Recently it seems that evidence of anti-Semitism in the UK’s Labour Party—specifically via Twitter—has come with alarming consistency. It’s a cause Prime Minister Cameron has taken up in Parliament, calling on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to root it out of his party’s ranks.
The instances are piling up.
There’s Labour activist Vicky Kirby, who was suspended twice for her anti-Semitic tweets that hit on old favorites about Jews and their “big noses,” and the “Zionist God” who may just be Hitler, and the invention of Israel.
There’s Michael Abraham Levy, a member of the House of Lords, who threatened to leave the party if Corbyn didn’t condemn the party’s intolerable anti-Semitism. (Corbyn, it should be noted, has on many occasions. Corbyn, it should also be noted, has a dubious history of fostering political relationships with, well, let’s just call them people who don’t take too kindly to Jewish people or homosexuals.)
There’s Oxford Labour Club’s co-Chair, who resigned in February because he felt that “a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”
There’s Khadim Hussain, the former Mayor of Bradford, who was recently suspended for sharing a Facebook post that stated: “Your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.’
And now there’s the curious case of Aysegul Gurbuz, a 20-year-old Labour councilor in Luton, England, who has been suspended because of a number of anti-Semitic tweets found on her account between 2011 and 2014 by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Reported The Daily Mail:
One tweet, written in January 2013, said: ‘The Jews are so powerful in the US it’s disgusting.’
Another post, in October 2012, said: ‘Ed Miliband is Jewish. He will never become prime minister of Britain.’ And Adolf Hitler was praised as the ‘greatest man in history’ in a tweet in October 2011.
Miss Gurbuz last night denied she had written the tweets and claimed her sister may have posted them.
In reaction to the discovery of Gurbuz’s Tweets, Corbyn said on BBC One: “Anti-Semitism is absolutely abhorrent and wrong… Anyone that commits any act of anti-Semitism, that makes anti-Semitic remarks, is auto-excluded from the party and an inquiry follows immediately.”
Previous: In-Fighting Over Anti-Semitism Continues for UK’s Labour Party
David Cameron Acknowledges Growth of Anti-Semitism in Britain, Calls It ‘an Absolute Cancer in Our Societies’
Meet Jeremy Corbyn, the New Leader of Britain’s Labour Party
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
