Mccluskey: ‘hostile’ Jews exaggerate Corbyn’s anti-semitism issues
JEREMY CORBYN’S biggest union backer has accused the Jewish community of “intransigent hostility” towards Labour and claimed the party’s antisemitism problem has been “wildly exaggerated”.
Len Mccluskey, the general secretary of Unite, Britain’s biggest union, said the issue risked turning the party into a “vortex of Mccarthyism” and he blamed Jewish leaders for their “utter refusal” to accept an olive branch from Mr Corbyn.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which Mr Mccluskey singled out for criticism, said he was guilty of an “unfair and unwarranted attack” on the Jewish community.
Last night a Labour Party spokesman accused a Jewish Labour MP of being “disconnected from reality” after she compared her treatment by the party to the persecution of her family by the Nazis in the 1930s.
Dame Margaret Hodge said she felt as though “they were coming for me” when she was told she faced disciplinary action and possible suspension after she accused the Labour leader of being racist.
She told Sky News: “On the day that I heard that they were going to discipline me and possibly suspend me… it felt almost like… I kept thinking, what did it feel like to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s, because it felt almost as if they were coming for me.
“It’s rather difficult to define, but it’s that fear, and it reminded me of what my dad used to say – he always said to me as a child, you’ve got to keep a packed suitcase at the door, Margaret, in case you ever have to leave in a hurry.
“And when I heard about the disciplinary, my emotional response resonated with that feeling of fear that clearly was at the heart of what my father felt when he came to Britain.”
A Labour Party spokesman hit back, saying: “The comparison of the Labour Party’s disciplinary process with Nazi Germany is so extreme and disconnected from reality, it diminishes the seriousness of the issue of anti-semitism.”
Mr Mccluskey’s intervention at such a highly charged time piles yet more pressure on Mr Corbyn, who has faced a week of questions over his attendance at a ceremony to honour the terrorists behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.
Writing for The Huffington Post, Mr Mccluskey claimed that he was “at a loss to understand the motives” of Jewish leaders, adding that they had “simply refused to take ‘yes’ for an answer”.
He named the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Jewish Labour Movement as he said that when Mr Corbyn had attempted to “build bridges” with them, they had shown “intransigent hostility and an utter refusal to engage in dialogue about building on what has been done and resolving outstanding difficulties”.
He continued: “I therefore appeal to the leadership of the Jewish community to abandon their truculent hostility, engage in dialogue and dial down the rhetoric, before the political estrangement between them and the Labour Party becomes entrenched.”
While Mr Mccluskey joined with other union leaders in calling for the adoption of the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-semitism, he said moderate Labour MPS were trying to use the issue as “rocket fuel” to split the party.
A spokesman for the Board of Deputies said: “His attack on the Jewish community is both unfair and unwarranted. We have had a deluge of words from the Labour leadership. It is about time that the party resolved this crisis by taking the firm and decisive action which the communal leadership set out for them in detail months ago. They have so far failed to do what is right.”