Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn being assaulted with an egg at a London mosque has sparked a “Nazi” Twitter row featuring Countdown’s Rachel Riley and the Guardian’s Owen Jones.
Journalist Jones lashed out at the TV presenter for using one of his old tweets to justify the attack on Corbyn at Finsbury Park mosque on Sunday.
Riley shared a screengrab of a Jones tweet from January 2019 about former British National Party leader Nick Griffin being pelted with eggs.
In a thread of follow-up tweets Jones accused Riley of undermining the seriousness of the attack on Corbyn and of labelling the opposition leader a Nazi.
He also took aim at Conservative MP James Cleverly, accusing him of “cheering on the attack” for responding to Riley with an enthusiastic “Boom!” meme.
Cleverly shot back that he was not celebrating the attack on his political opponent, rather he was seeking to highlight Jones’ “hypocrisy.”
31-year-old John Murphy has been charged with ‘assault by beating’ for attacking Corbyn. He was holding an egg during the incident which took place at the same mosque that was attacked by right-wing terrorist Darren Osborne in June 2017.
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Riley, who is Jewish, has been vocal in her criticism of Corbyn and the handling of his party’s anti-semitism scandal. Her tweet received more than 7,000 ‘likes’, and caused ‘Corbyn is a Nazi’ to trend on Twitter in the UK.
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