Leaks suggest Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is not dealing with complaints of endemic antisemitism as it claims, as the Simon Wiesenthal Center puts the party at the top of its antisemitism list.
While the British opposition party has claimed it is dealing with a deluge of complaints of antisemitism among its activists, leaked audio and files obtained by the Sunday Times suggest it is taking months, sometimes years to process cases — where it deals with them at all — with many people receiving only derisory sanctions or none at all.
The party took ten months to expel a Nottingham member who said that “Jews represent a viral infection that need to be completely eliminated” and that he longed for the “complete extinction of all Jews”, for example — and refused to say whether it had referred the member to the police under British hate crime legislation.
Another member who accused an elected Labour councillor of having “licked the bum of Jews for money” was not expelled at all.
Indeed, the Sunday Times reports that its files show “half of 100 anti-semitism cases between last summer and this May involved a warning or no action at all” even when the transgressions were seemingly quite serious — with members who shared articles about Holocaust denial, denounced “a Jewish agenda to obtain the conquest of the gentile world”, and claimed it was reasonable to “have a dim view of the Jews” all escaping punishment.
Labour told the newspaper that it had introduced reforms to speed up expulsions, that this was “proof of the robust action the party is taking to root out anti-semitism” — and even claimed that “No other party” had a process in this area as robust as theirs.
But sections of the Jewish community seem not to be convinced, with the U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, named for the late Holocaust survivor who tracked people involved in the 20th-century genocide after Germany’s defeat in 1945, identifying Corbyn’s Labour as the number one threat to the Jewish people.
“No-one has done more to mainstream antisemitism into the political and social life of a democracy than the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party,” the centre stated.
“Members and staff who have dared to speak out against the hate were purged, but not those who declared ‘Heil Hitler’ and ‘F*** the Jews,” it accused.
“If it wasn’t for Winston Churchill and Britain leading the fight against Nazism in the Second World War who knows if the Allies would have won?” mused centre chief Rabbi Marvin Hier in comments to the Mail on Sunday.
“Britain was at the forefront of defeating Hitler and now, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the person who wants to sit in Winston Churchill’s chair at No 10 is fostering antisemitism. If Mr Corbyn wins he will make Britain a pariah on the world stage. It will be a disaster for democracy,” the rabbi warned.
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