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MPs Say Police Chief in UK Should Be Fired After Accused of ‘Covering Up’ Threat to Maccabi Tel Aviv Fans
WMP Chief Constable Craig Guildford speaking before the Home Affairs Committee on Jan. 6, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Jewish groups and several members of Parliament in the United Kingdom are calling for the chief constable of the West Midlands Police (WMP) to lose his job after the police force was accused on Tuesday of hiding evidence about anti-Israel locals who were threatening violence against fans of the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Tel Aviv.
WMP Chief Constable Craig Guildford appeared before the Parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday for a second round of questioning regarding the decision to ban Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, whom police claimed were “uniquely violent,” from attending a Europa League soccer match against Aston Villa in Birmingham on Nov. 6 last year.
Documents revealed on Tuesday showed that the police’s initial public safety concerns surrounding the soccer match were not because of behavior displayed by Maccabi fans, but due to “high confidence intelligence” that police received on Sept. 5 about locals in the predominantly Muslim area of West Midlands who wanted to “arm” themselves” against Maccabi fans because they are from Israel. Birmingham City Council Leader John Cotton told the committee on Tuesday that police did not share with him the intelligence they received and their honest reasoning for banning Israeli fans.
Conservative MP Karen Bradley, who chaired the committee, accused the police force of “scraping” to justify their ban against Israeli soccer fans from attending the game on Nov. 6. She told WMP officials on Tuesday: “It feels to us like you felt you needed to justify banning these fans and that scraping was done to find a reason.”
In a post on X, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said Guildford’s position was now “untenable.”
“West Midlands police capitulated to Islamists and then collaborated with them to cover it up,” she said. “They knew extremists were planning to attack Jews for going to a football match, and their response was to blame and remove Jewish people instead. They presented an inversion of reality and misled a parliamentary committee. We have had enough of this in Britain. The British police serve the British public, not local sectarian interests.”
Tory MP Nick Timothy, who is an Aston Villa fan and former Home Office special adviser, also called for Guildford to be fired on Tuesday. “What was left of the credibility of West Midlands police has been destroyed” following the evidence presented to the committee, he wrote on X.
“We learned earlier that their initial reason for banning Israelis from Villa Park was the danger *to* away fans *from* ‘armed’ locals. But to justify the ban they portrayed the Israelis as ‘uniquely violent’ and military-trained,” he explained. “And when the Home Affairs Select Committee asked why the vital information about the danger *to* Israelis was kept secret, the chief constable ludicrously said it was because he had not been asked for it. “
“He is too arrogant to resign,” the MP added about Guilford. “The home secretary has the power to remove him under Section 40 of the Police Act 1996. She should use it.”
Timothy further criticized the police force, saying, “We basically had the mob saying we’re not prepared to have Israelis come to the city we live in and the police decided to appease the mob — and we all know where appeasement ends.” He also accused WMP of “lying” repeatedly in an effort to explain their ban against Maccabi fans and failing to take on “extreme elements in the communities they are supposed to police.”
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said Tuesday’s committee hearing was “yet another disgraceful performance from West Midlands police.” He added that the meeting clearly showed “the threat of armed Islamist thugs was a key consideration in the force’s decision to ban Israeli fans from attending the match, but this crucial detail was held back.”
“The chief constable’s pathetic excuse that he wasn’t asked is just the latest attempt to cover up a farce of his own making,” the MP added. “His position is untenable. If he doesn’t resign, then the home secretary must use her powers to sack him, and even more importantly explain exactly what she knew and when.”
Reform leader Nigel Farage told reporters that Guildford “needs to go today” during a press conference on Wednesday to announce the party’s 2028 mayoral candidate for London.
“It was monstrous that the impression was given that the Jewish-Israeli fans would be violent, when the truth is there were serious threats of violence against them, and huge degrees of misinformation, fed in by local elected politicians in the West Midlands with the assistance of one or two mosques, who do not have good reputations,” Farage said. “I thought the performance yesterday in front of the Commons committee was absolutely abject, so he needs to go first.”
The Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies of British Jews also called for Guildford to lose his job in a joint statement issued on Tuesday.
“It seems that the police reached a decision first, and then searched for evidence to justify it, apparently influenced by the threat posed by local extremists,” they said. “The police excluded (having initially included) any assessment of the significant risk to the Jewish community, and claimed to have consulted the local community in advance of the decision, which they had not.”
“In light of these events,” the Jewish groups continued, “significant harm has been done to the confidence of the Jewish community in the police. Action must be taken to ensure that these failures do not recur and to restore trust. Accountability matters. Considering the chief constable’s role in these events, a change of leadership is essential. If the chief constable does not step aside, responsibility lies with central government to intervene.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) also called on Guildford to step down.
“We believe Chief Constable Craig Guildford has failed to uphold the standards of neutrality and responsibility required of his office,” CAM Director of European Affairs Shannon Seban wrote in a letter to UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood. “We therefore respectfully call for his resignation. Should he refuse, decisive action by the home secretary is warranted.”
Guildford insisted there “wasn’t any political interference” in the decision to ban Maccabi fans from the soccer match in November. He said he was “very much sorry,” adding, “I do regret the focus that this has placed on our local Jewish community.”
Mike O’Hara, assistant chief constable of West Midlands police, also insisted there was “no conspiracy” behind the ban when speaking to the parliamentary committee on Tuesday. “There was a lot of intelligence that people would actively seek out Maccabi fans and seek violence towards them. There was a bubbling situation locally,” he said.
The police told the committee they were informed by senior Dutch officers that Maccabi fans were responsible for violence during a match against Ajax in Amsterdam in November 2024, but Dutch authorities have denied those claims.
The Embassy of Israel in the United Kingdom said on Wednesday that the police force’s initial portrayal of Israeli soccer fans as violent “was a gross mischaracterization that served the needs of those actively inciting against an Israeli team.”
“This framing diverted attention away from credible intelligence warnings regarding extremist elements preparing to target Israeli and Jewish Maccabi supporters, and instead placed blame on the very community that was facing the threat,” the embassy added in a statement shared on X. “The decision to obscure these assessments, and to allow a misleading narrative to take hold, raises serious questions. These acts by law enforcement institutions undermine real security risks, and even encourages a climate in which hostility towards Israeli and Jewish communities can be normalized under the rule of law. These matters require full accountability.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
The post Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’ appeared first on The Forward.