Jewish leaders condemn Corbyn over ‘racist trope’

JEREMY CORBYN must apologise for repeating a “classic racist trope”, Jewish leaders have said, as they warned that “no Jew can be an equal member of the Labour Party”.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews yesterday urged the party leader to act to end the party’s row over anti-semitism, with the group accusing Labour’s leadership of having “chosen to make its priority a fight with British Jews”.

The Jewish Leadership Council and Community Security Trust said Mr Corbyn needed to publicly acknowledge and apologise for the “hurt” he had caused the Jewish community.

The warnings came days before Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee is due to vote to accept in full an internationally recognised definition of anti-semitism, amid fears the party could seek to water it down.

Mr Corbyn said in 2013 that British Zionists “don’t understand British irony”. Gillian Merron, chief executive of the Board of Deputies, told Labour Party General Secretary Jennie Formby in a letter that the comments appeared to imply that Zionists were “somehow ‘un-british’”, which was “a classic racist trope”.

The former chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, has described the comments as the worst by a political leader since Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech.

The Jewish Leadership Council said in its own letter to Ms Formby that the “current obsessive hatred of Israel and Zionism means that no Jew can be an equal member of the Labour Party”.

A spokesman for Mr Corbyn claimed that he had been referring in 2013 to a “group of pro-israel activists”, had not been singling out Jews, and was “opposed to all forms of anti-semitism”.