Extra security guards drafted in to protect pro-Israel group at Labour conference
A PRO-Israel group has been forced to take on extra security at this year’s Labour conference amid the party’s antiSemitism crisis.
The conference, which starts tomorrow, will host an academic who has claimed Zionists stopped Jews escaping the Holocaust.
Professor Jonathan Rosenhead – who also suggested Israel could be orchestrating anti-Semitic posts left online by Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters – will speak at a fringe event.
Extra bodyguards will protect attendees at the Labour Friends of Israel’s annual reception, and the group has scrapped its usual stand in the conference exhibition due to fears of disruption.
As the deeply divided party prepares for the conference in Liverpool:
A string of hard- Left union leaders will launch a new body campaigning to ‘ stop the political silencing’ over Palestine;
The launch event will be addressed by an activist who last week described Israel as a ‘racist state’;
Mr Corbyn’s supporters in Momentum have called for ‘ mandatory reselection’, which would see all MPs have to resubmit to a vote by their local constituency party;
A documentary lauding Jackie Walker, who was suspended from the party for criticising Holocaust Memorial Day, will be shown;
Mr Corbyn is expected to attend the Labour Friends of Palestine event, while his deputy Tom Watson will be at the Labour Friends of Israel reception;
Shadow chancellor John McDonnell will share a platform with a controversial United Nations official who once sacrificed an animal to Karl Marx.
Mr Corbyn will tonight address hundreds of his supporters as moderates in the party fear Momentum’s ‘mandatory reselection’ proposals will lead to purges. Other bounce delegates Mr Corbyn are into hoping supporting to a second Brexit referendum.
Professor Rosenhead will speak at an event called by the hard-Left Jewish Voice for Labour group, which believes the international definition of anti-Semitism ‘is used to silence Palestinian voices’. The group – which was founded last year and opposes the official Jewish Labour Movement – says it ‘campaigns tirelessly to defend democracy and the socialist Corbyn Project’.
Mr Corbyn has described Jewish Voice for Labour activists as ‘good people’, even after they organised a counter-demonstration against a rally against anti-Semitism in Westminster earlier this year. Labour Friends of Israel will host its annual reception on Tuesday night, attended by Mr Watson and the group’s chairman, Labour MP Joan Ryan, who has been threatened with deselection.
Even though the reception will take place within the conference secure zone, Labour Friends of Israel has accepted extra security assistance from the party. It is believed extra security has also been provided for the Jewish Labour Movement rally tomorrow.
Professor Rosenhead’s appearance on Monday will come a year after Mr Watson promised an investigation into anti- Semitic remarks at last year’s conference fringe. He was forced to intervene after the Daily Mail revealed that at one event, a speaker had said people should be allowed to question whether the Holocaust happened.
Professor Rosenhead was condemned earlier this year after he claimed ‘the Zionists’ prevented hundreds of thousands of Jews escaping Germany before the Second World War.
The emeritus professor at the London School of Economics was speaking at an event at University College London entitled ‘Jeremy Corbyn, anti-Semitism and justice for Palestine’.
Professor Rosenhead said: ‘Just before the outbreak of war, the United States had organised for hundreds of thousands of Jews to escape from Germany and go – not to the United States, certainly, but to a number of Latin American countries that had agreed to have them.
‘And in those last few weeks before the war, the Zionists stopped that from happening. And the result was, hundreds of thousands of Jews who would have escaped did not.’
A string of academics criticised the claims as ‘baseless’.
The pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour will also host a screening of a documentary about Miss Walker, a hard-Left activist suspended by Labour after allegedly making anti-Semitic comments.
A separate event will mark the launch of a new group, Labour & Palestine, which will campaign to ‘stop the political silencing’.
‘Before outbreak of the war’
NOT since the Trotskyist Militant Tendency tried to infiltrate Labour has the shadow of the far Left hung so menacingly over the party’s annual conference.
The difference this weekend, as delegates meet in Liverpool, is that the Momentum extremists now have the upper hand, while it is the champions of traditional Labour voters who are treated as the interlopers.
Indeed, riddled with anti-Semitism and wedded to ruinous Marxist economic ideas, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour poses a threat to this country far greater than the worst that could come of Brexit, deal or no deal.
So this paper – which remains a firm believer in our bright prospects outside the EU – has a message for Tory Brexiteers plotting to undermine Mrs May (though with just six months to go, they’ve yet to come up with any better plan than hers).
They should listen to the speeches at the Labour conference, and ask if they’re really prepared to risk subjecting Britain to a Corbyn government by tearing their own party apart.