[LeatherTrumpet]

Home Affairs Select Committee chair doubts Corbyn is 'doing something serious' about anti-Semitism.


Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show, Loughton, the acting chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said anti-Semitism is "infecting political parties" and that incidents reported in Labour have not been "handled well" by its leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

The report claims the Labour party's failure to deal effectively with anti-Semitic incidents in recent years "risks lending force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti-Semitic".



http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/labours-ant...ory-mp-1586644

DO you think the labout party has a problem with Jewish people?

[Livia]

Yes, I do think Labour has a problem with Jews. I have no doubt based on the evidence that it's rife. Shame Chakrabarti didn't think so, but then... she had her peerage to consider. Not a bad quid pro quo for looking at the facts with blinkers on.

[Kizzy]

Oh dear, more shiz slinging from the chimps in the Labour ranks?.... When will they be united in addressing the important issues and not ones already addressed.

Was is the person writing the report, was she not male enough? white enough? or Christian enough to be deemed worthy?

This is yet another smokescreen.

[LeatherTrumpet]

You should have heard the labour party members trying to deny it on LBC this morning, Nick Ferrari was astounded at them.

[smudgie]

Without a doubt.
I don't think Mr. Corbin is guilty of it personally, but he doesn't seem to have the ability to get it sorted.
I wouldn't trust Mz Chakrabati as far as I could throw her. Quickly hashed up report to get in the good books, she sold herself far to cheaply.

[kirklancaster]

The Labour Party is RIFE with OVERT anti-semitism and in Corbyn, they have a leader who is OVERTLY anti-semitic, pro-Palestinian but who has crafted his denials of being so, into a fine art.

[Shaun]

I think Corbyn has a tendency to come across as aloof and not terribly passionate about issues other than socialist ones. The EU was a prime example of that. But that said, I'm not terribly well-read on the subject of antisemitism in the Labour Party and am only aware of the Ken Livingstone incidents? (Could someone educate me pls?)

[Johnnyuk123]

Originally Posted by kirklancaster

The Labour Party is RIFE with OVERT anti-semitism and in Corbyn, they have a leader who is OVERTLY anti-semitic, pro-Palestinian but who has crafted his denials of being so, into a fine art.

Not to worry Kirk cos labour won't be getting into power any time soon, for many decades in fact with the state that it is in right now.

[kirklancaster]

Originally Posted by Shaun

I think Corbyn has a tendency to come across as aloof and not terribly passionate about issues other than socialist ones. The EU was a prime example of that. But that said, I'm not terribly well-read on the subject of antisemitism in the Labour Party and am only aware of the Ken Livingstone incidents? (Could someone educate me pls?)

This might help for starters Shaun:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news...r-party-corbyn

[kirklancaster]

HERE'S A GREAT ARTICLE ON ANTI-SEMITISM IN THE LABOUR PARTY AND CORBYN. REPRODUCED FROM 'TABLET' MAGAZINE:

The most charitable explanation for Jeremy Corbyn’s inept handling of the British Labour party’s latest anti-Semitism row (which have become so numerous that one wag created a clock counting the “number of days since [Labour’s] last anti-semitic incident”) is that it once again demonstrates his indecisive leadership style. After it was revealed that MP Naz Shah had authored social media posts advocating the deportation of Israeli Jews to America, likening the Jewish State to Nazi Germany, and comparing Zionism to al-Qaida, Corbyn initially refused to suspend the lady from Bradford West. Only after members of his own caucus publicly demanded it did Corbyn finally cave and withdraw the whip.

Then came the defense of Shah by Corbyn’s longtime friend and ally, former London Mayor Ken Livingstone. In a truly weird, touring performance across several BBC programs meant to defend the disgraced Shah, Livingstone performed a sort of poor man’s impersonation of David Irving, claiming that Hitler was himself a Zionist. Digging his heels further, Livingstone claimed that Shah and other Labour figures accused of anti-Semitism have been smeared because “a real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel.” It takes one to know one.

Livingstone also said that he had “never heard anyone say anything anti-Semitic” in his near half-century involvement with Labour, which is a bit rich coming from the guy who once claimed that the Conservative Party was “riddled with homosexuals.”

Like his belated punishment of Shah, Corbyn only reluctantly suspended Livingstone from the party. And as if to send a signal to what is clearly a significant, and growing, anti-Semitic constituency within his party, Corbyn simultaneously reprimanded fellow Labourite John Mann MP, the heroic chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism who publicly confronted Livingstone and accused him of being a “Nazi apologist.”

