This is a guest post by Joseph Weissman
So Jenny Tonge has been sacked by Nick Clegg from her post as Liberal Democrat health spokesperson in the Lords, after she said that claims of Israeli organ harvesting in Haiti should be investigated. Nick Clegg claims that Tonge’s comments were not anti-Semitic. Yet the source of her claim, YouTube user T. West, gives one reason to think otherwise.
Tonge called for an investigation following this article published in the deeply-conspiratorial Palestine Telegraph, which claimed:
On January 20, Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV reported on the mission, citing a damning You Tube video posted by an American named T. West from a group called AfriSynergy Productions. “The video presents something to think about while exploiting the horrible tragedy that has befallen Haiti where Israeli occupation soldiers are engaged in organ trafficking.”
A ‘damning You Tube video’? This seems unlikely, given T. West’s track-record as a rather biased source. T. West is profiled in Heeb Magazine defending Jenny Tonge, asserting that “”Those who hold political office are especially vulnerable to the well funded and connected Zionist organizations.”
What else has T. West posted on Youtube?
Here is T. West on the Underpants Bomber Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab was doing the bidding of Israeli Mossad operating within Yemen agents pretending to be Al Qaeda.
“He also has no idea of who his handlers were. He was thinking that it was Al Qaeda. The Mossad operates within Yemen, and they pretend to be Al Qaeda, and they trick these young men into thinking they are Al Qaeda. They make them believe they are taking orders from Al Qaeda when in fact it is the Mossad and other Western intelligence, such as the CIA or the British in one. This is a situation that is happening. The American people have been deceived.”
T. West has also published this claim on YouTube:
In 1991, it was the ADL President Abraham Foxman who challenged me when I indicated it appears HIV/Aids is a race-specific weapon” targeted exclusively at African peoples. Later it emerged that up to 30 percent of Ashkenazim are immune to HIV/Aids. What was Foxman trying to hide by not wanting me to inform and educate people about this?
T. West on Jewish identity:
“Since the civil rights movement, African-Americans have often relied on relations with the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim popularly known as Jews.”
T. West has also posted a clip from CNN about Yousef al-Khatab and Younes Abdullah Mohammed: two Islamist hate preachers who consider Bin Laden as their role model. He labels his video with this question:
“Why Are They Encouraging Violence, Do They Serve Zionist Interests”
There are further examples of such rhetoric on T.West’s Youtube channel.
Before she called for an investigation into claims of Israeli organ harvesting in Haiti, why didn’t Tonge investigate the source of such claims herself for a couple of hours? She would have quickly discovered the anti-Semitic videos of the Youtube poster who began these postings. By Jenny Tonge’s logic, we would also have to investigate whether Mossad was controlling Al Qaeda on the basis of T. West’s allegations.
Tonge is no stranger to controversy on this issue, having previously said that she would consider becoming a suicide bomber herself if she were Palestinian, and has stated that Jewish people should be ashamed of themselves for not doing more to protest against Israel’s ‘not kosher’ behaviour.
You would have thought this latest episode would be the end of people taking her seriously on Israel/Palestine. Yet Tonge is still set appear in Parliament at a Labour Friends of Palestine event on March 1 alongside Lord Ahmed and MPs Gerald Kaufman and Jeremy Corbyn. Tonge is also a patron of the ecumenical Christian anti-Israel boycotters the Friends of Sabeel UK, alongside Ibrahim Hewitt, who is now arguing that Tonge’s sacking is down to ‘the Israeli lobby’. The antisemitism implicit in such a claim is chilling.
So despite Jenny Tonge’s track record, she is afforded legitimacy by political and religious groups with heavy biases against Israel.
At the very least, Friends of Sabeel UK and Labour Friends of Palestine should reconsider their alliance with Jenny Tonge.
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