‘Don’t vote for a Jew’: London mayoral hopeful suspended
Geeta Sidhu Robb Image by twitter
(JTA) — The United Kingdom’s fourth largest party suspended a candidate for mayor of London who was filmed in 1997 telling voters not to support a Jew.
The Liberal Democrats suspended Geeta Sidhu-Robb, who was vying to become their candidate in London’s 2021 mayoral elections, the Jewish News of London reported.
Over the weekend, a video emerged on Twitter showing her during her 1997 general election campaign for the constituency of Blackburn in northern England. In that campaign, Sidhu-Robb was running as a member of the Conservative Party against Jack Straw, a former Labour lawmaker.
“Don’t vote for a Jew. Jack Straw is a Jew. If you vote for him you’re voting for a Jew,” Sidhu-Robb is seen saying in Urdu into a loudspeaker in Blackburn.
In the video, taken from a documentary about the 1997 elections, Sidhu-Robb explains that she decided on this tactic because her rival’s campaign staffers were saying she’s “against Islam,” making the issue “racist, it’s making it personal.”
So, she added, “we’re going to get the gloves us” and “get a car drive to round through town telling everybody Jack Straw’s a Jew.”
Sidhu-Robb later said she regretted that action, and this week she apologized, writing on Twitter: “I am deeply ashamed of the ignorant and abusive language.”
The post London mayoral hopeful suspended for telling voters in 1997 ‘don’t vote for a Jew’ appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
