A member of the British parliament from the Labour party is hosting Ahmed Alshami, an international spokesman for the Houthi movement, the Sun reported. The Houthis slogan contains the phrases “death to Israel” and “curse the Jews.”
The Houthi movement’s full slogan reads “God is great, death to the US, death to Israel, curse the Jews, and victory for Islam.” The movement is backed by Iran.
Alshami is also executive director of the Arabian Rights Watch Association. Critics claim that the association is a PR front for the Houthi movement, according to the Sun.
Brighton Labour MP Lloyd Russel-Moyle is hosting Alshami at a Stop the War Coalition meeting in the Commons on Tuesday.
The Stop the War Coalition was founded after the 9/11 attacks and is “dedicated to preventing and ending the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere,” according to their webpage. The coalition also “opposes the British establishment’s disastrous addiction to war and its squandering of public resources on militarism.”
Stop the War also supports “an end to military support and arms sales to countries involved in foreign military aggression or domestic repression, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt,” according to their site.
British military advisers are part of the Saudi-led coalition fighting against the Houthis in Yemen’s civil war.
In May, Houthi drones attacked oil pumping stations in Saudi Arabia. In many cases the Houthis have used Iranian technology and support to create a ballistic missile and drone program to fight Saudi Arabia.
The Yemeni Embassy in London asked Russel-Moyle not to host the “militia” member, the Sun reported.
In the last years the Houthis have increasingly incorporated anti-Israel rhetoric into their speeches, as part of the growing network of Iranian-backed groups in the region, such as Hezbollah, that are obsessed with fighting Israel. The website Al-Bawaba pointed out in 2017 that “oddly enough, the Houthis have denied that they have any issues with Jews.”
“Time and again, Corbyn and his allies welcome in Jew haters and side with the extremist enemies of the UK,” said Independent MP John Woodcock, who resigned from Labour last year due to antisemitism in the party, in response to the incident. “The decent MPs left in the Labour Party need to stop this event from happening on Tuesday.”
Woodcock stated that it was “staggering that a Labour MP is welcoming this virulently antisemitic terror group into parliament,” according to the Sun.
Earlier this year, the Labour Against Antisemitism group compiled a 15,000-page digital report detailing “endemic” anti-Jewish behavior throughout the Labour party and claiming that Labour has a “don’t care” attitude to the issue.
The leader of the Houthi movement’s supreme revolutionary committee, Mohamed Ali al-Houthi, attacked British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt for pushing for arms sales with Saudi Arabia in an interview with The Guardian in March.
“If it wasn’t for the joint British, US, Saudi, and UAE naval forces, the existing famine and the tragic humanitarian situation wouldn’t reach such critical levels, including as he admits about 24 million Yemeni need an emergency aid of food and medicine,” said al-Houthi.
“The Saudi-led coalition, backed by Britain, commits war crimes and does not abide by, as Britain claims, ‘the most stringent guidelines for the export of weapons in the world,'” al-Houthi added. “The principles mentioned are solely for political speech and to avoid the legal and moral responsibility concerning the war crimes and humanitarian situation that the British government faces as part of such alliance”.
Houthi spokesperson Mohammed Abdulsalam threatened airports of coalition members against the movement in retaliation for the closing of the airport in Sanaa.
“The states of aggression must be made to understand that their airports are in the crossfire, and that their closure or total paralysis is the closest way to break the siege of the airport Sana’a,” wrote Abdulsalam in a tweet on June 9.
Seth J. Frantzman and Alex Winston contributed to this report.