Did Labour suspend a candidate because he liked a Jon Stewart joke? – The Forward

Did an old Jon Stewart joke about Israel get a candidate for the British Parliament in trouble? Photo by Brad Barket/Getty Images for Comedy Central

By PJ Grisar
May 30, 2024

In a rare international commentary, Jon Stewart filmed himself being shouted at by a crowd of his correspondents as he considered commenting on a ground offensive in Gaza. This was not from his 2024 Daily Show term of office, it is from 2014 – but the clip still exists.

Now this ten-year-old clip is having an impact on a British politician. Something like that.

Faiza Shaheen was disqualified from running for the British Labour Party because she had liked 14 social media posts over a ten-year period, including one that linked to Stewart’s clip on The daily show.

Stewart, who can be seen in the clip ducking as his colleagues bombard him with arguments that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and that he is a self-hating Jew, wasted no time in wading into the controversy.

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This is the stupidest thing Britain has done since Boris Johnson was elected… what the hell is this… https://t.co/n6Ekibi5is

– Jon Stewart (@jonstewart) May 30, 2024

When journalist Mehdi Hassan pointed this out to him, Stewart called it “the stupidest thing Britain has done since the election of Boris Johnson.”

Labour, still trying to redeem itself from anti-Semitism accusations, is very sensitive to anything that appears to be biased against Jews. But it may not be the clip itself that got Shaheen in trouble.

The Daily Show bit has been widely circulated on social media since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza because it shows how nuanced voices are met with slogans aimed at suppressing discussion. One of the posts Shaheen reportedly liked featured the clip, but contained Original text on the same idea: “Every time you make even the slightest critical remark about Israel, you are immediately attacked by hordes of hysterical people telling you why you are completely wrong and why you are biased against Israel.”

The problematic part came in the next part of the post, which said people were being “mobilized by professional organizations” to harass critics and influence politicians. Shaheen, who claims he cannot remember liking the post, accepted in a BBC interview that she knew the line about organizations “plays on a stereotype of Jewish control that she disagrees with. She apologized.

From an American perspective, it’s odd for a candidate to like social media posts containing anti-Semitic phrases and apologize for them. Here in the US, our candidates make their own blatantly anti-Semitic posts, persist in criticism, and win seats in Congress.

Even if Labour continues to stumble despite having a highly unpopular Tory prime minister, it can at least congratulate itself on having done one thing right: bringing more attention to one of Jon Stewart’s best plays.

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