Nearly all Jewish MPs from the Labour Party are reportedly on an “enemies list” compiled by allies of party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The document, which was leaked to the Times of London and further reported upon by The Jewish Chronicle, classified nearly every Jewish Labour MP as “hostile” or “core group hostile,” including former party leader Ed Miliband and Luciana Berger, the shadow mental health secretary and therefore a member of Corbyn’s cabinet. Shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn, who publicly opposed Corbyn when advocating for airstrikes in Syria, and Labour’s London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan are also on the list. Corbyn’s office denied any connection to the document.
“At a time when every focus should be on crafting a message to win support in the country so that we can displace an unpopular government with a wafer-thin majority, it is absolutely extraordinary to find that an ‘enemies’ list is being drawn up,” A Labour MP told the Times. “The last politician to draw up a list of enemies was Richard Nixon; it didn’t end well for him or his party.”
The Labour Party has been engulfed by numerous accusations of antisemitism in recent weeks, sparked by the resignation of the Oxford University Labour Club co-president last month, who said that some members of the club “have some kind of problem with Jews.” Members of the club allegedly expressed solidarity with Hamas and defended the murder of civilians, dismissed accusations of antisemitism as “just the Zionists crying wolf,” condoned attacks on Paris synagogues in 2014, and referred to the Auschwitz concentration as a “cash cow.” An internal party inquiry was completed last month, but no students have been disciplined over the charges.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that two people who had been banned from the party for antisemitism had been readmitted to the party last month. Vicky Kirby, who was briefly a Labour parliamentary candidate until she tweeted that Adolf Hitler might be the “Zionist God,” and Gerry Downing, who wrote blog posts stating that “Marxists must address the Jewish Question” and do something about the “world Jewish-Zionist Bourgeoisie,” were re-expelled after an uproar two weeks ago. But the fact that they were allowed to rejoin the party since Corbyn came to office led Baron Michael Levy, a Labour member of the House of Lords, to say on Monday that if the party leadership did not address antisemitism, he would “question my being a Labour peer and a proud member of the Labour party.”
Prime Minister David Cameron criticized the rise of antisemitism in Britain on the floor of the House of Commons on Wednesday, and particularly in the Labour Party. “Antisemitism is an absolute cancer in our society and we should know when it grows it is the signal of even worse things happening,” he said. “There is sadly a growth of antisemitism in our country and we see it in terms of attacks on Jewish people and Jewish students. We do see a growth in support for segregation and, indeed, for antisemitism in parts of the Labour Party, and I say to the leader opposite [Corbyn], it’s his party and he should sort it out.”
In Western Europe’s Most Powerful Anti-Zionist, which was published in the October 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine, Liam Hoare described Corbyn’s rise to the leadership of the Labour Party and the possible consequences of his tenure.
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.
[Photo: Garry Knight / Flickr ]