A left-wing United Kingdom politician has registered a landslide win in a parliamentary by-election on a platform promising to advocate for Gaza.
George Galloway won the seat in the northern English town of Rochdale after a fractious campaign, which saw the Labour Party withdraw support from its candidate over his anti-Israel comments.
Galloway won 12,335 votes compared with 6,638 for second-placed David Tully, an independent candidate. The former Labour candidate, Azhar Ali, came fourth after the opposition party pulled its support after he was recorded espousing conspiracy theories about Israel. Turnout was low at 39.7 percent.
“Keir Starmer, this is for Gaza,” Galloway said on Friday, referring to the Labour leader who initially refused to call for a ceasefire in Gaza where more than 30,000 people have been killed in the past five months of Israeli bombardment.
Late on Friday, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who supports Israel’s war, said the election of Galloway to a parliamentary seat was “beyond alarming” and accused him of dismissing Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Yes and they are all from people that call criticism of israel anti-Semitic. Do you realize that?
It really doesn’t seem like that if you go through the different accusations. But again, what I said was
I don’t think we disagree on that?
No we do disagree on that. If I post 20 comments accusing you of murder without any evidence you don’t have “a lot of allegations that you committed murder.”
This is clearly a futile converstation
I mean if you’d have 20 people accusing me of the same thing over the years I’d think it’s fair to say I’ve had quite a few lemmings accusing me of murder. If you put that into my Wikipedia article I’d be fine with that.
I mean I tried to explain what I said but you’ve just wanted to take it in all kinds of directions. It might not always be a fruitful convo if you do that.