GUY ADAMS: I exposed new councillor's tirade against rabbi, but when I warned the Greens they just ignored it
When I stumbled upon the social media feeds of Green Party election candidate Mothin Ali, I couldn't believe my eyes.
It was mid-February, and the Daily Mail was investigating an anti-Semitic hate campaign that had forced Leeds University's Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, into hiding.
Rabbi Deutsch is an Israeli national. So, like almost all of his countrymen under the age of 40, he is required to serve as a reservist in its armed forces.
Following the October 7 terror attacks, he had therefore been called upon to temporarily return to his homeland.
He spent three months with his regiment in the Israeli Defence Forces before returning to the UK in January.
In an increasingly frenzied tirade, a video posted by Mothin Ali before his election whipped his viewers into turning against Leeds University's Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, forcing him into hiding
Rabbi Zacharia Deutsch, with his wife, Nava, received menacing calls and threats following a video posted by Mothin Ali
This fact became public a few weeks later. There followed an appalling online hate campaign, which – in turn – resulted in more than 300 highly threatening messages being sent to the family home where he lived with his wife Nava and their two small children.
'Tell that Jewish son of a b***h we're coming for him,' went one of the more sinister late-night telephone calls, picked up by Nava at midnight.
'We're coming to his house and we're going to kill him in his house and you as well, you f*****g racist b***h, s**g.'
Another anonymous caller said: 'We are going to get you, we're going to get your husband and we are going to get you as well, love. It's as simple as.
'How dare you come to Leeds and expect the Muslims not to do 'owt, when all you lot have been doing is killing innocent children?'
A third caller, who like the two previous ones was male and spoke with a Yorkshire accent, promised: 'Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist mother****ers.'
Rabbi Deutsch and his family responded to the menacing calls – which included several threats to rape Nava and torture their children – by going into hiding. They have remained there since.
That was the backdrop. My job was to find out exactly why this revolting pile-on had taken place; not to mention who might be to blame.
I didn't have to look far. For I quickly discovered that the aforementioned Mothin Ali, a prominent local YouTube and TikTok personality, had posted a two-minute video about Rabbi Deutsch to his various social media feeds, a mere three hours before the death threats had begun to roll in.
The online rant was notable for the utterly dehumanising way in which it described the Jewish chaplain, saying his 'contract should be terminated with immediate effect' and he ought to be 'prosecuted for war crimes'.
'This creep, that's the only way I can describe him, is someone who went from Leeds to Israel to kill children and women and everyone else over there,' it began, neatly ignoring the fact that Deutsch went to Israel because he was legally required to.
Ali continued his message by branding the chaplain an 'animal' (a rhetorical trick once commonly used by Nazi propagandists), saying: 'We [Muslims] are treated as second-class citizens and Leeds University is violating safeguarding standards.
'You should be protecting people. You should be protecting students from this kind of animal, because if he's willing to kill people over there, how do you know he's not going to kill your students over here?'
In an increasingly frenzied tirade, the video added that the rabbi had been 'massacring people' (there is no evidence that he killed anyone) before concluding that the 'far-Right radical' is 'radicalising students,' meaning that 'Leeds University should dismiss him urgently. He's absolutely disgusting. He's shameful'.
Viewers swiftly took the bait. On Ali's TikTok feed, there were 340 comments about the video, some of them virulently anti-Semitic.
'He's a terrorist, psychopath and paedo,' reads one. 'Zio lunatics pathetic savages beastly f***s always ugly deranged f***s, they need to be put in nutters asylum or concentration camps,' goes another.
'I am beginning to believe the Holocaust is a myth, we seeing the lies and propaganda,' said a third commentator.
Ali, a 42-year-old father of three from Roundhay, Leeds, who describes himself as 'an accountant by day and an Islamic teacher at night', did nothing to discourage or hide the vile outpouring of anti-Semitism, or to dial down the nature of the debate his hateful video had kicked off.
This wasn't his first rodeo, either. Take, for example, Ali's behaviour on October 7, the day Hamas terrorists attacked Israel from Gaza, slaughtering more than 1,200 people, mostly civilians, including 360 revellers at a music festival, carrying out mass rape and taking more than a hundred people hostage, including several babies.
