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UK Councillor Alana Bates performed a song with lyrics plucked from Hamas’ calls to destroy Israel.
By United with Israel Staff
The UK’s Labour party, which is dogged by accusations that its ranks are filled with anti-Semites, faces another flare up. This one concerns Labour candidate Alana Bates, who performs with the self-described “radical-political” rock band “The Tribunes,” crooning along to a song called “From the River to the Sea,” a phrase used by Hamas terrorists.
The song’s lyrics include these lines, “Israel’s an apartheid state. … Israel is a racist state.” “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
The latter phrase represents Hamas’ rallying cry to ethnically cleanse the Land of Israel of its Jewish inhabitants.
The song also calls on listeners to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS).
Bates claimed that the song is not anti-Semitic but only pro-Palestinian, according to The Sun, which broke the story.
Bates defended the song, maintaining, “At no point during the song does it say Jewish people out of the Middle East. At no point does it talk about Jewish people at all. It’s about Israel.”
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), anti-Semitism is something that denies “the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
Since the song explicitly uses that terminology, it is categorically anti-Semitic according to the IHRA definition.
The UK group Campaign Against Anti-Semitism responded, explaining that the verse “‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ only makes sense as a call for the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with a Palestinian state,” reported The Sun.
Penzance Independent Cornwall Councillor and former Labour Group Leader Tim Dwelly tweeted on November 9, “Labour’s candidate in St Ives Alana Bates wants Israel abolished. Her band sings that Palestine should be ‘one state’. Israel should be ‘out of the Middle East’, is a ‘racist state’. Repulsive racism. She should be expelled by Labour immediately.”
Jeremy Jacobson OBE, chairman of the Cornwall Jewish Community said of the incident, “Why always Israel, this tiny sliver of land granted to the Jews after 6 million of them had been slaughtered only a few years before, after 2000 years of persecution, massacres, slaughter, attacks, expulsions?” according to The Sun.
Labour HQ ordered the video removed from Bates’ social media, a request with which she complied.
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