JW3 accused of being ‘apologists for terror’

THE CHIEF executive of the JW3 community centre has revealed that he received abusive messages believed to have come from within the Jewish community for hosting the Labour leadership debate between Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Smith.

Emails and Facebook posts sent to JW3 accused Raymond Simonson and other JW3 staff of being “apologists for terror” for hosting Mr Corbyn, who was described in the messages as “a known collaborator with Hamas and Hizbollah”.

One message referred to the assassination in 1995 of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a far-right activist who was angry over the Oslo peace agreement signed by Mr Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Mr Simonson told the JC: “Not everyone was happy with the fact that we were hosting Jeremy Corbyn, and [felt] that the Jewish community shouldn’t ever speak to him, host him or go anywhere near him.

“A few people, not many, sent emails or private messages to our Facebook account.

“It was a lot of these messages coming from the same person who then started posting them on social media. Some people were responding to that — a very, very small number, I should be very clear — very strongly agreeing, and making comments about ‘look what happens when a Jew associates with a known antisemite, look what happens. Look what happened to Rabin who associated with, shook hands with Arafat’.”

He added that one of the messages said Mr Corbyn was “a known collaborator of Hamas and Hizbollah, and therefore he has the blood of Jewish victims of terror on his hands’, and we, JW3, should be ashamed of ourselves because we are apologists for terror. That we don’t care about dead Jews, we don’t care about victims of terror.”

The messages had been passed on to the police, he said.

The hustings took place on Sunday night amid heightened security at the north-west London venue.

Mr Simonson told the audience that without the police and the Community Security Trust, “sadly we would not have been able to put this event on this week, because of some of the abuse I and others were taking over the last week, unfortunately, including from members of the Jewish community.”