UK Tory candidate said rabbis turn Jews visiting Israel into ‘extremists’

18 November 2019, 6:19 pm

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The Jewish Chronicle reports that a candidate for British parliament representing the Conservative Party said in 2014 that local Jews who go to Israel “have come back as extremists – as people that are brainwashed.”

In a speech delivered to the European Parliament in Brussels, Amjad Bashir, who is running for parliament in a Leeds constituency, he said, “Young men are going over from England where I come from – people of the Jewish faith… They will not listen to reason. There is something very peculiar and wrong going on in Israel.”

In the speech, which he delivered in Brussels, he blamed “rabbis and politicians.”

Bashir apologizes for his remarks, expressing “deep regret,” and adds that they were “born from personal experience.”

— with JTA