Hodge ‘using Holocaust’, says Corbyn ally
Labour Party plunged into new anti-Semitism row as ex-minister who criticised leader accused of cynicism
A CLOSE ally of Jeremy Corbyn has accused a Jewish ex-minister of using the murders of her family members in the Holocaust as a “weapon” with which to attack the Labour leader.
David Rosenberg, an author who has described allegations of anti-Semitism in Labour as a “largely engineered furore”, said Dame Margaret Hodge had “cynically drawn on her family’s direct experience of the Holocaust to bolster her special right to pronounce on the subject”.
Mr Rosenberg’s attack on Dame Margaret, in an article for the Left-wing Morning Star newspaper, came after she was threatened with disciplinary action after calling Mr Corbyn a “racist and anti-Semite” during a confrontation in Parliament over Labour’s refusal to adopt in full an internationally recognised definition of anti-Semitism.
Dame Margaret wrote in a Guardian article that she had told the Labour leader “to his face what I and others are feeling”. She said her grandmother and uncle were among relatives killed during the Holocaust and she “joined the Labour Party to fight racism”.
Yesterday she accused Mr Rosenberg of a “depressingly awful” attempt to attack her personally rather than “face up to the issue that has infected the party”.
Mr Rosenberg, a Labour activist in Mr Corbyn’s Islington North constituency in north London, sat next to the party leader at a controversial Passover meal in April hosted by Jewdas, a far-Left Jewish group which has called for the destruction of Israel. In January, Mr Corbyn attended his 60th birthday party and gave what Mr Rosenberg described online as a moving speech.
Mr Rosenberg said Dame Margaret, the MP for Barking, in east London, was accused of “legitimising” claims by the far-Right British National Party by stating in 2007 that families who come from this country have more right to social housing than new migrants. “It is just a tad embarrassing and tasteless even that a politician who wields her family’s Holocaust history as a weapon to give her licence to say what she likes in arguments with fellow Labour MPs was being criticised then by leading refugee bodies for bolstering the racism of a party whose roots were in classical Nazism,” Mr Rosenberg wrote.
“This is not really about anti-Semitism but is a battle to defeat the Left of the Labour Party and defend Israel from criticism.” He also mocked Dame Margaret’s “sisters in struggle”, the Labour MPs Ruth Smeeth and Luciana Berger – who have spoken about the anti-Semitic abuse they have received from within the party – as “craven opportunists” and “selective anti-racists”.
Responding to Mr Rosenberg’s comments, Dame Margaret said: “This is a disgraceful attempt to trivialise the argument by playing silly tribal politics with a fundamental problem, namely anti-Semitism among the hard Left.”
Last night it emerged that Labour MP Ian Austin, whose adoptive parents were Czech Jewish refugees whose own parents died in the Holocaust, is also being investigated by officials after challenging the party’s response to the anti-Semitism crisis. Mr Austin received a letter earlier this month from Labour head office confirming he is be- ing investigated for “abusive conduct”. The letter followed a heated row with Ian Lavery, the party chairman.
It came as the Mail on Sunday reported that Tories on Barnet council are seeking strip Mr Corbyn of his allotment in the borough in the interests of “community cohesion” over the row.
Mr Corbyn once linked a jihadi massacre of 16 Egyptian policemen to Israel, it emerged last night. “I suspect the hand of Israel in this whole process of destabilisation,” he told Press TV, the Iranian state-owned broadcaster, in 2012. A Labour spokesman said Mr Corbyn’s “speculation” was based on “welldocumented incidents of killings of Egyptian forces by the Israeli military”.
It is time for all those on the Left who despair of how Jeremy Corbyn and his friends have disgraced the Labour Party to act. Week after week, allegations emerge of hard-Left activists peddling vile anti-Semitic propaganda, some of it the stuff of ancient blood libel, all of it unacceptable in any civilised society. Labour has had plenty of opportunities to clamp down on extremism within the ranks. Instead, the scandal keeps getting worse. The party dragged its heels on dealing with Ken Livingstone. Its internal inquiry, headed by Baroness Chakrabarti, was woefully inadequate. And, appallingly, it refused to adopt fully an internationally recognised definition of anti-Semitism, instead cherry-picking bits of it, seemingly to placate its more unsavoury members.
Remember that Mr Corbyn called Hamas and Hizbollah “friends” and has appeared on Iraniansponsored TV. Some of his defenders believe he is as innocent as a lamb, in which case he is also stunningly ignorant and useless as a party manager. Moderates who are sick of him, and plenty sit on the backbenches, appear to be waiting for him to step down voluntarily. That’s neither good enough nor a sensible strategy, given how ensconced Mr Corbyn is. Every penny donated to Labour, every canvass, every leaflet pushed through a door sustains this man in position and, Heaven forbid, puts him a little closer to No 10.
The only answer is for real social democrats in the party and in Parliament to walk away. Starving Mr Corbyn of money and campaigners is all he’ll understand, and hopefully he’ll either change or quit. At that point, social democrats can return to Labour and help to restore it to the status of a legitimate opposition movement.