GUY ADAMS: I exposed new councillor's tirade against rabbi, but when I warned ... trends now
When I stumbled upon the social media feeds of Green Party election candidate Mothin Ali, I couldn't believe my eyes.
It was mid-February, and the Daily Mail was investigating an anti-Semitic hate campaign that had forced Leeds University's Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, into hiding.
Rabbi Deutsch is an Israeli national. So, like almost all of his countrymen under the age of 40, he is required to serve as a reservist in its armed forces.
Following the October 7 terror attacks, he had therefore been called upon to temporarily return to his homeland.
He spent three months with his regiment in the Israeli Defence Forces before returning to the UK in January.
In an increasingly frenzied tirade, a video posted by Mothin Ali before his election whipped his viewers into turning against Leeds University's Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, forcing him into hiding
Rabbi Zacharia Deutch, with his wife, Nava, received menacing calls and threats following a video posted by Mothin Ali
This fact became public a few weeks later. There followed an appalling online hate campaign, which – in turn – resulted in more than 300 highly threatening messages being sent to the family home where he lived with his wife Nava and their two small children.
'Tell that Jewish son of a b***h we're coming for him,' went one of the more sinister late-night telephone calls, picked up by Nava at midnight.
'We're coming to his house and we're going to kill him in his house and you as well, you f*****g racist b***h, s**g.'
Another anonymous caller said: 'We are going to get you, we're going to get your husband and we are going to get you as well, love. It's as simple as.
'How dare you come to Leeds and expect the Muslims not to do 'owt, when all you lot have been doing is killing innocent children?'
A third caller, who like the two previous ones was male and spoke with a Yorkshire accent, promised: 'Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist mother****ers.'
Rabbi Deutsch and his family responded to the menacing calls – which included several threats to rape Nava and torture their children – by going into hiding. They have remained there since.
That was the backdrop. My job was to find out exactly why this revolting pile-on had taken place; not to mention who might be to blame.
I didn't have to look far. For I quickly discovered that the aforementioned Mothin Ali, a prominent local YouTube and TikTok personality, had posted a two-minute video about Rabbi Deutsch to his various social media feeds, a mere three hours before the death threats had begun to roll in.
The online rant was notable for the utterly dehumanising way in which it described the Jewish chaplain, saying his 'contract should be terminated with immediate effect' and he ought to be 'prosecuted for war crimes'.
'This creep, that's the only way I can describe him, is someone who went from Leeds to Israel to kill children and women and everyone else over there,' it began, neatly ignoring the fact that Deutsch went to Israel because he was legally required to.
Ali continued his message by branding the chaplain an 'animal' (a rhetorical trick once commonly used by Nazi propagandists), saying: 'We [Muslims] are treated as second-class citizens and Leeds University is violating safeguarding standards.
'You should be protecting people. You should be protecting students from this kind of animal, because if he's willing to kill people over there, how do you know he's not going to kill your students over here?'
In an increasingly frenzied tirade, the video added that the rabbi had been 'massacring people' (there is no evidence that he killed anyone) before concluding that the 'far-Right radical' is 'radicalising students,' meaning that 'Leeds University should dismiss him urgently. He's absolutely disgusting. He's shameful'.
Viewers swiftly took the bait. On Ali's TikTok feed, there were 340 comments about the video, some of them virulently anti-Semitic.
'He's a terrorist, psychopath and paedo,' reads one. 'Zio lunatics pathetic savages beastly f***s always ugly deranged f***s, they need to be put in nutters asylum or concentration camps,' goes another.
'I am beginning to believe the Holocaust is a myth, we seeing the lies and propaganda,' said a third commentator.
Ali, a 42-year-old father of three from Roundhay, Leeds, who describes himself as 'an accountant by day and an Islamic teacher at night', did nothing to discourage or hide the vile outpouring of anti-Semitism, or to dial down the nature of the debate his hateful video had kicked off.
This wasn't his first rodeo, either. Take, for example, Ali's behaviour on