Hours after that incident, he posted a two-and-a-half-minute video to TikTok suggesting that the atrocities were justified because 'Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces'.
He urged viewers to 'support the right of indigenous people to fight back'.
Mothin Ali appeared, in other words, to be a deeply questionable character with a track record of posting highly insensitive and unpleasant material about Israel.
And his hateful and dehumanising posts about a local rabbi had fuelled an outpouring of virulent anti-Semitism which had driven a young family from their home.
Yet, as I discovered, this tub-thumping social media activist, who boasted around 55,000 followers across various platforms, was no ordinary online provocateur.
Instead, he was a prominent member of the Leeds Green Party, who was about to stand for election to the city council.
So it was that, at 5pm one Wednesday in February, I emailed the Green Party to alert them to Ali's questionable online behaviour.
My lengthy message included links to several of his most vile social media posts, along with quotations of the ugliest bits, which had sparked criticism from, among others, the Campaign Against anti-Semitism, and the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Semitic hate crime.
It concluded: 'Given all of the above, I wanted to ask whether the Green Party is prepared to allow him to continue to remain as not only a member but also one of its election candidates.'
Normal practice, when a candidate stands accused of a racially motivated misdeed, is for their political party to launch an immediate investigation.
Often, the individual concerned is suspended for the duration, especially when (as in this instance) that candidate's behaviour has attracted criticism from anti-racism groups.
The Green Party did things differently, however. In fact, its senior officials chose to ignore it.
On February 15, at 2.59pm, a senior press officer, Paul Corry, responded to my email by issuing a statement that indicated that it would not be taking any action because 'the Green Party believes in free speech'.
Corry's message included a rambling official comment from Ali, in which he disingenuously claimed to be a victim, saying: 'I have received hundreds of death threats from those on the far Right and supporters of what the Israeli government is doing, many of which have been reported to the police.
'I understand very well the emotional turmoil threats of violence can have and would not wish that on others... the video in question has absolutely nothing to do with violence.'
I have worked as a journalist for almost three decades, becoming a connoisseur of political cynicism in the process.
Yet the official Green Party response – or rather lack of it – to its candidate's revolting online behaviour left me so gobsmacked that I took the highly unusual step of contacting Corry to make sure it had not been issued in error.
'Just to confirm,' I wrote, 'the Green Party is totally happy for someone who used the terms that Mothin Ali used in that video – 'creep', 'low-life', 'animal' etc – to now stand for election?
'And neither you nor Mr Ali have any regrets whatsoever about the death threats that Rabbi Deutsch subsequently received? Or the grotesque outpouring of anti-Semitism his video triggered?'
I did not receive a response. A lengthy article about the ugly affair then appeared in our pages the following Saturday.
Fast forward to this weekend, and Mothin Ali is once more at the centre of controversy.
Specifically, following his victory in last week's local government elections, which he greeted by shouting the words 'Allahu Akbar!' at the count, his appalling attacks on the Jewish community have sparked a major political scandal.
The Green Party's response has been to launch a formal investigation, claiming it was unaware of its candidate's previous remarks.
On Channel 4 News on Sunday night, party co-leader Carla Denyer claimed: 'I'm not familiar with all of the details of what you're saying about the Leeds councillor so I wouldn't be able to comment on that… I don't have the full facts at hand.'
The party's press office, which was made aware of Ali's offending remarks in mid-February, sought to argue that they'd only just stumbled across them.
'The Green Party is investigating issues drawn to our attention in relation to Councillor Mothin Ali, so cannot comment further. However, we are clear that we never support anything that extols violence.'
This is at best misleading and, at worst, a straightforward lie.
They were contacted about Ali in February and sought to claim in official statements that he'd done nothing wrong.
That position did not alter following the publication of the Mail's article that month.
As for Mothin Ali, he has belatedly deleted his Twitter account.
Perhaps he hopes the whole thing will blow over. But as he, and the Green Party, will soon come to realise, the internet never forgets.
