Shaming of Lib Dem peer who hosted vile anti-Semites in Lords
A LIBERAL Democrat peer who hosted an anti-Semitic event in Parliament was finally forced out of the party last night.
Baroness Tonge’s membership was suspended two days after she chaired a meeting at which it was claimed that Jewish people had ‘antagonised Hitler’ and that the Holocaust was caused by ‘Judea declaring war on Germany’.
The remarks, in which Israel was also compared to Islamic State, provoked outrage. They were ‘hard to believe’, the Israeli embassy said.
Tory MP David Davies called on Britain to apologise for hosting an event in the House of Lords at which ‘Jews were blamed for their own genocide’.
At the meeting hosted by Baroness Tonge on Tuesday night, the former Lib Dem MP failed to interject when a member of the audience said, to applause: ‘If anybody is anti-Semitic, it’s Israelis themselves.’
After her suspension, Baroness Tonge quit the party last night and claimed she did not hear the full ‘rant’ blaming Jews for the Holocaust.
‘I was chairing, I did not make any speeches, I introduced the speakers and in the course of that meeting there was a great rant,’ she said.
‘I remember the rant very well but I don’t remember hearing very much of it. I didn’t know what this person said.
‘You do get ranters at these meetings and I think the best way of dealing with them – if you challenge them they go on and on and on and on – the best way is to just say, “Yes, thank you very much, next speaker”.’
Her suspension came four years after she was forced to resign the party whip by former leader Nick Clegg for saying Israel would not last for ever. Mr Clegg never stripped her of her party membership and she has since sat in the Lords as an ‘independent Liberal Democrat’.
On Tuesday she was pictured on the by-election campaign trail with Sarah Olney, the Lib Dem candidate for Richmond Park in south-west london.
Baroness Tonge was told by the party last night she had been suspended pending a investigation. A spokesman said: ‘She has an email telling her she has been suspended as a member of the party. There will be an investigation, which usually lasts a month.
‘This shows we take these types of issues seriously and will act accordingly. She will not be welcome on the campaign trail in Richmond Park.’
The Campaign Against Antiport Semitism welcomed the suspension, but criticised the fact that she had been allowed to remain a Lib Dem member after previous anti-Israel comments.
Tuesday’s meeting in a House of Lords committee room was held to launch a campaign for Britain to apologise on the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that pledged supreceived for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The Palestinian Return Centre, which broadcast the meeting on its Facebook page, said the Government should ‘officially apologise for its past colonial crimes in Palestine’.
A spokesman for the Israeli embassy described the gathering as ‘a shameful event, which gave voice to racist tropes against Jews and Israelis alike’.
One audience member was applauded for suggesting that Hitler decided to kill Jews only after he was provoked by antiGerman protests led by a rabbi in Manhattan.
The speaker said that in the 1930s Rabbi Stephen Wise, whom he described as a heretic, ‘made the boycott on Germany... which antagonised Hitler over the edge, to then want to systematically kill Jews wherever he could find them’.
The speaker said: ‘He became a madman after this boycott. Judea declares war on Germany. In Manhattan they had 100,000 people marching in the economic boycott in 1935 – it was the same heretic rabbi who caused that.’
He also cast doubt on the figure of six million Jews killed by the Nazis and compared Israel to Islamic State.
‘Just as the so-called Jewish state in Palestine doesn’t come from Judaism, this Islamic State in Syria is nothing to do with Islam,’ he said. ‘It is a perversion of Islam, just as Zionism is a perversion of Judaism.’
Another audience member suggested the ‘Zionist movement’ had power over the UK Parliament comparable to that which anti-Semites believed ‘world Jewry’ used to wield globally.
Before Baroness Tonge quit the party, Gideon Falter, of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, said: ‘(She) specialises in baiting Jews and her ongoing membership of the House of Lords and the Liberal Democrats is a disgrace to both institutions.
‘It is indefensible that the Liberal Democrats withdrew the whip in 2012 over her anti-Semitic remarks then but allowed her to remain a member.’
He welcomed the peer’s suspension and urged the party ‘to ensure that this cannot happen again by adopting our manifesto for fighting anti-Semitism in political parties as backed by the Home Affairs Committee’.
‘She specialises in baiting Jews’
As the so-called Jewish state in Palestine doesn’t come from Judaism, this Islamic State in Syria is nothing to do with Islam How one speaker compared Israel to IS