British Prime Minister David Cameron said from the floor of the House of Commons on Wednesday that he was concerned by the growth of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, and admonished opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn to “sort it out.”
Cameron was asked by Conservative MP Mike Freer during the weekly session of Prime Minister’s Questions about the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK and how public and private organizations should “root out anti-Semitism without hesitation.” Cameron responded by noting that “anti-Semitism is an absolute cancer in our society, and we should know that when it grows, it is the signal of many even worse things happening to ethnic groups and different groups all over our country.”
There is, sadly, a growth of anti-Semitism in our country, and we see it in terms of attacks on Jewish people and Jewish students. And it absolutely has to be stamped out. We should all, all of us, whatever organization we’re responsible for, make sure that happens. And I have to say, we do see a growth in support for segregation and, indeed, for anti-Semitism in part of the Labour party and I say to the leader opposite [Corbyn], it’s his party and he should sort it out.
Labour, which Corbyn has led for the past six months, has become the center of controversy after numerous accusations of anti-Semitism within the party. The co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club resigned last month after noting that many members of the club “have some kind of problem with Jews.” Two people who had been banned from the party for anti-Semitism, including one former parliamentary candidate, were briefly readmitted last month until they were re-expelled after heavy media scrutiny. And a British political blogger revealed on Wednesday that a local Labour counsellor in the London district of Kensington who was suspended for claiming on Facebook that Jews were behind the 9/11 terror attacks and the rise of ISIS had been reinstated. The problem has gotten so bad that Baron Michael Levy, a Labour member of the House of Lords, told Sky News on Monday that if Corbyn did not sufficiently address the anti-Semitism issue, he would “question my being a Labour peer and a proud member of the Labour party.”
Liam Hoare wrote in The Tower Magazine last October about Corbyn’s troubling ties to anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers.
It seems that the new leader of the Labour Party is friends with two bloody organizations committed to erasing Israel from the map of the Middle East and whose Islamist values are ostensibly antithetical to his own. And this is, troublingly, only the tip of the iceberg. Throughout the Labour leadership campaign, Corbyn’s connections with anti-Semites, anti-Zionists, Islamists, terrorists, and Holocaust deniers were exposed in the British media. Each revelation only seemed to bolster the righteousness of his supporters, who turned Corbyn into a political phenomenon.
Jeremy Corbyn’s victory is deeply disturbing. It speaks to the ideological corruption of the Labour Party—traditionally an engine for the economic, social, and cultural betterment of the British people—and the collapse of its political center. The party has now been taken hostage by a tendency on the British Left that claims to be committed to free political and personal expression, while it ignores the concerns of Jews at home and abroad, and pledges alliance to every person, organization, and nation whose raison d’être is anti-American and anti-Israel. This includes everyone from Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez to Vladimir Putin and, of course, the aforementioned Hezbollah and Hamas.
Philosophically juvenile and unserious, this tendency—with Corbyn as its public face—nevertheless has the potential to do a great deal of damage, especially to the Labour Party and its relationship with Israel and the British Jewish community.
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