Thread: One of the candidates excluded from the Labour NEC ballot has posted a statement defending himself. Keith Hussein (South Shields CLP) says that claims he promoted antisemitic conspiracy theories are "completely baseless" and "vicious personal character assassination". /1 
Concerns about alleged #antisemitism in Keith Hussein's Facebook posts were first raised publicly by Stephane Savary, vice-chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, whose blog questioned whether the comrade was fit to join Labour's governing body. /2
link.medium.com/lZ7qpHarr4
link.medium.com/lZ7qpHarr4
Hussein says: "An innocent discussion on economics is somehow re-spun to make the accusation that I was spreading anti-Jewish conspiracy theories regarding George Soros. I didn’t even know Soros was Jewish at that time." He assures us that he doesn't believe in such theories. /3
It's unclear whether Keith Hussein is rejecting the antisemitic claims made in the articles he shared or disputing that they make such claims. He says he didn't know Soros was Jewish at the time but that fact is stated early on in the ZeroHedge piece he posted in July 2016. /4
The article is replete with antisemitism, Islamophobia and racism, referring to "puppet-master" Soros's supposed "globalist agenda" to "cause economic and social chaos" by "flood[ing] Europe with hordes of third-world Muslims" whose "values are completely incompatible". /5
If Dr Hussein didn't know Soros was Jewish, surely he must have recognised the "globalist" tropes and far-right, indeed neo-Nazi, rhetoric? He is after all an academic/activist who "specialises in globalisation, culture and media" with "publications on ethnicity and media". /6
Other Soros-related material shared by Keith Hussein comes from similarly disreputable, far-right conspiracist sources. Except for an article published by the LSE, which barely mentions Soros at all but is used as a prop to describe him as the "architect of the Ukraine War". /7
It would be interesting to find out why Hussein believes that Soros was responsible for the Ukraine conflict. However, the content of the articles and the way he uncritically posted them doesn't back up his claim that "an innocent discussion on economics" has been "re-spun". /8
The most charitable explanation is that Hussein shared this antisemitic propaganda without reading it. But that excuse doesn't work for the LSE blog whose fleeting reference to Soros is buried deep in the article and only "re-spun" as an AS conspiracy by Hussein himself. /9
Whichever way we look at it, Hussein's decision to promote blatantly antisemitic articles and his spinning of a non-AS one in order to support a false claim about Soros made by far-right antisemites suggest that Jennie Formby was correct to exclude him from the NEC contest. /10
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