Opinion
Labour's social media sickness is now endemic to the party
How can the party begin to combat its online antisemitism problem when it does not even recognise some types of Jew hatred?
July 31, 2018 09:35
2 min read
How can the party begin to combat its online antisemitism problem when it does not even recognise some types of Jew hatred?
July 31, 2018 09:35It is not pleasant to be Jewish on social media these days. I have come to dread logging online after Shabbat and seeing the latest comments by supporters of Labour, the supposedly “anti-racist party”.
This week was no exception.
There was the sharing by the far-left blog Skwawkbox of an article titled: The Jewish ‘War Against Corbyn’ risks bringing real antisemitism to Britain."
The article asked: “What if Corbyn loses by a narrow margin? How will the millions who voted for him see the Jewish community and its three-year campaign to brand him toxic?”
It is hard not to see the traditional Christian antisemitic trope of blaming Jews for killing Jesus.
Skwawkbox had called the article “pertinent and frightening”, but subsequently deleted its tweet, noting it had “caused offence”. The blog’s author changed the title from “Jewish” to “Jewish establishment” as if to somehow make it more palatable.
Other particularly egregious examples of Labour antisemitism over the weekend came from Peter Arif, a staunch Corbyn supporter, who posted on Facebook that “when JC [Jeremy Corbyn] wins the next election, if Jewish people aren’t happy they will be welcome to leave the UK”. He has also shared antisemitic videos from the neo-nazi Daily Stormer website and asked: “Why are people here scared of Jews? They might have more money but are certainly not above the law. They can’t swear at our leader [a reference to an accusation levelled at MP Margaret Hodge] and get away with it!”
A number of supporters of Mr Corbyn have claimed that Peter Arif is not a member of the Labour party.
The truth is that, if you know where to look, there is no end of antisemitic content being shared by Corbyn supporters. It seems every prominent Corbyn supporting group on Facebook is riddled with people who regularly post antisemitic articles and comments, from the top down.
Take The Labour Party Supporter, a group with over 16,000 members. One of its administrators, Ali Mossabir, shared an article about Margaret Hodge last week with the comment: “Terrorist supporter Margaret Hodge isn’t UK loyalist [sic] she should be deport to her homeland #Israel.”
Or Michelle Harris. An administrator of the Labour Party Forum Facebook group, also with 16,000 members, she was suspended from the party earlier this year after some of her posts were discovered.
In 2014, at the time of the Gaza conflict, she wrote: “I have often said the Holocaust victims who died with dignity must be turning in their graves at the horrors done in the name of Judaism. Gaza is a ghetto being shelled.”
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, examples of contemporary antisemitism include “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”. Labour’s revised definition, however, does not describe this as antisemitism. Similarly, while the IHRA definition describes accusing Jews of dual loyalties as antisemitism, the Labour definition does not, merely calling it “wrong.”
This week Michelle Harris declared that she had been reinstated into the Labour party, with it having been deemed she had “no case to answer”. Similarly, it is unlikely that Mr Mossabir will face any sort of censure for his comment.
How can Labour possibly deal with its antisemitism problem when it has deliberately left out clear examples of antisemitism from its own definition?
