Dr Elsayed Omar Selim, a former care home owner and one-time independent parliamentary candidate for Basingstoke, has authored a series of tweets promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, as well as employing various antisemitic tropes.
In one tweet questioning why Israel should appear in the Eurovision Song Contest – a question which a Google search would reveal is down to the Israel Broadcasting Authority’s membership of the European Broadcasting Union, as well Israel’s historical, cultural and geographical proximity to Europe, as opposed to its immediate neighbours – Dr Selim attached an image featuring many Stars of David encircling various large media outlets, using perhaps the most recognizable symbol of the Jewish people to imply Jewish control over the media, an antisemitic canard which can be traced back to pieces of antisemitic propaganda such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Dearborn Independent by Henry Ford. Sharing the same image, he describes Jeremy Corbyn as bowing to ‘Zionist thugs’. In another tweet he describes the BBC as a ‘Zionist Controlled…paedophile castle‘, and in yet another he claims that ‘Zionists control the world’ through outlets such as the BBC ‘brainwashing’ their viewers with ‘Zionist propaganda’. He even goes as far to state that Islamophobia is a ‘Zionist invention’ and that President Obama answers to his ‘masters’ in the ‘Zionist lobby‘. In all of these instances and in others, Dr Selim evokes the the common antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jewish dominance of international business, politics and the media, veiling it thinly behind the use of the word ‘Zionist’ instead of ‘Jew’, a tactic which, as the notes to the European Union Working Definition of Antisemitism state, is often employed in antisemitic discourse as Israel and Zionism are often ‘conceived as Jewish collectivity’.
Perhaps most disturbingly, in his articles on ‘Independent Views’, Dr Selim attributes the world’s problems to 7 million administrators who are ‘controlled’ by ‘7000 creatures‘. Given his frequent invocation of conspiracy theories involving Jewish control over world affairs, it is quite possible that he believes that these ‘creatures’ and various undesirables he refers to are in fact Jews. Dr Selim trivialises the Holocaust, describing the migrant crisis on equal terms as an ‘ongoing holocaust’. On the same website, another writer espouses blood libel, accusing Theodore Herzl, considered to be the founder of modern Zionism, of trying to ‘disappear the entire population of Palestine’, as well as erroneously describing him as the ‘secular founder of the Jewish State’ (despite the fact that Herzl died 44 years before the founding of Israel). Again, the notes to the European European Working Definition of Antisemitism explicitly use attempt to portray the State of Israel as an inherently racist endeavour as an example of antisemitism. This cynical emphasis of Herzl’s secular identity is a clear attempt to portray Israel as a colonial project with little connection to the Jewish faith, despite surveys often demonstrating the commitment of religious Jews to Israel and Zionism.
