HOW LOW CAN YOU GO, MR CORBYN?

Revealed: Militant Jewish group he partied with for 4 hours mocks Judaism and Queen

JEREMY Corbyn faced a revolt last night after meeting a fringe Jewish group that has dismissed Labour’s antiSemitism crisis as a ‘malicious ploy’.

The Labour leader was accused of a ‘gratuitous insult’ to mainstream Jews by sharing a Passover meal with Jewdas, a radical Left-wing body that has called Israel ‘a steamand ing pile of sewage’. He enraged a string of Jewish community groups at a time when antiSemitism claims have engulfed the party and threatened Mr Corbyn’s leadership.

Jewdas has described the antiSemitism scandal as a Right-wing smear and accused mainstream Jewish groups of ‘playing a dangerous game’.

It once staged a satirical event celebrating ‘the glorious relationship between Jews and money’ –

published an obscene ‘prayer’ that is offensive to the Queen and Prince Philip.

Despite this, an unashamed Mr Corbyn insisted he had no regrets ‘in the slightest’ about meeting with the organisation’s members.

Last night, extraordinary details emerged of Jewdas’s history and of Monday night’s event, at which attendees shouted ‘f*** capitalism’ as a plate of beetroot from Mr Corbyn’s allotment was raised in the air. The Mail can reveal:

In a programme for the event,

Jewdas mocked the dipping of food in salt water – symbolising the tears of the Israelites when enslaved in Egypt – as ‘a weird Jewy thing’; ÷They also boasted that ‘everything about it [the event] is heretic, nothing that the rabbis would allow’; ÷During the four-hour ceremony, which Mr Corbyn attended for its full duration, those gathered chanted ‘f*** the police’, ‘f*** the Tories’, and said they wanted to ‘bring about a revolution’; ÷The offensive ‘prayer’ published by Jewdas last year called for Parliament to be burnt down and ended with the words, ‘F*** the Queen and especially f*** Prince Philip.

Yesterday, one Jewish group said Mr Corbyn’s attendance at the Jewdas event had ‘topped off the worst week on record for awful relations between the Labour Party and the Jewish community’.

Community leaders said it was clear that his pledge last week to be ‘an ally against anti-Semitism’ could no longer be taken seriously.

Several of Mr Corbyn’s own MPs also lined up to criticise his actions

It came just as Labour’s new general secretary, Jennie Formby, used her first day in the job to tell members the ‘stain of anti-Semitism’ must be ‘eradicated’ from the party.

Backbencher John Woodcock said Mr Corbyn’s involvement at the Jewdas seder was ‘deliberately baiting the mainstream Jewish community days after they pleaded with him to tackle anti-Semitism’. MP Louise Ellman, who is Jewish, added that it was a ‘gratuitous insult’ to Britain’s Jews and ‘very regrettable’.

Wes Streeting, another Labour MP, said: ‘This demonstrates either extraordinarily bad judgment or a deliberate affront to the majority of British Jews. Probably both. It calls into serious question the sincerity of every public statement Jeremy Corbyn has made on anti-Semitism during the past week, just as many of us hoped we had begun to make progress.’

And fellow MP Angela Smith said it ‘reads as a blatant dismissal of the case made for tackling anti-Semitism in Labour’.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which comprises 300 representatives from the country’s synagogues, questioned Mr Corbyn’s commitment to tackling the problem.

President Jonathan Arkush said Jewdas viewed the anti-Semitism row as a ‘smear’, adding: ‘If Jeremy Corbyn goes to their event, how can we take his stated commitment to be an ally against antiSemitism seriously?’

The Jewish Labour Movement’s Ivor Caplin said: ‘When we called on the leader of our party to show moral leadership and take decisive action to stamp out antiSemitism, this is not what we had in mind.’

Jon Lansman, founder of the Corbyn-supporting Momentum group, told BBC Radio 4’s Today: ‘It’s certainly not helpful to Jeremy or the cause of opposing antiSemitism in the Labour Party … I think the important thing is that Jeremy is seeking

to meet with mainstream Jewish organisations.’ He suggested Mr Corbyn and members of Labour’s National Executive Committee should attend training on ‘unconscious bias’.

Labour has faced a wave of anti-Semitism allegations in recent weeks, including vile abuse on Facebook pages of which senior party figures are members.

Visiting Swindon yesterday, Mr Corbyn said: ‘It was a seder event, which is a celebration of Passover, which I celebrate with young Jewish people from my own community … It was very interesting talking to a lot of young people about their experiences of modern Britain and I learnt a lot. Isn’t that a good thing?

‘Anti-Semitism is a vile and evil thing within our society at any level, anywhere, at any time … If it arises in my party … we examine each case and, if someone has committed any anti-Semitic act, they are suspended and could be expelled … We are very clear about that and very clear in the whole of our society we cannot accept anti-Semitism in any form or indeed any other form of racism.’

Charlotte Nicols, who attended the Jewdas event, said Mr Corbyn stayed for four hours and was an ‘active participant’ in the rituals.

She wrote on website Labour List: ‘Jeremy could not have been a more gracious guest … It lasted over four hours, with Jeremy an active participant … leading the prayer for Elijah’s cup, singing along with us as best he could, and even bringing along beetroot from his own allotment for our (vegan) seder plate.’

Jewdas shrugged off the criticism and suggested to the Board of Deputies that Mr Corbyn attended the event because Jewdas throws the best seders.

JEREMY Corbyn is either phenomenally stupid and insensitive – or setting out deliberately to alienate members of the mainstream Jewish community.

Nothing else can explain his jaw-dropping decision to celebrate Passover with an obscenity- spouting Jewish fringe group which shares his hostility to democratic Israel and pours scorn on fears over the rise of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party.

For the leader of the Opposition to seek out such company, with his party mired in accusations of racism, smacks of contempt for the concerns of most British Jews.

One thing’s for sure. On this occasion, Mr Corbyn cannot plead ignorance, as he did when he claimed he hadn’t looked carefully enough at a blatantly anti-Semitic mural he wanted preserved.

Indeed, Jewdas has made no secret of its extremism. When not urging followers to ‘f*** the police’ or ‘f*** the Queen and especially f*** Prince Philip’, it has described Israel as ‘a steaming pile of sewage which needs to be properly disposed of’.

The group has also dismissed evermounting evidence of Labour antiSemitism as a ‘ bout of faux outrage’. What’s more, at the event Mr Corbyn joined, Jewdas members booed the names of deeply worried community leaders.

Yet he says he does ‘not in the slightest’ regret attending. Thus he sends out the message that he is simply not serious about eradicating anti-Semitism from his party.

Indeed, his conduct has provoked such outrage that even Momentum has sought to distance itself from him.

So now the question is: how much longer can Labour MPs sit on the sidelines, watching Mr Corbyn bring shame on their party? Don’t any feel strongly enough to register more than a token protest?

The truth is that every day they fail to act against the sinister maverick who leads them makes them collaborators. When will they find the courage to stand up for decent Labour voters – and a country crying out for an Opposition worthy of respect?