As Labour and the media debate whether or not there is an anti-Semitism “crisis” within the party, nearly everybody seems to agree on at least one thing: Jeremy Corbyn himself is no anti-Semite. This generousness extends even to Corbyn’s harshest critics. “It is not that Labour’s leadership is anti-Semitic,” opines the New York Times’ Kenan Malik in a piece titled, “The British Left’s Jewish Problem.” “There is no reason to believe Corbyn is an anti-Semite,” writes the Financial Times’ Robert Shrimsley in a column explaining why he can no longer vote for a Corbyn-led Labour Party.

On the contrary, there is every reason to believe Corbyn is exactly that.

As was well-known before he ever won the Labour leadership last fall with nearly 60 percent of the vote, Corbyn has a long and disgraceful history of associating with, promoting and defending anti-Semites. There was the Holocaust denier Paul Eisen, to whose charity he had donated. There was his defense of the vicar, Stephen Sizer, who believes the Mossad perpetrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There was his invitation to, and later praise of, the Islamist Raed Salah, who has repeated the blood libel. Don’t forget Dyab Abou Jahjah, with whom Corbyn shared a platform, utterer of the claim that Europe made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshipping its alternative religion,” or Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami, Palestinian terrorists who bombed the Israeli Embassy and the offices of a Jewish charity, for whose release Corbyn campaigned.

If so many of his comrades were defaming, condemning, and bombing any other minority group, no one would have any confusion whatsoever as to what to call Jeremy Corbyn: a racist. It is inconceivable that a Labour leader would contemplate being in the same room with, much less stand proudly alongside, someone who had voiced such calumnies about Muslims, the “new Jews” of the European left. Try to imagine if Prime Minister David Cameron had shared the stage, repeatedly and over many years, with British National Party leader Nick Griffin and other lesser-known demagogues of the far right, and campaigned on behalf of Northern Irish Loyalist militants. Not only would his political career rightly reach an immediate and ignominious end, he would go down in history as a vile enabler of fascist violence. But when the ideological tables are turned, with the political dissembler a leftist and the targets of the attacks Jews, there exists a great deal of hand-wringing in stating the blindingly obvious. As far as the British media and political class are concerned, the old saw about Jew-hatred apparently applies to Jeremy Corbyn: he cannot be an anti-Semite because he doesn’t hate Jews more than absolutely necessary.

Why the double-standard? As demonstrated by the latest chicanery with the National Union of Students, which actually debated whether to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day and elected an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist as its president, a wide swathe of the left believes that it is only possible for Jews to be victims of racism when the perpetrators are the white far right. In fashionable left opinion, homely socialists with a penchant for jam-making and photographing manhole covers cannot be anti-Semites. Nor can Muslims, whose anti-Semitism—no matter how explicitly redolent of Nazi themes—is regularly excused as just an intemperate form of an entirely legitimate “anti-Zionism.” My Tablet magazine colleague Lee Smith calls this exclusively high threshold for what constitutes anti-Jewish bigotry “The Hitler Test,” by which “It’s only when [anti-Zionism] comes from someone wearing a swastika and who has the resources to slaughter Jews wholesale that they’ve crossed the threshold into ‘real’ anti-Semitism.” Livingstone explicitly verbalized this sentiment when he said that it was “over the top” to consider anti-Semitism on par with color-based racism, and much of the media validates this misrepresentation by claiming that his statements linking Hitler to Zionism are “offensive to Jewish people,” when they ought to offend every decent person, Jewish or gentile.

In an otherwise excellent column written just weeks before Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, the Scottish journalist Stephen Daisley declared that, “Jeremy Corbyn is not an anti-Semite. How I wish that he were. How much easier it would make things. We could chalk all this up to the prejudices of one man and we could avoid the raw, awkward conversation we’re about to have.” Daisley didn’t excuse Corbyn; far from it. He argued rather that Corbyn was a “symptom and a symbol” of the left’s “anti-Semitism problem.”

But this too falls into the trap of seeing Corbyn as, at worst, a naďve, left-wing variety of the stereotypical British eccentric. Corbyn, according to this narrative, means well; he just isn’t very perceptive when it comes to the sensitivities of British Jews and, conversely, overly solicitous of radical Muslims whom he views as anywhere and everywhere oppressed by Western imperialism. To believe this explanation for Corbyn’s behavior, however, is to accept the false notion that British anti-Semitism manifests itself solely in the form of Oswald Moseley’s black-shirted thugs, or ageing Tory Lords trading Jew jokes in the backrooms of London’s most exclusive private clubs.

