How could the Greens NOT know about councillor’s vile rant against a rabbi? Party faces fury for failing to suspend pro-Gaza activist over tirade against Jewish chaplain

From the Daily Mail

The Greens were last night facing fury over their failure to suspend a councillor who launched a hate-filled tirade against a rabbi.

Mothin Ali, who was elected to Leeds city council last week, had called Leeds University’s Jewish chaplain, Zecharia Deutsch, a ‘creep’, a ‘low-life’ and an ‘animal’.

The 42-year-old had been allowed to stand for the Greens despite branding Israelis ‘white supremacists’ after the Hamas Palestinian terror group killed 1,200 people on October 7 last year. He was filmed shouting ‘We will raise the voice of Palestine – Allahu Akbar!’ after winning his council seat.

Yesterday the party faced a string of calls to take action against him, including from Jewish leaders who accused it of hypocrisy for not distancing itself from his ‘extremist nonsense’.

When presented with the evidence at the time, the Green Party told this paper it ‘believes in free speech’ and Mr Ali was allowed to stand, and win, as a councillor. But staggeringly, when asked about Mr Ali’s offensive remarks in a television interview on Sunday night, Carla Denyer co-leader of the Green Party, appeared not to know about them.

She declined to comment when asked about how well the party vets candidates, saying she was ‘not familiar with all of the details’ and didn’t have ‘the full facts at hand.’ She added the remarks sounded ‘very concerning’ and that she would ‘make sure that those are looked into’.

Last night there was still no indication Mr Ali faced being suspended, with the Greens only saying they were ‘investigating’.

Back in February Daily Mail feature writer Guy Adams presented the Greens with a dossier of offensive comments made by Mr Ali, including the tirade against Rabbi Deutsch, who was later forced into hiding:-

When I stumbled upon the social media feeds of Green Party election candidate Mothin Ali, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was mid-February, and the Daily Mail was investigating an anti-Semitic hate campaign that had forced Leeds University’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, into hiding.

Rabbi Deutsch is an Israeli national. So, like almost all of his countrymen under the age of 40, he is required to serve as a reservist in its armed forces. Following the October 7 terror attacks, he had therefore been called upon to temporarily return to his homeland.  He spent three months with his regiment in the Israeli Defence Forces before returning to the UK in January.

This fact became public a few weeks later. There followed an appalling online hate campaign, which – in turn – resulted in more than 300 highly threatening messages being sent to the family home where he lived with his wife Nava and their two small children.

‘Tell that Jewish son of a b***h we’re coming for him,’ went one of the more sinister late-night telephone calls, picked up by Nava at midnight. ‘We’re coming to his house and we’re going to kill him in his house and you as well, you f*****g racist b***h, s**g.’

A third caller, who like the two previous ones was male and spoke with a Yorkshire accent, promised: ‘Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist mother****ers.’

I didn’t blog this at the time. No particular reason, other than there was so much to report, my home and abroad, and our NER readers  are as capable of reading their local and national news as I am. 

Rabbi Deutsch and his family responded to the menacing calls – which included several threats to rape Nava and torture their children – by going into hiding. They have remained there since.

My job was to find out exactly why this revolting pile-on had taken place; not to mention who might be to blame.

I didn’t have to look far. For I quickly discovered that the aforementioned Mothin Ali, a prominent local YouTube and TikTok personality, had posted a two-minute video about Rabbi Deutsch to his various social media feeds, a mere three hours before the death threats had begun to roll in.

The online rant was notable for the utterly dehumanising way in which it described the Jewish chaplain, saying his ‘contract should be terminated with immediate effect’ and he ought to be ‘prosecuted for war crimes’.

‘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,’ it began, neatly ignoring the fact that Deutsch went to Israel because he was legally required to.

In an increasingly frenzied tirade, the video added that the rabbi had been ‘massacring people’ (there is no evidence that he killed anyone) before concluding that the ‘far-Right radical’ is ‘radicalising students,’ meaning that ‘Leeds University should dismiss him urgently. Read it all.