Jon Stewart calls rejection of UK candidate for liking one of his sketches ‘dumbest thing since Boris Johnson’

The US late-night satirist Jon Stewart has responded after Britain’s Labour Party blocked left-wing academic Faiza Shaheen from standing as a candidate in the upcoming general election for liking a number of potentially offensive social media posts, one of which featured a clip from The Daily Show.

“This is the dumbest thing The UK has done since electing Boris Johnson… what the actual f****…,” the comedian wrote on X when he was notified of the controversy.

The clip in question, dating from July 2014, sees Stewart introducing a segment about an Israeli ground offensive – during the 2014 Gaza War – at which point he is immediately swarmed and rebuked by four of the Comedy Central show’s correspondents, barracking him as a “self-hating Jew” for daring to question the country’s actions.

“Look, obviously there are many strong opinions on this issue but just merely mentioning Israel or questioning in any way the effectiveness or humanity of Israel’s policy is not the same thing as being pro-Hamas,” Stewart says, before being shouted down again, at which point he abandons the subject and pivots to talking about Ukraine, a matter about which the correspondents concede they have no strong feelings. Ukraine was also in the news in 2014 after Russia seized the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea.

The account that posted the tweet liked by Ms Shaheen, which featured the clip, also included a commentary attacking the “Israel lobby” that read: “You can’t easily ignore them, because those are not just random people, they tend to be friends or people who move in the same circles as you. Those people are mobilized by professional organizations, but to a large extent, that is organic.”

Ms Shaheen is understood to have been called to