Sadiq Khan, the Labour Party’s candidate for mayor of London, said that the level of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is “unacceptable” and a “badge of shame,” The Telegraph reported on Wednesday.

“It is unacceptable for 2016 that there is anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. It is with sorrow that I wear that badge of shame,” Khan, who is Muslim, said in his opening remarks at a candidate forum for the Jewish community in North London. “We need to walk the walk not simply talk the talk. There should be no hierarchy when it comes to racism. Racism is racism. And if it means members of my party – senior members including members of the [Labour National Executive Committee] – being trained on what anti-Semitism is, then so be it.”

Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has been criticized for his ineffectual response to anti-Semitism as well as his past associations with Arab terrorist organizations and Holocaust deniers, and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who has previously compared Israeli leaders to Nazis and accused Jews of being too rich and selfish to vote for the Labour Party, are both members of the National Executive Committee.

Khan called on Corbyn to do more to fight anti-Semitism in the party’s ranks: “I think the Labour leader could have taken a tougher stance and needs to take a tougher stance,” Khan said.

Khan’s remarks followed a similar call by longtime Labour MP Louise Ellman, who said on Sky News on Sunday that Corbyn “has spoken out clearly that he is against anti-Semitism but it is not just about words, there has got to be some action, and we haven’t seen enough of that.” Ellman, who is Jewish and is vice chair of Labour Friends of Israel, has been the target of abuse from Momentum, a grassroots organization founded to support Corbyn.

The pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was highlighted in February when Alex Chalmers, the co-president of the Oxford University Labour Club, resigned after observing that members of the club “have some kind of problem with Jews.”

In The Holocaust, the Left, and the Return of Hate, which was published in the April 2016 issue of The Tower Magazine, Jamie Palmer explained that Jews are becoming estranged from the European Left, generally, and under Jeremy Corbyn, in Britain specifcally.

The key question facing the European Left is whether or not it can change in such a way that Jews can once again feel part of the Left’s political family. Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future the answer to that question appears to be no. …

In Britain, the Labour Party has elected Jeremy Corbyn as its leader—an unrepentant hard-Left anti-Zionist who has shared platforms with genocidal terrorists, blood libelers, and Holocaust deniers in order to supposedly demonstrate his solidarity with the oppressed denizens of Palestine, even as he signed petitions calling upon a centrist Israeli MK to be arrested on arrival in the UK.

Supporters of the policies of pro-Israel former British prime minister Tony Blair and the European Zionist Left are embattled, diminished, and in disarray. The signs are that things are going to get worse. Blairism has not survived because its centrist values were never accepted by the Labour rank-and-file, who preferred to gripe and pine for the day that they would get “a real Labour government.” The Iraq catastrophe was used to discredit and denigrate wholesale a political project they never particularly liked in the first place. But by Blair’s own assessment, it was his firm support for Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War that finished him off. “[That] probably did me more damage than anything since Iraq,” he wrote. “It showed how far I had swung from the mainstream of conventional Western media wisdom and from my own people.”

Concerns about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Labour Party have risen ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as party leader last year. In Western Europe’s Most Powerful Anti-Zionist, which was published in the October 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Liam Hoare examined Corbyn’s anti-Israel convictions and his connections to controversial anti-Semitic figures.

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