‘Ignorant and godless’ – Labour donor’s withering attack

A withering attack on the Labour leader by donor who backed party with £400,000 at 2015 Election

THE Labour Party stands for a vision of community which appeals to many British Jews. The party matters to them. And for the 2015 Election, my family donated £400,000. But in a week where David Cameron is on the ropes, I have to question the very purpose of a leader who defends his brother’s racist remarks rather than be seen by his supporters as being in any way soft on Israel.

I am not alone in my concern, and Labour should be deeply worried, too.

In the run-up to the last May’s General Election, the Jewish community donated almost onethird of the £9.7 million that Labour received from private donors – and that despite recoiling from Labour’s parliamentary vote to recognise Palestine.

This year, no major Jewish donor has yet given one pound to the central Labour Party.

It is, in its way, a tragedy. The values of Judaism and the Labour Party are well aligned.

As late as 1997, 70 per cent of the British Jewish community, voted for the Labour Party. Today it would be less than 25 per cent and that is because the Jewish community cannot support a political party that, at its top levels, appears by its inaction to tolerate anti-Semitic speech and behaviour, from Labour students at Oxford to deputy party chairs in Woking who make crude antiSemitic remarks.

Before anyone tries to claim that Piers Corbyn, Jeremy’s brother, is no racist by the way, just read his tweet – ‘Zionists can’t cope with anyone supporting rights for Palestine’ – and try replacing the words ‘Zionists’ and ‘Palestine’ with ‘Blacks’ and ‘White South Africa’.

I and many other Jews who support Labour, have this year donated directly to Sadiq Khan’s campaign for London Mayor, to individual Labour councils fighting in the May elections, to local constituency Labour parties, but nothing to those who presently control the party. We would be foolish to donate to a cause whose leaders view us with contempt.

The evidence is all too clear. Take Jeremy Corbyn’s statement last week about antiSemitism in the Party: ‘I wouldn’t call it a crisis,’ he said.

To me that shows only his callousness and contempt for the history of the Jews in Europe.

Too many Jews in Britain had grandfathers like mine who confidently told my father that Hitler walking into Austria was not a crisis. Grandpa Heinrich was in Dachau within four days. There is not a synagogue in Britain today that does not have 24-hour manned security. Imagine that level of security around every church in England. The Jewish community has cause and reason to be vigilant.

No wonder it takes just one example of anti-Semitism from within the party of Her Majesty’s Opposition to have the Anglo-Jewish community up in arms.

What are my fellow Jews to make of claims reported elsewhere in this newspaper that a young Labour councillor in Luton, Aysegul Gurbuz, described Hitler as the ‘greatest man in history’ and hoped Iran would use a nuclear weapon to ‘wipe Israel off the map’?

Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is quite right to warn Jeremy Corbyn he will be unfit to govern unless he eradicates anti-Semitism from the Labour Party. Yet Jeremy Corbyn continues to ignore the problem – and that shocks me.

He makes no attempt at all to put at ease a Jewish community in Britain that for more than 100 years has supported Labour spiritually, politically and financially. The community look on in horror that a supposedly civilised man cannot understand the pain and fear that many on the Left of the Labour Party inflict without any worry of disciplinary action from the leadership. All Jeremy Corbyn dispenses are palliative statements, lumping anti-Semitism with racism.

Why would any of these ignorant people hold back on their attacks against individual Jews and the Jewish community when all through the Labour leadership election Corbyn would not distance himself from accusations the supported organisations calling for the destruction of Israel.

The Jewish community has protested clearly and often, and will continue to do so. Yet I will vouch that Jeremy Corbyn will do nothing.

HE IS too weak to stand up against the wing of the party on whose support he relies. These people have a Pavlovian reaction to Jews and Israel: see a Jew, see an anti-Palestinian. They blend Israel and Zionism into the supposed demagoguery of the classic Jew, an all-controlling malevolent demon, and a rich one, intent on committing incremental genocide against the Palestinian people.

They believe that, without Israel, the Sunni will lie down with the Shia, the Taliban will stop growing opium in Afghanistan, and the Yazidi Christians of Syria and Iraq will be free from genocide. It is a fairy story.

I set this out only to expose the nonsense – and to expose Jeremy Corbyn’s crass, hateful and ignorant support for these people. People like his brother and like those Labour members in Liverpool who criticise their MP Louise Ellman for her supposed anti-Palestinian stance. Their evidence? No more than this: Louise Ellman is a Jew.

The Left is organised and disciplined. The growing number of incidents since Jeremy Corbyn took over the party machine is too great to be a coincidence. Jeremy has emboldened these people because he clearly leans towards Hamas, the violently anti-Israel Palestinian party that governs Gaza. Hamas have included the anti-Semitic libel, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in their constitution.

Ultimately, this is about how safe the Anglo-Jewish community feels in Britain. This year I witnessed a child of mine getting up to speak at a political meeting at a leading university only to see the argument drowned out by hooligan white male students shouting: ‘Zio, Zio, Zio.’

It was as if these thugs held my child personally responsible for the extremes of the very questionable treatment by Benjamin Netanyahu the Israeli Prime Minister, of Palestinian and Israeli Arabs. The word Zio for those not used to the language of the young is not a shortened reference to a Zionist but slang for Jew.

There are many Anglo Jews like me; yes of course we worry. History tells us we are not wrong to do so. I am the first male in four generations going back to 1860 who has not yet been driven from their country of birth by political anti-Semitism.

Those of us who are committed socialists, committed supporters of Labour, will fight both for the Labour cause of justice and fairness in our society. We won’t be defeated by ignorance, hate and a godless totalitarian black-and-white view of the world that so many on the Labour Left possess.

As for anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, it will recede when the party has strong leadership and not before. That’s the litmus test for Jeremy Corbyn.