Originally Posted by The Bedlington Terrier
Reply With QuoteLabour MP Ian Austin, on Labour and Corbyn's anti-Semitism. I really struggle to come to terms with the cess-pit this party has descended into. Beats me why decent people like Ian Austin, and our own BT, are still in it.
"Just when you thought Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis couldn’t get worse, its leadership managed to cause even more offence. Pete Willsman, a member of the ruling National Executive Committee, told a meeting that was supposed to sort out the crisis that “Jewish Trump fanatics” were making false claims of anti-Semitism. He demanded: “We should ask the 70 rabbis, ‘Where is your evidence of severe and widespread anti-Semitism in this party?’” This wasn’t an obscure meeting in the back room of a pub. It was Labour’s most senior committee, and Jeremy Corbyn, who promised to be a “militant opponent of anti-Semitism”, sat silent throughout.
How could a party with such a proud and long-standing record of fighting racism cause such huge distress and offence to the Jewish community? Like many members, I joined as a ****ager determined to fight racism and build a fairer society. I grew up listening to my dad recount how at the age of 10 he had fled Czechoslovakia days after the Germans invaded in 1939. His dad had died years before and the last time he saw his mum and sisters was when they put him on a train to England. Like other Jews, they were rounded up and forced first into a ghetto, then transported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. They were sent to Treblinka and murdered in October 1942.
As a student I volunteered for the anti-racist campaign Searchlight and my first priority when I was elected in 2005 was to organise a campaign to drive the BNP out in Dudley. Earlier this year I organised a Rally Against Racism in the Birmingham hotel room where Enoch Powell made his “Rivers of Blood” speech 50 years before. I’ve stood with Muslim constituents targeted by the BNP or the EDL.
But it would all be completely meaningless if I ignored anti-Semitism in my own party. And Labour members must understand that we won’t have any right to criticise our opponents about racism until we get our own house in order.
Earlier this year I travelled to Poland with the London-based charity March of the Living. We visited the sites of concentration camps, clearings in forests where thousands of people were shot and former ghettos. The unforgettable week culminated with thousands of people from around the world marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau, but the moment that stands out for me took place in a Krakow hotel lobby. I’d been introduced to a survivor of the death camps. When he heard I was an MP, he asked for which party, then looked up from his wheelchair and said: “Are you not ashamed of the Labour Party with all the anti-Semitism?”
The truth is that I am deeply ashamed. Just last week the party had to suspend a councillor over an anti-Semitic online post claiming that Jews drink blood and ***ually abuse children. At last year’s conference, the party gave a platform at a fringe event to a speaker who said: “Holocaust: yes or no.. What did that mean — did it happen? Or was it right? We’ve seen Ken Livingstone’s offensive nonsense about Hitler supporting Zionists. Others legitimised the myth that Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade, or draw comparisons between the actions of Israel and the crimes of the Nazis.
Corbyn himself defended an appalling racist caricature on a mural in the East End. It took four days and an unprecedented protest by the Jewish community before he apologised. And yesterday we learned that he hosted an event at Parliament which compared the Israeli government to the Nazis on Holocaust Memorial Day.
There is a reason the Labour leader hasn’t been able to solve this crisis. He has spent his entire political career mixing with or defending all manner of extremists, in some cases, anti-Semites. He has called the avowedly anti-Semitic organisations Hamas and Hezbollah “friends” and invited them to Parliament. He described activist Raed Salah — found by a British court judge to have used the anti-Semitic “blood libel” — “a very honoured citizen” and invited him to Parliament too. When the vicar Stephen Sizer was disciplined and banned from social media by the Church of England for spreading ideas which were “clearly anti-Semitic”, Corbyn defended him as well.
He was a founder member and chaired the Stop the War Coalition, which carried an article on its website that praised what it said was the “internationalism and solidarity” of Islamic State and compared it to the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. The group supported what it called the Iraqi “struggle” against British troops “by any means necessary”, said it stood with Saddam Hussein, and promoted or provided a platform for Assad apologists.
The Marxist Left blames every problem on the West and America and Israel. For them, the world is a simple place and the solutions are obvious. Thirty years in protest movements making the same speech to people who agree with him means Jeremy has never had to answer a tough question, or think about complex problems and difficult solutions. This is why it is completely untrue for his supporters to claim complaints about anti-Semitism are “whipped up” or have been “weaponised” to undermine him. The reason many mainstream members did not think he should be leader is because he spent so long on the extreme fringes. We were worried that he would turn our mainstream party into a dogmatic and hard-Left organisation, and I’m afraid we’re being proved right. It looks like a very different party to the one I joined."
