Clare Short is a member of the Labour Party and MP for Birmingham Ladywood. Formerly she was Secretary of State for International Development. Ms. Short has claimed that Israel is “much worse than the original apartheid state” and incredibly then went on to blame Israel for global warming.  She is also on record for saying “I … believe that US backing for Israeli policies of expansion of the Israeli state and oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.”

In a speech in Parliament on June 26, 2007, she stated “[t]he Israelis are clearly and systematically attempting to take the maximum amount of land  with the minimum number of Palestinians. As things stand, Israel has taken 85 per cent. of historical Palestine, leaving the remaining 15  per cent. for Palestinian ghettos.”

In 2008, she made a trip to Lebanon that was funded by none other than Al Manar television, a virulently antisemitic news outlet that is the propaganda arm of Hezbollah. And in the same year, she was among a number of parliamentarians including antisemite, Baroness Jenny Tonge, and Lord Nazir Ahmed, who sailed by boat to Gaza to protest the blockade imposed on Hamas-ruled Gaza.

More recently in April 2009, she organized an event at the House of Lords entitled Talk with Hamas where Khalid Mish’al, Chief of the Political Bureau of Hamas, was invited to speak to Parliamentarians via a live video uplink to Damascus.

Below is a statement made by Clare Short on the pages of ‘Comment is Free’ “in her own words”:

“Hamas is also accused of using local civilians as human shields, but since this excuse was used for every Israeli attack on civilian targets, we must await objective reports on whether this allegation is true. Even more shockingly, evidence has been growing of the IDF’s use of white phosphorous shells in residential areas – a clear war crime in exposing civilians to horrendous deep-burn injuries that have shocked and bewildered burns unit doctors in Gaza’s overrun hospital wards. Moreover, as the new BBC Panorama programme on Gaza asks, was the colossal destruction of roads, houses, factories, farms and ordinary civilian infrastructure right across the Gaza Strip (creating what an Amnesty researcher called “total devastation”) an act of “wanton destruction” and therefore itself a war crime.” Gaza: the world looks away February 10, 2009