POLICE IN BRITAIN HAVE OPENED A CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION INTO ALLEGATIONS MEMBERS OF THE LABOUR PARTY HAVE COMMITTED ANTI-SEMITIC HATE CRIMES. A DOSSIER OF PARTY PAPERS DETAIL 45 CASES.
Allegations of anti-semitic hate crimes
LONDON • British police launched an inquiry into allegations that some members of the Labour Party may have committed anti-semitic hate crimes.
The Metropolitan Police are acting on a dossier of information handed over to investigators at the broadcast office of LBC Radio in London two months ago.
The file was reported by British media to be an internal document assembled by the Labour Party itself, detailing 45 instances involving messages posted by party members on social media and other forums.
One of the posts read: “We shall rid the Jews who are a cancer on us all.” Other examples of anti-semitic speech in the dossier were accusations of slurs used, including calling someone a “Jew boy” and another a “Zionist Extremist.”
Police Commissioner Cressida Dick on Friday stressed that the Labour Party itself was not under criminal scrutiny.
“We are not going to investigate the Labour Party,” she told BBC radio. “We would always want institutions and political parties and similar to be able to regulate themselves.”
The Labour Party faced a torrent of accusations over the summer that the opposition party was lax in allowing anti-semitic speech on its social media pages, including online gatherings of local Labour activists. The party has more than 500,000 dues-paying members, making it one of the largest in Europe.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said that the “poison” of anti-semitism has no place in his party and vowed to expedite the process to investigate claims. Members guilty of bad behaviour may either face internal discipline — required to attend a hate speech education class, for example — or get tossed out of the organization.
Corbyn himself is a longtime, ardent critic of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and its blockade of Gaza.
But he also stoked the current controversy, hosting a panel in 2010 where Israelis were compared to Nazis and defending an artist’s freedom of speech in 2012 while failing to condemn the London mural that depicted Jewish bankers playing monopoly on the bent backs of the workers.
Critics charge that Labour cannot untangle some members’ fierce condemnation of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians from raw statements about the Jewish state’s right to exist. Yet some Labour members have bristled at the suggestion that their party’s anti-semitism is widespread or allowed — and they have called the charges politically motivated and designed by opponents to smear and weaken the opposition.
A Labour Party spokesman told reporters the party has a robust system for investigating complaints of alleged breaches of conduct and said that police should investigate crimes committed by individuals.