Labour activist is expelled for abuse

A JEWISH anti-Zionist activist has been expelled from Labour after a disciplinary hearing found he had repeatedly breached the party’s rules.

Tony Greenstein’s case was one of the most high-profile to go before Labour’s national constitutional committee (NCC) since the party pledged to do more to tackle antisemitism within its ranks.

The party said Mr Greenstein had “purposefully” used terms including “Zio scum” as offensive slurs, knowing that the remark was considered antisemitic.

The activist is also known to have sent offensive tweets to the relative of a Holocaust survivor telling him he “should have been a member of the SS”, and other messages apparently likening Israel to Hitler.

He called one female Labour activist a “racist whore”.

The three charges against him were based on a series of “deeply offensive and derisory antisemitic posts to social media” after May 2016 in which he referred to people as “Zionist scum” and wrote that “gay Zionists make me want to puke”.

Mr Greenstein repeatedly targeted Louise Ellman, the Jewish Labour MP, and Jeremy Newmark, the then chair of the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), John Mann MP, and others.

The NCC considered a series of blogs Mr Greenstein had written in which he referred to Mrs Ellman as a “supporter of Israeli child abuse” and claimed she had made excuses for Israeli “torture” and “beatings”.

He also called Ella Rose, the JLM director, “immature” and “pathetic”, claiming that her appointment to the Jewish Labour group had “deprived some village of their idiot”.

Mr Greenstein alleged on 17 occa- sions that Iain McNicol, Labour’s general secretary, was “crooked”, and also made racist remarks about Chuka Ummuna, the Labour MP.

The final charge Mr Greenstein faced focused on an email he sent Mr McNicol in which he suggested the party should run membership applications past the Israeli embassy.

He suggested the proposal “would provide a final, I mean complete, solution”.

Mr Greenstein claimed he had intended to send a “humorous email” but later said he stood by the message “100 per cent”.

The NCC’s lawyer concluded that if the activist was not expelled from the party he would “return to his keyboard [and] continue to make offensive comments… online, including using the abusive racial slur ‘Zio’”.

A panel heard Mr Greenstein’s defence in Brighton on Sunday and concluded with his expulsion.

He had denied the charges against him and, in a blog written after the hearing, said he would fight for his reinstatement. Mr Greenstein said his expulsion was “nothing less than an attempt by the right and the Zionists in the party to purge the party of socialists and anti-imperialists”.

A Labour Party spokesperson confirmed all three charges of a breach of the party’s rule 2.1.8 had “been found proved” but declined to comment further.

The rule bars party members from engaging in prejudicial conduct based on another person’s age, gender, religion, sexual orientation and other personal issues, and specifically refers to racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other racist language.

The NCC also cited the recommendations of the Chakrabarti Inquiry into antisemitism in the party and

Greenstein called one woman a ‘racist whore’