Proud to be a Lib Dem Zionist

I am surprised and disappointed to see that, elsewhere on this site, Jonathan Hoffman has written about me: "When it comes to a choice between being a LibDem and being a Zionist, you will go for the former every time." As Jonathan knows (http://www.thejc.com/blogpost/not-leaders-debate-hendon-parliamentary-hu...), during the General Election campaign, I spoke with Hendon's Tory and Labour candidates at Hendon Mosque, at a meeting organised by Barnet Muslim Forum - http://vimeo.com/10744722. If you go in roughly 54 minutes and 30 seconds, you'll find the answer to a question in which I happily told this audience that I am a Zionist and explained to them what Zionism actually is. At several points throughout the meeting, I explained that I am both Jewish and a Vice-Chairman of Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel. When I separately went to meet people who had been worshipping at Friday prayers at Hendon Mosque, the leaflet that I handed out said that I was a Vice-Chairman of Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, and was exactly the same leaflet that I had handed out at the hustings meeting at Hendon Synagogue. Also during the General Election campaign, I very publicly told MPAC that I did not want their implied support (http://matthew4hendon.blogspot.com/2010/04/thanks-but-no-thanks-rejectin...), when they told people to vote Tory or Lib Dem to defeat Andrew Dismore. So it is a bit rich for Jonathan to say that I am in any way coy about standing up as a Zionist. Jonathan, just because I don't regularly get thrown out of public meetings and accused of having disrupted them, doesn't mean that I'm not a Zionist.