Labour MP Naz Shah says did not recognise 'anti-Semitism as racism' in Facebook outburst

Recently reinstated Labour MP Naz Shah has said that she didn't understand anti-Semitism was a form of racism when she compared Israel with Nazi Germany, and said that Jews there should be removed and sent to the US.

The Bradford West MP was censured in April 2016 for sharing a graphic on her Facebook page in 2014, before she was elected, showing Israel on top of a map of the US under the headline "Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict – Relocate Israel into United States".

She also conducted an online poll asking whether Israel had committed war crimes. The posts caused uproar and forced her to quit as parliamentary private secretary to the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell.

Labour was thrown into turmoil by the revelations, with some arguing that leader Jeremy Corbyn did not act fast enough to head-off the row; Shah was suspended 24 hours after the comments emerged.

In her first interview since the incident, Shah apologised for the comments and said they were down to ignorance.

"The truth is that some of the stuff I have since looked at and understood, I didn't know at the time," she told BBC Radio 4's World At One. "I didn't get anti-Semitism as racism. I had never come across it. I think what I had was an ignorance. She says that when she looked back she thought "how stupid I was and how ignorant I was".

The interview came after Shah wrote for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, saying at the time of her initial apology she did not mention her involvement with the Jewish community.

"I didn't mention that I already had a meeting scheduled with the Jewish Board of Deputies, or that I'd been asked to join the UK Parliamentary group for British Jews," she wrote.

"I didn't talk about my history of work with – not against – the British Jewish Leadership Council, or about how I felt my own people – the Muslim community – could learn from Britain's Jews, who have integrated successfully without losing their identity."