Non-Jews fight within Labor anti-Semitism

JTA – Anchored in accusations of anti-Semitism involving him and his supporters, the leader of the British Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn has made many Jewish enemies, including within his own party.

But one of his most effective critics is not Jewish. He studies meteorology at the University of Reading and describes himself as "just a kid with a laptop".

Twenty-year-old Denny Taylor used this laptop to index party members who violated the Labor Party's own anti-hate speech guidelines and report them to the party's ethics committee.

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Horrified by revelations about Corbyn's ties to anti-Semites, Taylor created the Labor Against Anti-Semitism, or LAAS, in 2016, along with a few dozen non-Jewish and Jewish volunteers. He was 18 and had voted the year before for Corbyn.

Last month, LAAS informed the Labor Ethics Committee of an earlier recording in which Corbyn had declared that the Zionists "did not understand English irony". The group reported to 1,200 members alleged to have violated the party's anti-hate speech guidelines. a backlog of some 2,000 new cases of people engaging in what LAAS considers antisemitic rhetoric. The LAAS has not yet reported the latter, according to its spokesman, Euan Philipps, who is also not Jewish.

According to Jonathan Hoffman, a British Jew who participated in some of the most virulent protests against Labor's anti-Semitism, LAAS "far exceeds its weight," including a poster campaign in London earlier this year.

The "small group of volunteers", to which Hoffman does not belong, "has been able to raise awareness of anti-Semitism in the Labor Party and is now the first interlocutor of media such as the BBC, the Times and Sky News," he said. he told JTA.

Corbyn, a far-left politician who was elected leader of the Labor Party in 2015, alternated between vowing to respond to Jewish concerns and sending them away. In August, he described as "overheated rhetoric" the existential fears of many Jews against a government led by Corbyn.

He also declined to apologize for his own controversial actions, notably by paying tribute to Palestinian terrorists who died in 2015 and claiming in 2013 that local "Zionists" did not have the sense of freedom. ;irony.

In the midst of moderate Labor attacks, Corbyn's increasingly deteriorated relationship with British Judaism reached a new low in August when former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a lord and probably the most prominent representative of the British Judaism, called Corbyn "an anti-Semite." The Jewish Labor Movement, a group of coreligionists within the party, which was once the political home of British Jews, threatened to sue Corbyn and rejected his promises to fight anti-Semitism.

Corbyn's supporters reject many criticisms as "Zionists" – Corbyn himself acknowledged that the term has often been "hijacked" by anti-Semites as a code for Jews – or Labor rivals seeking to militarize allegations of # 39; Semitism.

According to Taylor, such criticisms are more difficult to impose on LAAS.

Beyond the presence of non-Jewish members of all political backgrounds within the Labor Party, "we are filing mostly complaints that are well-documented," Taylor said. He attaches his commitment to fighting anti-Semitism within the Labor Party to a desire to "repair the damage" that Corbyn and other former supporters have helped to cause in the UK.

The Labor Ethics Committee – a party that wants to get rid of its image as a hub of anti-Semitism – is obliged to respond to complaints on behalf of Corbyn, which makes complaints and disciplinary actions later more difficult to reject than his followers. critical.

LAAS said it followed Labour's own definition of anti-Semitic hate speech, which was identical last month to that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. This working definition recognizes that criticism of Israel is not automatically anti-Semitism, but also mentions examples showing that anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric often take anti-Semitic forms.

Among the recent successes of LAAS is the suspension in April of Pam Bromley, a local legislator from the north of England. LAAS announced that its 2017 Facebook article defended its opposition to the Rothschilds, the famous Jewish banking family at the center of many antisemitic conspiracy theories. She urged her supporters to remember that "the Rothschilds are a powerful family (like the Medici) and represent capitalism and big business – even though the Nazis used the Rothschilds' activities in their anti-Semitic propaganda. We must not hide the truth with the need to be tactful. "

Anne Kennedy, suspended in May for writing that Israeli Jews are "Hitler's bastard sons," is another subject of LAAS ethics complaints.

Jane Dipple, a media and communication lecturer, was suspended and may have been fired for invoking "a Zionist attempt to create a pure race" and a "creeping Zionism in the media" in an article including a link to an article on the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website. It was titled "BBC to replace the Jewish political editor by a Jewess".

Emma Feltham, a London-based painter-decorator and Labor Party long-time voter, had never imagined that she existed in politics before making her appearance in 2015, after thousands of extreme left voters entered politics. the Labor Party to support Corbyn.

"I am a white English person; I had never seen anything like it. I remember crying for the first time, "recalls Feltham, who joined LAAS as a result of this experiment.

The fact that she is not Jewish, she says, makes it more difficult to reject her critics.

"It's harder to ignore, they can not say," Oh, it's just because she's a Zionist, what she says does not matter because she's Jewish, "Feltham said. .

When non-Jewish members of the Basic Labor Party fight in trenches against anti-Semitism, she said, "It shows that there are people who care, who find it so unacceptable."

Nevertheless, Labor's highly public anti-Semitism problem seems to have only marginally affected the party's popularity in the general population. Corbyn's approval rating in a YouGov poll on September 27 was 10 points higher than a poll that week in 2016. (It currently enjoys 51% approval vs. 49% disapproval .)

Antisemitism is not even the main problem against Corbyn, according to Taylor.

"The main problem is the management of Brexit by Corbyn," he said. Critics say the union leader has failed to effectively oppose the government's exit policy from the European Union.

Corbyn seems closer than ever to become Prime Minister, despite positive ratings and the Conservative government with internal Brexit disagreements, even though it is on the front pages of the mainstream dailies on the issue of anti-Semitism of Labor.

Faced with this reality, Feltham said he understood and accepted the British Jews who claim to consider the Corbyn-led Labor Government as an existential threat to their community – an unprecedented statement, the three major British Jewish newspapers made headlines in July and the Council of Deputies of British Jews also echoed.

"I do not think it's an overreaction," she said of the warning. And Feltham believes that "a party that can target a minority or group will target others when it becomes timely. It is a danger to society in general. "

However, Feltham, Taylor and Philipps, spokespersons for LAAS, said they were not sure they could win the fight for Labor 's identity and image.

"This question is out of my control," said Feltham. "All I know is that I can not stop fighting. I do not want to have to say that I did not do anything while it was happening. "