Ali has not disputed the content of the video when asked by the BBC.
He said: “I think anyone who participates in a genocide is a danger and should be investigated by the police. I don’t believe that British people, people who enjoy the freedoms of this country, should be able to go into a foreign state and participate in genocide.”
On Israel: “The land was ethnically cleansed by European settler colonialists – white supremacists. When people wanna talk about it you’ve gotta remember it is white supremacy. White supremacists have always done well at portraying the native population as barbarians, as some kind of bloodthirsty savage.”
There’s no pill for this. Mothin Ali is a qualified Mufti, and an accountant.
