HYSTERICAL STORIES MAKING US A LAUGHING STOCK

Despite your attempt to justify it ( We cannot relent, JC, April 8), the crusade the JC has been spearheading ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party (and even before then) is worryingly damaging the very cause you purport to be protecting.

Rising anti-Jewish feeling in the UK and elsewhere — inflamed by the passions engendered by the unresolved conflict between Israelis and Palestinians — is certainly a real issue.

But constantly overstating the problem (eg ‘‘a cancer exists in the Labour Party”) and sometimes subsequently falsely identifying it, does not help.

The incessant campaign is drowning rational thought and analysis and making Jews something of a laughing stock in the wider public, to the point of causing resentment, especially among the young and other demographics with their own serious problems.

While the JC could play an important role in exposing antiJewish sentiment where it genuinely exists, the hysteria, by contrast, is playing an instrumental role in fomenting it. Tony Klug London

I am a Labour party member but I write entirely as a member of the public in a non-political manner.

I have never seen the slightest hint of antisemitism within the party, in fact precisely the opposite. However, I find myself increasingly annoyed at the persistence of some journalists in their repeated and malicious propaganda to conflate the terms between “antisemitic” or “anti-Jewish” with “anti-Zionist” or “anti-Israeli government” in order to deliberately muddy the waters.

This is, as I am sure you realise, intellectually offensive.

I find it doubly annoying because the same journalists are quite prepared to quote mainstream media as if they were valid sources. They are not. Andy Coombes London