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In-Fighting Over Anti-Semitism Continues for UK’s Labour Party

A senior Labour leader said relations between the party and the Jewish community has hit ‘rock bottom’

by
Jonathan Zalman
March 22, 2016
Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the Labour Party North Regional Conference at the International Centre for Life in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, March 12, 2016. Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Ian Forsyth/Getty Images
Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn speaks at the Labour Party North Regional Conference at the International Centre for Life in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, England, March 12, 2016. Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

It’s becoming an ugly scene within Britain’s Labour Party over the subject of anti-Semitism, to the point where the Senior Labour leader Louise Ellman said relations between the party and the Jewish community had hit ‘rock bottom,’ ” reported JTA, citing a report from The Guardian.

Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: “What we are seeing at the moment is widespread concerns being voiced by senior Labour Party figures, by no means limited to Jewish figures – in fact, the majority are not Jewish. There is an issue of trust in the minds of many in the Jewish community towards Labour. I’m not saying that Labour have completely lost that trust, I’m saying that relations are under deep strain.”

Last week, Labour activist Vicki Kirby was suspended for the second time after a controversy over her alleged anti-Semitic tweets dating back to 2014 and 2011 resurfaced. These tweets mention the Jews and the “big noses,” the “Zionist God” who may just be Hitler, and the invention of Israel. Last month, Oxford’s Labour Club co-chair, who is not Jewish, resigned, citing the anti-Semtism coming from the campus left who have “some kind of problem with Jews.” A second officer of Oxford’s Labour Club recently stepped down as well.

This week, Michael Abraham Levy, a member of the House of Lords and former Labour Treasurer, threatened to quit the party if Corbyn does not address that anti-Semitism will not be tolerated within his party, saying that he was “shocked and horrified” by the views of his colleagues. “If they don’t make that clear, I will start to question that myself and actually question my being a Labour peer and a proud member of the Labour Party,” said Levy.

On Monday, Corbyn appeared on SkyNews and addressed Levy’s statement, and the notion that anti-Semitism is a problem in the Labour Party.

Last September, when Jeremy Corbyn was elected as the new leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Tablet columnist Yair Rosenberg wrote a mini-profile of the far-left MP, detailing his many “exploits.” Among them was Corbyn’s donation to a Holocaust denier, and his praising of a preacher, who has been banned from the UK for anti-Semitic incitement in part because he claims that Jews make their Passover matzoh with gentile blood, that Jews had foreknowledge of 9/11, and that homosexuality is ‘a great crime.’ ” Corbyn, added Rosenberg, has:

Invited activist Dyab Abou Jahjah to parliament and spoke alongside him. Abou Jahjah had called the 9/11 attacks “sweet revenge,” said Europe made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion,” and called gays “Aids-spreading faggots.” He is now banned in the U.K.

Read more about Corbyn here.

Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.