At some point, you earn a reputation for the company you keep and the environment your leadership engenders. It really doesn’t matter that Jeremy Corbyn (as far as we know) has not explicitly said anything anti-Semitic in the literal sense of the term. He has surrounded himself with, elevated, and shielded all manner of people who have, stubbornly backing down only when it has become politically untenable to continue defending them. All the while he denies that his party even has an anti-Semitism “crisis” in the first place. Like a stinking fish, the Labour Party rots from the head, and the head is Jeremy Corbyn.

[joeysteele]

I have not posted on here for a while due to personal issues.
I wasn't going to today again but have to say this.

Anyone who wants knowledge on this issue, please neither take the word of those on here who are in the Labour party or are supporters of same,and certainly please do not take the word of those who are again simply exercising their own personal hate and prejudice against the Labour party and those on the left of politics generally.
Particularly those who hate Corbyn.

Please research for yourself the ordinary Labour members, voters and MPs who the vast majority of are as decent, and in no way anti semitic, than people and MPs in other political parties.

To generalise on a whole party and movement is slanderous,a disgrace, it is got away with at times here and has reared its head many times now.
I have always made a stand against that prejudice.

The vast majority of people in the Labour party and movement, just as is the case with other political parties too,( the mainstream ones),are decent caring and hardworking individuals who do not warrant in any form the spite and hate directed at them from those who simply detest the whole of the left of politics and anyone who is of that persuasion.

I hadn't accepted how bad that personal spite and prejudice was until I ended up on the receiving end of it, and just because I joined the Labour party.

People should remember that members on here are members of Labour, are Labour supporters and maybe even Labour councillor/s, when people make serious generalised charges of them being anti semitic, thereby tarnishing deliberately decent innocent individuals, that is and should be totally unacceptable and wrong.

It is even more rich when that attack comes from those who choose to do so from a hate and prejudice against those on the left, no matter who they may be.

[Jack_]

Originally Posted by bitontheslide

interesting that forum members have been chastised for using terms to describe labour such as looney left, yet a word such as chimps is ok within the ranks

Not true. I've chastised the truth for using the term 'loony left' not only because it's cringey as ****, but also because the context within which he was using it (to criticise the New Labour administration) wasn't at all applicable or relevant.

Once again, for every time I see it being used (or indeed the entirety of the left being slandered as antisemetic), I will make a point of referencing the racist right

Originally Posted by joeysteele

I have not posted on here for a while due to personal issues.
I wasn't going to today again but have to say this.

Anyone who wants knowledge on this issue, please neither take the word of those on here who are in the Labour party or are supporters of same,and certainly please do not take the word of those who are again simply exercising their own personal hate and prejudice against the Labour party and those on the left of politics generally.
Particularly those who hate Corbyn.

Please research for yourself the ordinary Labour members, voters and MPs who the vast majority of are as decent, and in no way anti semitic, than people and MPs in other political parties.

To generalise on a whole party and movement is slanderous,a disgrace, it is got away with at times here and has reared its head many times now.
I have always made a stand against that prejudice.

The vast majority of people in the Labour party and movement, just as is the case with other political parties too,( the mainstream ones),are decent caring and hardworking individuals who do not warrant in any form the spite and hate directed at them from those who simply detest the whole of the left of politics and anyone who is of that persuasion.

I hadn't accepted how bad that personal spite and prejudice was until I ended up on the receiving end of it, and just because I joined the Labour party.

People should remember that members on here are members of Labour, are Labour supporters and maybe even Labour councillor/s, when people make serious generalised charges of them being anti semitic, thereby tarnishing deliberately decent innocent individuals, that is and should be totally unacceptable and wrong.

It is even more rich when that attack comes from those who choose to do so from a hate and prejudice against those on the left, no matter who they may be.

Eloquently put as ever Joey.

[bitontheslide]

Good to see you here again Joey, and you are of course correct. Labour as a whole reflects society in the UK and that society is not all anti-semitic. However, if there are elements within the labour party that encourage or condone it, it should be highlighted and stamped out for the benefit of the party

[Northern Monkey]

It doesn't surprise me.Many Labour members and MP's are good people as Joey says but there is an element who are anti semitic and anti western and it tends to be the ones who support Corbyn(not all of them).
Jeremy Corbyn for instance was one of the founding members of the Stop The War Coalition.A disgraceful Organisation who's Chair men have been supporters of the North Korean regime and dictators such as Saddam Hussein.They're Anti Isreal and only take a stand against Western military intervention and not the terrorists,Russia or any other non Western countries other than our allies.They don't want to 'Stop The War' unless the west are involved.They seem fine with our enemies wars or all oppressive regimes wars.The most shocking thing is that Jeremy Corbyn is STILL involved with this 'organisation' while being the leader of Her Majesty's opposition.It's not surprising many of his followers hold these views.He is a stain on the Labour party and the reason i could never vote Labour until these elements are out of it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...they-are-trai/

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by joeysteele

I have not posted on here for a while due to personal issues.
I wasn't going to today again but have to say this.

