Labor Party leader, Keir Starmer, has come under pressure to return financial donations from a property developer who is known to have posted Islamophobic material on social media.
The controversy revolves around businessman David Abrahams, a Blair-era donor who has been embraced by Starmer.
The re-admission of Abrahams as a financial supporter of the Labor Party is widely interpreted as yet another move by Starmer to distance Labor from the legacy and ideals of former leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
Muslim groups and a member of Labor’s National Executive Committee (NEC), Mish Rahman, have contacted Starmer with evidence of Abrahams’ deep-seated Islamophobic views.
Abrahams’ tweets include suggestions that Muslims have “mixed loyalties”, that conservative Muslim culture is “inherently violent” and that Muslim youth have a “propensity for violence”.
In his most recent Islamophobic tweet (January 2020), Abrahams boasted that while Israel was a “brand new hi-tech state with new inventions to benefit mankind”, the Zionist entity’s “close neighbors chose terrorism and invented suicide bombers”.
The NEC member Rahman has called on Labor to return Abrahams’ money.
“These comments are deeply disturbing … Donating huge amounts of money to Labor should not mean someone can make racist remarks and get away with it. The party should immediately return Abrahams’ donations”, Rahman said.
The controversy over Abrahams comes in the wake of research showing that the majority of Muslim members and supporters of the Labor Party have no faith in new leader Starmer.
According to a survey by the Labor Muslim Network (LMN), 55 percent of respondents say they do not “trust the leadership of the Labor Party to tackle Islamophobia effectively”.