Critics are calling on Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to end his association with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) after chapters of that group were found to have posted anti-Semitic propaganda on social media, the Evening Standard reported Wednesday.
Local chapters of PSC, with which Corbyn has “been closely associated for two decades” have been found to post anti-Semitic material on their social media accounts, the Evening Standard reported:
A Standard investigation found such images as a cartoon comparing Israeli Jews with white power neo-Nazis, an ugly caricature of a Jew sowing hand grenades in a field, and an image of Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu bathing in Palestinian blood posing with Adolf Hitler.All were posted in the name of local branches of the PSC, despite the organisation insisting it is “unequivocally” opposed to anti-Semitism.
Another post called a Corbyn deputy, MP Tom Watson, who has called for ridding the Labour Party of anti-Semitism, an Israeli “agent.”
The preponderance of the posts prompted Amanda Bowman, vice-president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews to call on Corbyn to “publicly disassociate himself from this malevolent group.”
“Equating Jews with Nazis, endorsing anti-Semitic tropes and dismissing instances of British anti-Jewish hate is vile and shouldn’t be tolerated by anyone, never mind those who purport to be on the political Left,” Labour MP Ruth Smeeth told the Standard. “I would urge Jeremy Corbyn to speak out and remove his patronage from the organisation until they have condemned their supporters and expelled those who are filled with hate.”
The Standard noted that many of the posts it found that violated “the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism.” The Labour Party adopted those standards last September.
This comes one week after Corbyn came under fire for having written a foreword to a century-old anti-Semitic book, which he praised as “brilliant.”
It was also reported Tuesday, that an advocacy group, Labour Against Antisemitism released a report documenting “15,000 screenshots taken from hundreds of Labour members ‘and officials’ promoting anti-Semitic views.” The report will be submitted to the British Equality and Human Rights Commission for a probe into the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism.
Euan Philipps, a spokesman for the group said in a statement that during the past two years a team “has systematically collected and detailed evidence of Labour Party members promoting antisemitic views and tropes across a range of social media platforms.”
“This has all been reported to the party’s compliance team, in a format suggested by them and including a significant level of detail,” Phillips added.
But anti-Semitism scandals have been par for the course for the Labour Party since Corbyn, described as “Western Europe’s Most Powerful Anti-Zionist,” took control of the party. It’s so bad that in 2016 one Labour MP described the anti-Semitism problem as a “bit like lifting up a stone and having insects crawl out from under it.”
Last year it emerged that Corbyn appeared at a 2014 event in Tunisia that honored one of the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes.
[Photo: Guardian News / YouTube ]
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