Jewish UKIP candidate quits after ‘do an Eichmann’ on Obama slur

A Jewish UKIP candidate for Hendon has stood down just a month before the general election after saying that Israel should kidnap and extradite US President Barack Obama just as they did Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Jeremy Zeid this week confirmed that the UK Independence Party (UKIP) had sent him a letter saying “oh dear, oh dear, what have you said now, or words to that effect” but denied any party pressure to resign.

He resigned, he said, because he was “fed up of people asking whether I was racist,” after he said parts of London were being “ethnically-cleansed” last year. Other reports cite his resignation as being due to his health.

This week Zeid, who is also chairman of UKIP Harrow, denied causing offence by saying of Obama that Israel should “extradite the bastard” and “do an Eichmann on him,” and that his latest remarks were simply “a salacious bit of chit-chat” and “a storm in a teacup” which would “blow over soon”.

Asked about his political views, he said he had been “thrown to the wolves” and that “in politics, if you keep your head down, you go right up the chimney,” in what some will interpret as a reference to the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

Zeid said he was sticking by UKIP and that – had he been left-wing – he could have made the comments about extraditing Obama as if he were a Nazi war criminal, adding: “If I’d been a Labour candidate, there wouldn’t have been a squeak.”

A member of Kenton United Synagogue, Zeid was this week replaced by Dr Raymond Shamash, a dentist who served as a medic in the IDF during the Yom Kippur War.