Four pro-Hamas candidates win county seats in UK

Three ran as independents and one was a Greens Party candidate.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Four pro-Hamas candidates won in elections in Lancashire County in Great Britain Thursday, three of them while running as independents.

Eighteen-year-old Maheen Kamran was elected a councillor for Burnley Central East with 1,357 votes, beating out the populist, right-wing Reform UK candidate by fewer than 300 votes.

A devout Muslim, she told media outlet PoliticsHome that she had been inspired to enter politics by the war in Gaza, where she claimed that Israel was committing a “genocide.”

Israel has proven that it takes measures to protect the enemy civilian population in Gaza that no army has ever taken in wartime and that Hamas uses its civilians as human shields in order to raise the death toll so that international pressure will be brought on the Jewish state to end the conflict.

Kamran said she was also driven by the need to segregate Muslim women and men in public places, such as gyms, to “protect women’s health.”

Another Muslim, Usman Arif, won the Burnley North East seat. He had left the Labour Party over its moderately pro-Israel stance and often comments against Israel’s prosecution of the war on his social media account.

Azhar Ali became county councillor for the Nelson East ward with 1,976 votes. The middle-aged politician was ousted from the Labour party last year while running in a parliamentary by-election due to his antisemitism.

The party initially stood by him after he said that Israel had “allowed” Hamas to perpetrate its October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in order to give it an excuse to invade the Gaza Strip and “grab” the land.

He apologized two days later for making what he called a “deeply offensive, ignorant and false” claim and “inexcusable comments,” but the leading Jewish umbrella group in the country, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, did not accept the apology.

His comments were “disgraceful and unforgivable,” the Board said in a statement at the time, adding, “It is clear to us that Mr. Ali is not [apologizing] out of a genuine sense of remorse.”

Ali was then suspended from the party after the airing of a longer recording of his speech, in which he also bragged that he prevented people from hanging Israeli flags on public buildings after the invasion.

In addition, he blamed “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters” for the suspension of a pro-Palestinian Labour MP, Andy McDonald.

A fourth anti-Israel candidate, Sohail Asghar, who ran on the Greens ticket, won the Accrington West and Oswaldtwistle Central seat, with only 133 votes separating him from the second-place, Conservative candidate.

Asghar had shared on social media a picture of a wounded child with the caption, “Israel equals ISIS.”

All three flipped seats, in votes that showed little turnout, that initially were in the Labour party’s hands.

According to Lord Hayward, a Tory peer, their success should worry the ruling party, which was largely backed by Muslim voters in the last general elections.

“I don’t see Labour being able to resolve this issue with the Muslim community in places where there are large Muslim populations,” he told PoliticsHome, especially until the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza comes to an end.