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Hate spread against Jews and Israel on Twitter accounts followed by Jeremy Corbyn
Comments comparing Israel to the Nazis breach party's policy on antisemitism
April 22, 2018 11:09
Comments comparing Israel to the Nazis breach party's policy on antisemitism
April 22, 2018 11:09Virulently anti-Israel campaigners are among the 2,500 individuals and groups followed on Twitter by Jeremy Corbyn, new analysis reveals.
Research by the Sunday Times shows the Labour leader follows more than 40 accounts that are pro-Palestine and in many cases fiercely anti-Israel. The paper reports that a small number of tweets on those accounts are abusive and some are antisemitic.
Mr Corbyn is among 57 followers of anti-Israel campaigner Adnan Darwash, who tweeted after the suspected chemical attack in Douma earlier this month that “crafty Israelis” appeared to be responsible. Darwash also blamed a “Mossad outsourced outfit” for the chemical attack in Salisbury on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
In February Darwash tweeted: “No matter how much weapons and support the US gives to Israeli Nazi Zionists, Arabs will never be led like Jewish sheep to gas chambers.”
Another activist followed by Mr Corbyn, Antifa Jerusalem (@antifa_jlm), last August accused “the Israeli regime” of adopting “Nazi tactics". Another tweet in November 2016 read: “At this rate of adopting Nazi tactics, death camps for non-Jews in Israel are only a matter of time.”
Also followed by Mr Corbyn is Declan Hayes, a former finance lecturer at Southampton University and a defender of the Syrian regime, who has called the JC a “fascist rag” on Twitter and compared the Nazi regime to modern Israel.
He retweeted an online survey on April 9 that asked: “Should the US take action against Israel for staging a false flag chemical attack in Syria?”
Occupy London, part of a global protest movement against abuses by banks and big business, tweeted in May 2016 about “three staggering” facts that made it “perfectly acceptable” to compare Israel to Nazi Germany.
Tweets comparing “contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” breach Labour’s own policy on antisemitism, based on guidelines drawn up by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Mr Corbyn joined Twitter in February 2010 and was following around 2,100 accounts by September 2015, when he was elected Labour leader.
Labour sources told the paper that Mr Corbyn had not seen the tweets it had highlighted, saying he did not have time to read his Twitter timeline. However, he would now “unfollow” the accounts of @AdnanDarwash and @antifa_jlm.
“Jeremy is utterly committed to driving antisemitism out of the Labour Party."
Also in the Sunday Times, Heather Mann, daughter of Labour MP John Mann, a long-time campaigner against antisemitism, writes that she grew up in the shadow of antisemitic abuse directed at her parents.
She also revealed that in February, a man she described as a “far-left extremist” went into detail about how he intended to rape her and her sister and anally rape her mother, Jo White, a senior Labour Party councillor.
Ms Mann, 27, an Oxford University postgraduate student, wrote: “Since my father raised in detail the latest threats against us in private to the parliamentary Labour Party three weeks ago, nobody from the national party has bothered to check on us. Nobody.”
John Mann, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism, revealed the torment suffered by his family in a speech on Tuesday.
