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Activists Make “Thinly Veiled Call to Purge Jews” from UK’s Labour Party

The British Labour Party faces a fresh anti-Semitism controversy after a speaker at a side event at the party’s annual conference called for free speech to extend to Holocaust denial, and activists made a “thinly veiled call to purge Jews” from the party according to one MP, The Daily Telegraph reported on Tuesday.

Speaking at an event on free speech and Israel, speakers called for the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) to be “kicked out” of the party, compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to the Nazis’ treatment of Jews, and accused Israel of “genocide” in the Gaza Strip.

One speaker told the audience that Israel and Israelis should be shunned as if they were Nazis or South Africans during the apartheid period. The Daily Mail quoted Israeli-American author Miko Peled saying “This is about free speech, the freedom to criticise and to discuss every issue, whether it’s the Holocaust: yes or no, Palestine, the liberation.”

He added, “We don’t invite the Nazis and give them an hour to explain why they are right; we do not invite apartheid South Africa racists to explain why apartheid was good for the blacks; and in the same way we do not invite Zionists – it’s a very similar kind of thing.”

Other speakers at the event refused to refer to Israel by name, calling it only “the Zionist state,” highlighting the correlation between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that was recently laid out by a landmark British study.

In the aftermath of the controversy, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was accused by one of his own MPs of having an “ostrich strategy” to anti-Semitism. The MP said the comments made at the event amounted to a “thinly veiled call to purge Jews from the Labour Party.”

Corbyn, who in the past described terror organizations Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends, has faced persistent accusations that his party has an institutional problem with anti-Semitism and that he whitewashed a report on the subject. During the launch, he said Jews were “no more responsible” for Israel’s actions than Muslims were for “those various self-styled Islamic states.”

In a conference call with The Israel Project, which publishes The Tower on September 25, Dr. David Hirsh, a leading scholar on contemporary Antisemitism, told the audience that, under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, anti-Semitism has been mainstreamed. As a result, Hirsh said, “people from the far-left were moving into the Labour Party…and some of them ‘would demand to re-opened the Jewish questions’…a whole number of anti-Semitic canards made it into the mainstream.”

A complete recording of Hirsh’s call is embedded below.

[Photo: TheZionistChannel / YouTube]