The sinister truth about the ‘Gaza independents’

The recent UK General Election was marred by intimidation and harassment. ‘British politics must soon wake up to what happened at this election’, said Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood. Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, said that this was the ‘worst election I have ever stood in’. Even before the election was announced and campaigning had kicked off, now deputy prime minister Angela Rayner spoke in February of being too afraid to leave the house.

What unites these politicians is the aggression, hate and intimidation they faced, seemingly over Labour’s stance on the Gaza conflict. Mahmood said that masked men burst into a community meeting she was hosting and ‘terrified’ people. Some of Phillips’s campaigners were harassed, filmed, screamed at and had their tyres slashed. Phillips herself was heckled during her acceptance speech on election night.

Clearly something is deeply wrong with the political climate in this country. Much of it is the result of an ever-growing shadow of sectarianism, from which some candidates have managed to profit. In several constituencies, independent candidates won seats off the back of supposedly ‘pro-Palestine’ campaigns. But it doesn’t take much digging to find something more sinister beneath the surface when it comes to these new MPs.

One such independent is Shockat Adam, recently elected MP for Leicester South. Jewish News identifies Adam’s brother to be none other than Ismail Patel, founder of a hardline Islamist group called Friends of Al Aqsa. Patel has previously said that he ‘salutes Hamas’ and has been seen meeting with Hamas leaders in Gaza.

During his campaign, Adam received support from Majid Freeman. Freeman played a leading role in stoking community tensions during the unrest in Leicester in 2022 and just this week, he was arrested on terrorism charges. When Adam won his seat last week, Freeman celebrated the victory saying ‘This is for Gaza’.

Adam himself has close ties to an organisation called Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND). Earlier this year, MEND was labelled as an Islamist extremist organisation by then communities secretary Michael Gove. Adam was apparently the former chair of the Leicester branch and had previously fundraised for the group.

The other ‘pro-Palestine’ independents are no less troubling. Iqbal Mohamed, now MP for Dewsbury and Batley, delivered a speech during the election in which he told a crowd to search their homes for ‘Zionist’ items and throw them out. He even suggested that parents should warn their children of which ‘Zionist’ sweets they shouldn’t buy. His speech was met with chants of ‘From the river to the sea’, a slogan best understood as a call to wipe Israel off the map.

Then there is Ayoub Khan, now MP for Birmingham Perry Barr. Khan was previously a Liberal Democrat councillor and was investigated by the party last year after comments he made on social media, questioning the extent of Hamas’s 7 October atrocities in Israel. The party cleared him of any wrongdoing, but it said he had agreed to undergo anti-Semitism-awareness training (although he denies this).

In June 2024, Khan spoke to MEND and 5 Pillars, an online Muslim news site, for two separate publicity films. Three months earlier, it had become public knowledge that MEND was being investigated as a potential extremist organisation by the government.

In Blackburn in Lancashire, Adnan Hussain won the seat following a particularly aggressive campaign. His supporters were involved in confrontations with Labour activists, and his shocking victory speech included the words: ‘We will raise our voice for Gaza! We will continue to fight, until death, inshallah!’ After his victory, he was greeted with chanting of ‘From the river to the sea’.

Of course, Jeremy Corbyn also managed to retain his seat in Islington North, now as an independent. The former Labour leader was infamously suspended from his party and had the whip withdrawn in 2020 for downplaying the anti-Semitism that festered on his watch. Corbyn himself has a shocking record of consorting with anti-Semites, too. He once called Hamas his ‘friends’ – though he has since said he regrets this – and laid a wreath at a grave of the terrorists thought to be behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.

All these candidates were enthusiastically endorsed by The Muslim Vote (TMV), a campaign group dedicated to ‘putting Muslim issues at the forefront’ of politics. On its website, TMV boasts of support of numerous other Muslim organisations – including MEND and the Muslim Association of Britain (MAB).

MAB was founded in 1997 by Kamal El-Helbawy, a longtime member of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the world’s oldest and farthest-reaching Islamist movements. Meanwhile, MEND’s founder and CEO, Sufyan Ismail, claims that British society ‘hates [Muslims]’ and that British law has specifically allowed violence against Muslims while protecting other groups.

The rise of the ‘Gaza independents’ is not purely the result of anger with the Israel-Hamas war. Nor did TMV emerge spontaneously from a vacuum. All of it is fuelled by a broader sectarianism that is starting to bed into our politics.

The hatred and aggression that this kind of divisive campaigning encourages will only continue to grow if left unchecked. These sectarian victories in the UK are losses for everyone – including for the diverse Muslim communities who cherish a free, tolerant and democratic Britain.

Charlotte Littlewood is a research and media consultant, specialising in extremism and radicalisation. She supports numerous global think tanks. Follow her on X: @CharlotteFLit.