Belfast hosts UK's fourth Holocaust Memorial Day and Tonge condemned

BY Rafi Aziz, Communications Director, GMAF (Gay Men's Aids Forum)

I was invited to participate in UK's fourth Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January in Belfast, the 2004 host city, amongst the hundreds of individuals and agencies gathered to remember and mourn the millions of Jews and other demonised groups massacred by the Nazis six decades ago. Unsurprisingly, when my colleagues discovered I lived in Richmond, the heated topic of local MP Tonge came up and she was unanimously condemned and vilified for her comments, supporting Palestinian suicide bombers, and her refusal to retract them. Belfast is a city which, unlike Richmond, has a long and tragic experience of bombing and terror campaigns conducted on and by her citizenry, and the sheer, monstrous stupidity of an English MP supporting the promotion of primal barbarism, although conveniently at a very far remove from Richmond Park, was met with shock, horror and disbelief.

However, MP Tonge has a despicable history of supporting despotic regimes such as Mugabe's Zimbabwean government. Since 2000 my agency has actively condemned Mugabe's anti-democratic rule and, apart from protesting through diplomatic channels, my agency and others conducted direct action, with some attempting a citizens' arrest on Mugabe when he visited London, which resulted in near-fatal assaults by his bodyguards on legal protesters.

The Evening Standard's Peter Oborne (26 January) described MP Tonge's inaction in the face of the atrocities committed by Mugabe's Zanu PF murderers as her having a "...liberal conscience so highly refined that it refuses to condemn barbarism, urges silence in the face of Mugabe's near genocide and publicly contemplates mass murder". AA Gill described Tonge in The Sunday Times on 25 January as being encased in her "...hajib and dynamite corset" in her empathising with Palestinian female suicide bombers.

The Belfast Telegraph described Tonge on 27 January thus: "What a monster that woman is. And how easy it is for such monsters to be elected to Parliament under the guise of being both liberal and a democrat, when actually they are nothing of the sort, They are the sort of toady who oils the wheels of fascism and always have done". As I left Belfast to return to Richmond I was urged not to rest until this vile politician resigns, as politics in Richmond has now been degraded to support mass murder and promote the slaughter of innocents. Anyone familiar with the politics of genocide will know that convincing arguments for their activities can be made by all parties in justification, but not many get it as badly wrong, and with such potentially fatal consequences, as does MP Tonge.