Labour’s candidate in the Peterborough by-election is under fire for “liking” an anti-Semitic Facebook post which claimed Theresa May was advancing a “Zionist, slave-masters agenda”.
Lisa Forbes, who will stand in the election on June 6th, also commented under a post claiming Islamic extremists were created by the CIA and Mossad.
“I have enjoyed reading this thread so much. So much that trys [sic] to divide us, but there is far much more that unites us,” she wrote.
When contacted by The Sunday Times, Forbes said she apologised “wholeheartedly” for not calling out the posts, adding that, “Regardless of whether I am elected, I will deepen my understanding of anti-Semitism so I can act as an ally, challenging it wherever it occurs”.
The controversy is just the latest in a long line of anti-Semitism claims dogging the Labour Party.
Earlier this week Pete Willsman, a key ally of Jeremy Corbyn and a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), was suspended for apparently claiming that Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis was “all lies” and “whipped up” by the Israeli embassy.
Jeremy Corbyn himself has also been revealed as having written about the “unbelievably high levels of influence that Israel’s government appears to have in the upper echelons of parts of the media”.
The idea that Jews or the Israeli government control the media is a well-known anti-Semitic trope.
The chairman of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, Gideon Falter, said of Mr Corbyn’s views, “Jeremy Corbyn has a history of endorsing such conspiracy theories, whether he is accusing ‘the hand of Israel’ of being behind Islamist attacks in Egypt, or writing his glowing foreword to a tome alleging that a ‘peculiar race’ has successfully plotted to control Europe.”
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHCR) has now launched an investigation into Labour to see if the party had “unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised people because they are Jewish”.
Labour are the first British political party since the British National Party (BNP) to be investigated in this way.
“In just four chilling years, Jeremy Corbyn has turned the Party which pioneered anti-racism into the Party that now finds itself in the company of the BNP, being investigated by the very equality and human rights regulator it once fought so hard to establish,” observed Mr Falter.
A poll in April found that over half of the British population (51 per cent) believed that Labour has a serious anti-Semitism problem.
Many in the party have been quick to downplay the allegations of anti-Semitism however, with one branch member notoriously dismissing the claims with a complaint that there was too much “anti-Semitism this, anti-Semitism that” in the wake of a deadly synagogue shooting.
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