Anyone who wants knowledge on this issue, please neither take the word of those on here who are in the Labour party or are supporters of same,and certainly please do not take the word of those who are again simply exercising their own personal hate and prejudice against the Labour party and those on the left of politics generally.
Particularly those who hate Corbyn.

Please research for yourself the ordinary Labour members, voters and MPs who the vast majority of are as decent, and in no way anti semitic, than people and MPs in other political parties.

To generalise on a whole party and movement is slanderous,a disgrace, it is got away with at times here and has reared its head many times now.
I have always made a stand against that prejudice.

The vast majority of people in the Labour party and movement, just as is the case with other political parties too,( the mainstream ones),are decent caring and hardworking individuals who do not warrant in any form the spite and hate directed at them from those who simply detest the whole of the left of politics and anyone who is of that persuasion.

I hadn't accepted how bad that personal spite and prejudice was until I ended up on the receiving end of it, and just because I joined the Labour party.

People should remember that members on here are members of Labour, are Labour supporters and maybe even Labour councillor/s, when people make serious generalised charges of them being anti semitic, thereby tarnishing deliberately decent innocent individuals, that is and should be totally unacceptable and wrong.

It is even more rich when that attack comes from those who choose to do so from a hate and prejudice against those on the left, no matter who they may be.

Wonderful post Joey, thank you.
So pleased to see you posting

[Toy Soldier]

Jews.

[Northern Monkey]

'Jeremy Corbyn risks "undermining" his vow to tackle anti-Semitism in the Labour party by failing to suspend a Momentum leader who made "disgusting" comments about Holocaust Memorial Day, an MP has warned.
Wes Streeting called for Jackie Walker's immediate suspension pending an investigation after she claimed that the day of mourning is not inclusive enough and questioned party definitions of anti-Semitism. Ms Walker has previously been suspended for a period over alleged anti-Semitic remarks.'

[GiRTh]

The comments made by Naz Shah were horrendous and rightly condemned. I hope Corbyn show some spine in dealing with this problem.

[Kizzy]

What more can a leader do?... Ask for an enquiry, investigate, state categorically that anyone guilty will be ousted, what's left?

[bitontheslide]

just out of interest, does Corbyn's "inclusive" inner circle contain any jewish people?

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by bitontheslide

just out of interest, does Corbyn's "inclusive" inner circle contain any jewish people?

A member of Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) has supported Jeremy Corbyn’s dismissal of a damning parliamentary report on antisemitism in politics that heavily criticised the party, saying it was “overly focused” on Labour.

Rhea Wolfson, a Corbyn supporter who was voted on to the NEC in the summer, said the fact the Labour leader had commissioned a report into antisemitism within the party by Shami Chakrabarti was “testament to the fact he is taking the issue seriously”.

Chakrabarti’s findings were derided in the report from the cross-party home affairs select committee, published on Sunday, and described as “ultimately compromised” by Chakrabarti’s subsequent peerage and elevation to the shadow cabinet.

The committee’s report said a lack of action over the issue from Corbyn “risks lending force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally antisemitic”. The party was said to have been “demonstrably incompetent” in dealing with incidents of anti-Jewish abuse.


MPs urge Jeremy Corbyn to take critical antisemitism report seriously
Read more
Corbyn said the report was overly focused on Labour. The committee’s acting chairman, Tim Loughton, said he was disappointed by Corbyn’s response, saying it showed he was “still in denial”.

Wolfson, who is Jewish, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she had received strong support within Labour when far-right activists targeted her for antisemitic abuse when she stood for the NEC.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-jeremy-corbyn

[bitontheslide]

I don't think a momentum activist could be considered a member of his inner circle. She is not even an MP let alone a member of his cabinet.

[kirklancaster]

Originally Posted by bitontheslide

I don't think a momentum activist could be considered a member of his inner circle. She is not even an MP let alone a member of his cabinet.

Those were my thoughts too.

[Niamh.]

Deleted lots of posts in here. The next person to start attacking another poster in here instead of discussing the topic will be put on an instant ban

[James]

It is the Momentum wing of Labour that stands accused, not all of Labour.