Colin Woodward is a Conservative Councillor in Bishop’s Stortford.
In response to this tweet
Are the kosher stores in Paris open today? And if so, who in France will say #I’llShopWithYou
he responded
Probably more open than shops in #GazaUnderAttack
brushing aside the murders of four innocent French people to make a crass equivalence between this terrorist attack and the actions of Israel, and implying collective Jewish responsibility for the situation in Gaza. As Elliott Johnson notes here he pointedly tagged the Conservative MP for Harlow, Robert Halfon (who is Jewish) into this exchange.
When asked whether he had no concern for the victims, he responded with an accusation of racial supremacism:
Of course. Whereas you could be seen to value one race above another.
Ironically Woodward complained that those attacking him ‘were all quick to score a political point’, piously invoking Matthew 7, when he himself was weaponising murderous antisemitism in order to score a cheap and utterly offensive political point.
Update on Woodward: He has now apologised.
Update
Here’s an utterly shocking example of a conflation between the fears of French Jews and the situation of the Palestinians in Gaza. The BBC’s Tim Willcox asks a French woman about her reaction to the recent killings- she invokes the 1930s and points out that the Jews are the target now. He interrupts her in order to point out that.
‘Many critics though of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffered hugely at Jewish hands as well’.
She rightly points out that this is an ‘amalgame’ – conflation – but, unbelievably, Wilcox still presses the point.
Hat Tip: Stephen Hoffman
