The US satirist Jon Stewart has waded into the row about Britain’s Labour party blocking an academic from standing as a candidate in July’s general election over her social media activity.
Faiza Shaheen was not endorsed as the Labour candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green in north London after she liked a series of posts on X that allegedly downplayed antisemitism accusations, one of which featured a clip from an episode of The Daily Show, which Stewart hosted.
After being alerted to the story by the journalist Mehdi Hasan, Stewart posted on X to his 1.7 million followers: “This is the dumbest thing the UK has done since electing Boris Johnson … what the actual fuck.”
This is the dumbest thing The UK has done since electing Boris Johnson…what the actual fuck… https://t.co/n6Ekibi5is
— Jon Stewart (@jonstewart) May 30, 2024
Shaheen was not investigated by Labour because the post she liked featured the Daily Show clip, but because it had a caption about the “Israel lobby”. She has said she did not see the caption.
The Daily Show episode from July 2014 had Stewart, who is Jewish, introduce a sketch about an Israeli ground offensive in Gaza before being rebuked by four of the programme’s correspondents for questioning Israel’s actions.
“Look, obviously there are many strong opinions on this issue, but just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policy is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas,” Stewart said, before being interrupted again, at which point he abandoned the subject and moved on to discuss Russia seizing Crimea.
The account that posted the tweet liked by Shaheen, which featured the clip, also included a commentary attacking the “Israel lobby” that read: “You can’t easily ignore them, because those are not just random people, they tend to be friends or people who move in the same circles as you. Those people are mobilized by professional organizations, but to a large extent, that is organic.”
Shaheen, the left-wing academic who ran against former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith in the Chingford and Woodford Green seat in the last national election in 2019, said she was in a “state of shock” after not being endorsed.
She said she was given five and a half hours’ notice of a panel meeting with Labour’s national executive on Tuesday to discuss her social media activity.
“My husband was at work and I undertook the interview with three members of Labour’s national executive with a crying baby on my lap, with no time to prepare, and feeling very poorly with mastitis,” she said in a statement.
Shaheen was presented with a dossier of posts that she had liked on X, some dating back to 2014. The most recent had prompted a complaint from the Jewish Labour Movement. The Labour Muslim Network said the treatment of Shaheen was “unacceptable”.
Last week, the UK’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced that the general election would be held on 4 July. Political parties must nominate their election candidates by 7 June.
