Fresh from promoting her autobiography, A Woman Like Me, on Sunday the MP Diane Abbott is due to address a Labour Party Conference fringe event. The meeting is to be held by a group that she serves as president, Stand Up to Racism (SUTR), which achieved prominence by organising demonstrations attended by thousands in the wake of riots triggered by the murders of three children in Southport at the end of July.

Also billed to appear are the Corbynite MPs Richard Burgon and Bell Ribeiro-Addy, and former Labour National Executive Committee member Mish Rahman. The meeting’s title in the conference programme is “Why a Labour government must challenge racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism”. However, none of those slated to speak are Jewish.

This may not be surprising, for recent SUTR protests have featured expressions of views on subjects relevant to Jews that many would consider extreme, such as repeated claims that “Zionists” were behind the post-Southport riots. SUTR has also forged close links with Anas Altikriti, the CEO and founder of the Cordoba Foundation, who openly welcomed the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October last year and earlier supported armed “resistance” to British and American forces in Iraq.

SUTR was founded by members of the Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party in 2013, but took a big step towards the British political mainstream after the riots. On 7 August, it issued a “unity statement” urging people to “to drive back the fascists” that was signed by the leaders of 11 big trade unions, including ASLEF, Unison and Unite. SUTR demonstrations followed in cities across the country.

The statement included a call to “stand up to antisemitism”. But although the protest rallies’ ostensible purpose was to expose the supposed role of the far-Right in the riots, they also focused on the Israel–Palestine conflict. Speakers at several SUTR events last month blamed “Zionists” for the riots. For example, addressing protesters in Birmingham on 17 August, Abdullah Saif, from the Muslim campaign group MEND, told his audience that Zionism had a “massive role” in “platforming the far-Right narrative” that triggered them, as it was “fully documented” that “the likes of Tommy Robinson are funded by Zionists”.

The claim that Robinson and others who had instigated the disorder were funded and controlled by Zionists was also made by platform speakers in several other English cities. In Newcastle, the journalist Yvonne Ridley suggested on 10 August that Robinson was “Israel’s poster boy”, instructed by his paymasters to foment the riots in order to “knock Gaza off the front pages”. She was joined by Chandi Chopra, chair of the Newcastle Palestine Solidarity Campaign, who said that “the Zionist squatter enemy” was the reason why “we are seeing racism against predominantly Muslim communities” in Britain.

SUTR announced on 29 August that its leaders had been “delighted” to attend the launch of another organisation fronted by Altikriti, the Islamophobia Action Group, stating on social media that the riots had underlined the case for urgent action to deal with this form of racism.

Indeed, Altikriti’s links to SUTR go back at least to 2017. He also spoke at an SUTR rally in Harrow in northwest London on 7 August, where he said that Robinson and the rest of the far-Right were “directly linked to the Zionist state of Israel”, and that the riots were their “payback for Gaza” — by which, he said, they meant to “punish” Britons who had protested against Israel’s conduct of the war.

Altikriti has long been a controversial figure. His father Osama was a leader of the Iraqi branch of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, and Anas said in 2004 that the “struggle of the Iraqi people, militarily and politically, must continue until the occupier leaves”. At the time, Iraqi insurgents were killing substantial numbers of British and American troops. He has visited the Hamas leadership in Gaza, posting photos of himself with its late leader Ismail Haniyeh. In 2014 he asked online “where pro-Israel Jewish Brits’ loyalties lie, whether with Britain or Israel”?

On the day after last October’s massacre, Altikriti signed a statement that affirmed Palestinians’ “inalienable right” to “armed struggle”, said “acts of the Palestinian resistance” should not be described as “terrorism”, and demanded “the dismantling of the settler-colonialist state of Israel”.  He also supported the taking of Israeli hostages, calling this “a very important part of any strategic military action or act of resistance”, while he has denied that Hamas fighters committed rapes.

Daniel Sugarman, the public affairs director of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, suggested on X this week that not having Jewish speakers at the upcoming SUTR fringe meeting was a “small mercy”. Given the organisation’s record, it seems he has a point.

A flyer issued by SUTR on Saturday, 21 September mentioned further speakers in addition to those named in the conference programme, including Edie Friedman, describing her as a Jewish race equality and refugee rights campaigner.

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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