A Green Party councillor who shouted “Allahu Akbar!” after being elected said Palestinians had the right to “fight back” on the day of the October 7 massacre.
Mothin Ali, 42, has previously described a Jewish chaplain forced into hiding by threats from protestors, as a “creep” and a “kind of animal”, and suggested that he had deliberately attempted to “kill women and children” by serving with the Israeli army as a reservist after the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
Mr Ali won the Gipton and Harehills ward in Leeds with 3,070 votes and said his election to the council was a “win for the people of Gaza”.
Delivering his victory speech, the father-of-three who works as an accountant and runs a gardening blog, said: “We will not be silenced. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. Allahu Akbar!”
Mr Ali was one of dozens of candidates around the country who ran on a Gaza ticket and defeated their Labour rival.
A series of videos posted on his social media channels have now re-emerged including one posted after October 7 when Hamas launched the worst attack in Israel’s history, killing more than 1,200 people.
As Israel responded to the attack, he said the country was going to “use the pretext of the fight back by Hamas fighters or supposedly Hamas fighters this morning” to launch attacks on civilians.
He said Gaza was the “biggest concentration camp the world has ever seen” and urged viewers to “support the right of indigenous people to fight back”.
Mr Ali added that Israel was a “settler, colonial, occupier” which had tried to “erase the legitimacy of a native population”.
“They use the pretext of rockets and they use the pretext of people resisting an occupier to further destroy a civilian population,” he said.
“They are not victims, they are occupiers, they are colonialists, they are European colonialists. It’s one of the last European colonies in the world and that’s why the European people don’t want to let it go. They use the weapon of anti-Semitism so effectively that anyone who criticises Israel is labelled as anti-semitic.”
He urged viewers to “support the right of indigenous people to have freedom and to fight back” against “occupiers”.