Jewish lecturer who made fun of Corbyn investigated
V UNIVERSITY BOSSES have been branded “absurd” for launching an antisemitism investigation into a Jewish academic who dared to make fun of Jeremy Corbyn.
Northumbria University said it was “urgently” investigating a tweet shared by Pete Newbon, a senior lecturer in Romantic and Victorian Literature.
The tweet featured a well-known 2017 photograph of Mr Corbyn reading the book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt to a group of children.
In the image shared by Dr Newbon, however, the cover of the book had been modified so that it bore the title, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a notorious antisemitic text.
The text above the image, in an echo of the children’s book, read: “A nasty, horrible Zionist! We can’t go over him, we can’t go under him, we’ll have to make an effigy...”
The author of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Michael Rosen, who has known Mr Corbyn for 30 years, condemned the tweet as “loathsome and antisemitic”, prompting calls on social media for the academic to be sacked. Mr Rosen, who is Jewish, said he was “not in favour of anyone being sacked over this”.
In 2019, Mr Rosen joined a number of Jewish leftwingers who signed an open
letter praising Mr Corbyn for what it described as his “consistent support for initiatives against antisemitism”.
In its own tweet, Northumbria University said: “We are aware of concerns raised following a Twitter post by a member of staff. @northumbriauni is committed to combatting racial inequality in all its forms and we have adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. We are investigating the complaints raised as a matter of urgency.”
Dr Newbon, a director of the antiracism group Labour Against Antisemitism,
was unavailable for comment. However, a friend of the academic said:
“This is an appalling travesty that owes more to Alice in Wonderland than the Bear Hunt.”
Jonathan Hunter, chairman of the Pinsker Centre think tank which campaigns against antisemitism on campus, said: “It is absurd and offensive that a Jewish lecturer is being investigated under the IHRA definition of antisemitism for satirising and ridiculing antisemitism within the Labour Party.”