Reform UK candidate who shared social media post showing bombing of Mecca accused of 'extremism'

Ben Rowe is running for a seat on Plymouth City Council in the local elections on May 7.Reform UK have told LBC they are “thoroughly looking into his social media posts” which have since been removed.The party also claims to maintain “some of the strongest vetting procedures in the country”. But Dr Naomi Green, Assistant Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain, told LBC the posts shared online by Ben Rowe portray Muslims as “a group of people who are bombable, who are killable.”Green says: “This is extremism. Anyone who is calling for the mass murder of a group of people is an extremist. It doesn't matter what religion, ethnicity, or background they are.”The Government defines extremism as “the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance.”Dr Naomi Green told LBC: “If I were to put up a similar image with a nuclear bomb dropping on an identifiable group of people, the police would be at my door pretty sharpish under anti-terror laws because it's extremism.”LBC has asked both Reform UK and Ben Rowe for a response to claims that the candidate’s posts are extremist.We were told Ben Rowe “will not comment on the matter” but it’s been reported that he posted on Facebook to say the posts had been taken out of context and that he had shared them years ago – although it appears this post has also since been removed.Reacting to another post shared by Ben Rowe on social media, depicting Patrick from SpongeBob as a Muslim with a child bride, Dr Green said: “I see images like that all the time, but they're not usually shared by people standing for election.” She told LBC: “I think that it’s just reinforcing this idea of Muslim communities as vermin, Muslim communities as something to cleanse the country of - the undesirables, the fifth column."You know, we've been down here before in history, and we know where this kind of rhetoric goes. And so, it's one thing when it's on the fringes, it's scary, you know, when— but when it's mainstreamed… that is terrifying.”Dr Naomi Green claims images such as those shared by Ben Rowe have the power to legitimatise violence against Muslims in real life.She said: “they're making a sort of stereotyped caricature of a Muslim and then making all of us that caricature and then making all of us essentially killable.”She told LBC: “We've been down this road before; we've seen the Bosnia genocide, we've seen the Armenian genocide, we've seen the Holocaust.”Dr Green went on to say: “When we reduce people to vermin and animals and something to be exterminated – that is the language of genocide. Let’s face it, that is what someone is normalising”.The deadline has now passed for Reform UK to remove Ben Rowe’s nomination from the ballot paper ahead of the local elections, but the party claims he “remains under investigation”.

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