LABOUR LEADER’S THREE MISSED CHANCES TO RAISE ALARM OVER SCANDAL
visibly struggled with her emotions, the insult was compounded when, at the end of his presentation, Corbyn walked through the audience and greeted Wadsworth.
‘I outed Smeeth,’ Wadsworth told him proudly. ‘Bloody talking to the Torygraph.’ Glancing at Smeeth, Corbyn saw that she was in tears, shared a laugh with Wadsworth, and walked out of the hall.
In the days following that incident, Smeeth received thousands of abusive messages, including death threats. In his own defence Corbyn said that he had been misunderstood. Beyond Parliament, within hours of the report’s publication, Chakrabarti’s reputation was being shredded, partly on account of her failure to consider that Corbyn had not vocally opposed the forced segregation of Muslims at party meetings. She had also ignored male Muslim officials refusing to allow women to be selected as Labour candidates in at least two constituencies.
AND still the anti-Semitic skeletons kept tumbling out of Corbyn’s closet. In 2012, a large mural had appeared on a wall in Tower Hamlets, East London. Painted by American artist Kalen Ockerman, it portrayed Jewish financiers playing Monopoly on a board supported on the naked backs of the world’s oppressed – mostly blacks.
Even after a brief glance, no one could fail to grasp the familiar caricature of grotesque- looking Jewish bankers engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to manipulate subjugated slaves.
Responding to protests, Tower Hamlets Council ordered the mural to be scrubbed out.
But looking at the mural on his computer, Corbyn saw rich white Jews, international powerbrokers, exploiting oppressed blacks. Immediately he protested against t he mural’s r e moval ‘on t he grounds of free speech’. He also wrote to Ockerman ‘You’re in good company’, referring to the removal of a mural by Diego Rivera in New York back in 1934: ‘Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.’
Screenshots of his Facebook post emerged last spring, prompting yet another toxic row. Another was quickly to follow.
Soon after he had approved Ockerman’s mural, Corbyn spoke without inhibition at a meeting of the Palestinian Return Centre, a
Former chief rabbi Lord Sacks accused Corbyn of spouting ‘pure anti-Semitism’
group known to blame the Jews for the Holocaust.
In an unusually light- hearted manner, he addressed the difficulty British ‘Zionists’ experienced in coping with an alien culture.
‘ So clearly two problems,’ he summarised. ‘ One is that they don’t want to study history and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either… so I think they need two lessons which we can help them with.’
From his own mouth came the declaration that ‘ Zionists’, alias Jews, were not genuinely British – remarks that sparked a cacophony of outrage when they came to light last summer. Corbyn, said former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, was a supporter of ‘racists, terrorists and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map’. The Labour leader’s remarks were the ‘ most offensive’ since Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968. Corbyn’s office openly mocked Sacks’s comparison.
The former chief rabbi, it seems, was just another wailing Jew.
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