SHAME OF ANTI SEMITES
Corbynistas’ applause for vile anti-Zionist rants amid calls to expel Jewish group
PRO-CORBYN activists applauded speakers who delivered vile antiSemitic rants at the Labour conference yesterday.
Delegates at a fringe event demanded the expulsion of the Jewish Labour Movement from the party for supporting the state of Israel.
One compared ‘Zionists’ to the Nazis and claimed it was part of free speech to be able to ask the question: ‘Holocaust: yes or no.’
The event, which took place outside the main Labour conference venue but was listed in its official handbook, was titled: ‘Free speech on Israel: why we oppose the witch hunt.’
Several attendees said claims of antiSemitism in the Labour Party were part of a plot by the pro-Israel lobby and the Labour right to stop Jeremy Corbyn from becoming prime minister. And some spoke up in favour of former London mayor Ken Livingstone who remains suspended from the party for claiming that Hitler supported Zionism.
The statements exposed that antiSemitism is still a big problem in Mr Corbyn’s party more than a year after he pledged to get to grips with the issue. It came as:
A leaflet was circulated at the conference from ‘Labour Party Marxists’ discussing the ‘commonality between Zionists and Nazis’ and quoting Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Final Solution, saying ‘National Socialists had no intention of attacking Jewish people’;
The chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, John Cryer, said he had seen tweets from party members which made his hair stand on end and were ‘redolent of the 1930s’;
Another Labour MP, Wes Streeting, criticised Mr Corbyn, saying there were ‘ too many people in our party, including at the top of the party, who have adopted an ostrich strategy’ on anti-Semitism;
Fellow MP John Mann said 200 Labour members had forwarded him links to a US white supremacist site to back up Mr Livingstone’s claims about Zionism;
The Holocaust Educational Trust suggested that in the two years since Mr Corbyn was elected there was a ‘ fertile ground’ for people to express such views;
Analysis released last night by the Campaign Against AntiSemitism found the problem is worse in Labour than any other party. The group looked at 4million social media posts of 2,000 parliamentary candidates and found that 61 per cent of antiSemitic posts were written by Labour candidates – eight times higher than any other party.
The controversial meeting on ‘ free speech on Israel’ was chaired by Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who said there was a ‘vicious campaign that’s been directed at the Palestinian cause, misusing anti- Semitic allegations’. Although described as a free speech event audience members were told not to record it or tweet.
Miko Peled, an Israeli-American who sat on the panel, said ‘they’ – an apparent reference to Israel or the pro-Israel lobby – did not want Mr Corbyn to enter Number 10. ‘This is about free speech, the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation, the whole spectrum. There should be no limits on the discussion.’
He added: ‘It’s about the limits of tolerance: we don’t invite the Nazis and give them an hour to explain why they are right; we do not invite apartheid South Africa racists to explain why apartheid was good for the blacks, and in the same way we do not invite Zionists – it’s a very similar kind of thing.’
Michael Kalmanovitz, from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, was applauded for calling from the audience for the expulsion from Labour of the Jewish Labour Movement and the Labour Friends of Israel.
A Labour spokesman said: ‘ Labour condemns antiSemitism in the strongest terms. We will not tolerate antiSemitism or Holocaust denial.’
‘No limits on the discussion’