Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
What would heroes who fought to liberate death camps think?
THE Mirror and the Labour Party have always stood shoulder-to-shoulder to fight racism. Remember how the paper campaigned with Hope Not Hate to take on the BNP?
Fighting racism is one of the reasons I joined the party as a teenager.
I grewup listening to my dad tell me how he fled his Czechoslovakian home just after the Nazis invaded. His Jewish mum and sisters were murdered in the Treblinka death camp in 1942.
So, like many Labour members, I’m horrified our party has caused so much offence to Jewish people.
In the past few weeks the party has had to suspend a councillor over an online post claiming Jews drink blood and abuse children.
Lastyear’s conference gavea platform at a fringe event to a speaker asking: “Holocaust: yes or no?” What would British heroes who fought to liberate those camps make of that?
We’ve had Ken Living stone’ s offensive nonsense about Hitler supporting Zionists. Others claimed Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade or drew disgusting comparisons between Israel’s actions and the Nazis’ crimes. Jeremy Corbyn himself defended a horrible racist caricature on a mural. He even hosted an event in Parliament on Holocaust Memorial Day that compared the Israeli government to the Nazis.
On Friday he wrote an article that made matters worse by totally failing to make the changes that are needed.
Instead, he repeated someof the things that caused the problem. He needs tostart listening and adopt the standard international definition of anti-Semitism andall its examples.
He must respond properly to the reasonable requests made by the Jewish Leadership Council, Board of Deputies and Jewish Labour Movement and kick the racists out of our party.
This is not about curtailing criticism of Israel. Thestandard definition says “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannotbe regarded as anti-Semitic”.
But the leadership’ s changes will let racists off the hook.
The reason he’ s struggling to resolve this crisis is he’s spent the past 40 years mixing with or defending all manner of extremists and, in some cases, antiSemites. Millions of people desperately need a Labour government but, under Jeremy, the party looks very different to theone I joined all those years ago.
Many people will not vote for a hardleft party mired in racism. We need to getback to mainstream common-sense politics before the British people will trustus to form a government that can make the changes Britain needs.