They raised a beetroot in the air and shouted f*** capitalism
Minute by jaw-dropping minute, ANDREW PIERCE reconstructs Corbyn’s four hour meeting with hate-filled group that mocks Judaism
AS THE 100 or so guests arrived for their Passover feast, a rumour swept the room that they were to be graced by the presence of a prominent politician.
After around 30 minutes of singing traditional Jewish songs, and a few short speeches, the doors to the Anglican church hall opened.
Amid loud apologies for being late, Jeremy Corbyn and his wife Laura joined the seder, a Jewish ritual dinner held on the first or second night of Passover.
The couple had been invited by the organisers – Jewdas, a far Left group founded by young Jews in 2005. Traditionally, seder is a dinner of chicken soup followed by lamb for family and friends. Often, Jews who otherwise might be alone over Passover are invited.
For more overtly political groups, the trend has been for a third celebration centred on political debate – thus the one hosted by Jewdas on Monday.
Corbyn was given a standing ovation by the majority of those present when he arrived.
Relaxed and smiling, the MP for the neighbouring constituency of North Islington was carrying a bag of beetroots from his allotment, where he had been earlier in the day.
One of Jewdas’s founders has explained that the group had ‘an explicitly non- Zionist stance, alongside satirising the many absurdities of the British Jewish community and throwing excellent parties’. On Monday, it served vegan and gluten-free food.
The vegetarian Labour leader had clearly done his homework to ensure he observed the correct protocol – bringing his homegrown beetroot. This suggests it was not an impromptu visit, as has been suggested.
Alongside his wife, who imports Fairtrade coffee, Corbyn took his place at a table in the hall at St Peter’s church in De Beauvoir, a well-heeled enclave in Meg Hillier’s Hackney South and Shoreditch constituency.
The church has a long history of community involvement. Its website states it has a ‘reputation for inclusiveness’ as well as being ‘a peaceful place for prayer and reflection’. Yet peaceful prayer and reflection seemed to be the last things on the mind of a succession of speakers who went to the front of the hall to denounce the State of Israel.
At a traditional Passover feast, there are readings from the Haggadah, a Jewish text which tells the story of the liberation of the Jews from slavery in Egypt.
But the folk of Jewdas do things differently. Instead, there was a succession of short political speeches, often peppered with four-letter words – despite the presence of primary school age children. There were repeated mentions of ‘f***ing Tories’.
There were jeers and catcalls when one speaker referred to Jonathan Arkush, President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who last week led the protest outside Parliament against Corbyn’s failure to tackle anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
Mention by one speaker of the moderate Jewish Labour MP Wes Streeting, a critic of Corbyn, produced a sustained burst of jeers.
Some eyewitnesses said they detected a smile on Corbyn’s face. Whatever the case, having committed Labour to ‘challenge and campaign against antiSemitism in all its forms’, Corbyn could have taken the opportunity to make his views known. Indeed, a more astute political leader might have called for calmer debate or even left the hall.
But Corbyn, who once said he regarded Hamas and Hezbollah as friends and laid wreaths in honour of victims killed by Israel during an attack on the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Tunisian HQ, stayed for around four hours.
Meanwhile, unknown to Corbyn, a fellow guest emailed a friend, expressing surprise that the embattled Labour leader was at an event organised by a group hostile to the Jewish establishment in Britain. Before long, Corbyn’s presence was widely known in Westminster circles – in time for the journalist Alex Wickham, of the Guido Fawkes political gossip website, to arrange for someone to covertly record the rest of the proceedings.
Worse was to follow. As the wine flowed, a woman speaker read from the Jewdas order of service, mocking the biblical story of Jews drowning in the Red Sea as they were chased by Egyptian soldiers.
She said: ‘Legend has it that when the Egyptians were being sucked down into the Red Sea, hallucinogenic angels wanted to chant a cover of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah in victory [a reference to the hit by the US singer-songwriter who drowned, aged 30, while swimming fully clothed in a river].
‘ This peeved Lorde. Lorde rebuked: ‘F***ing angels. Those are my little b******s down there. I know they were doing bad s**t but show some f***ing compassion.
‘In a normal seder, we’d fill our second bucket of wine only halfway up to show that it is sad to see any human suffering, even those a***wipes. In this seder, we fill two buckets per person because: f*** those Fascists.’
As cheers filled the air, Corbyn and his wife carried on chatting and laughing with fellow guests.