Quote:
Originally Posted by Livia
(Post 9270025)
Anyone can talk about Hitler... although if he's introduced into a debate on this forum plenty of people will shout 'Godwin' at you. And if your party is as embroiled in as many anti-Semitism claims as Corbyn's Labour is, you might want to keep your big gob shut.
Rather than me repeating stuff I've said on many other threads, I'll just post this thread from last September...
http://uk.businessinsider.com/mp-rut...16-9?r=US&IR=T
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Here's a post from last October...
A representative YouGov poll carried out in May 2016 found that Labour voters were no more likely than voters from other parties to express antisemitic attitudes, with UKIP voters demonstrating the highest levels of antisemitism.179 As outlined earlier in this report, a survey of British Jewish people found that almost half of respondents felt that the Green Party is too tolerant of antisemitism (compared with 87% in relation to the Labour Party), 43% think the same of UKIP, 40% of the SNP, and over a third in relation to the Liberal Democrats.180
122.Other political parties have not been immune to accusations of antisemitism, albeit apparently with a smaller number of reported incidents, and with a lower profile. In April 2015, a Conservative candidate for Derby Council was expelled from her Party after she said she would never support “the Jew” Ed Miliband.181 In August 2014, the University College London (UCL) Union investigated the university’s Conservative Society after it was accused of creating a “toxic environment”, with one member reported to have said “Jews own everything, we all know it’s true. I wish I was Jewish, but my nose isn’t long enough”. Media reports suggest that the incident was never investigated by the Conservative Party,182 but it is unclear whether it was ever referred to the Party, and questions have subsequently been raised about the veracity of the complaint.
123.A former Conservative Councillor who defected to the Liberal Democrats after losing his seat, Matthew Gordon Banks, was suspended from his new Party in September after writing on Twitter that “[Tim] Farron’s leadership campaign was organised and funded by London Jews”, adding in a second tweet: “I tried to work with them. Very difficult.”183 The former Liberal Democrat MP David Ward has been accused of antisemitism on several occasions. He was suspended from his Party after accusing “the Jews” of committing atrocities in Palestine,184 and later sent the following tweet: “The big question is–if I lived in #Gaza would I fire a rocket?–probably yes”.185 Baroness Tonge, who now sits in the House of Lords as an independent Liberal Democrat, resigned the Party whip in 2012 after refusing to apologise for saying that “Israel is not going to be there forever”, and has recently attracted fresh criticism for sharing an article that suggested that “Jewish power” was targeting the Labour Party.186 At this year’s autumn conference, the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine group was asked to remove Facebook posts that quoted the statement: “The Jews as victim. Always the Jews, only the Jews.” SNP MSP Sandra White apologised “unreservedly” in November 2015 after tweeting an antisemitic image of six piglets (representing the UK and others) suckling at a sow with the word “Rothschild” and the Star of David on it.187 Incidents involving other forms of racism, including Islamophobia, have also affected a number of mainstream parties.
124.Soon after this inquiry was announced, we invited the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, to give oral evidence as Leader of the Conservative Party. On the date in June when he was scheduled to attend, the events leading up to his resignation had been set in motion, and he wrote to the then Committee Chair apologising and stating that he was unable to attend. Rt Hon Patrick McLoughlin MP, the newly-appointed Chairman of the Conservative Party, provided a detailed written submission in early August, and indicated that he would have been happy to give further oral evidence to us.188 We later invited the new Prime Minister on several occasions to give evidence to us in October, but received no formal response until the morning of the scheduled evidence session, when Sir Eric Pickles MP, the UK Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues and former Party Chairman, was nominated to attend as a representative of the Conservative Party.
125.It is very disappointing that the Conservative Party procrastinated for so long, and that both the Leader and Chairman of the Party declined to give evidence on this vital issue, but we are very grateful to Sir Eric for stepping in at the last minute, and value his extensive experience in these matters. He told us that the Conservative Party had had problems (with racism) in the late 1960s, but had learned lessons from this and recognised that it “must have a no tolerance policy with regard to any form of racism”.189 When challenged about the incident at UCL, of which he was unaware, he apologised and said that, on the face of it, the Party should have investigated it; although, as previously mentioned, there is some dispute over the veracity of the complaint itself. Sir Eric denied that he had intended to suggest in his evidence that the Conservative Party was alone in having no ongoing problems with antisemitism among its members, stating that antisemitism is “one of the oldest, most nasty, most evil of all the sins”; that it “comes back”; and that “to suggest for a millisecond that I believe that the Conservative party is free of antisemitism would be a complete bastardisation of what I have just said”
As I said smoke and mirrors, one finger points and there a 3 pointing straight back at as seen here 3 other parties.
http://www.publications.parliament.u...e-006-backlink