Jo Bird told her friend he made 'a good point' when he called LFI 'people who make excuses for ethnic cleansing or condone racially motivated murder'
March 19, 2019 12:33
The Labour councillor who was briefly suspended after joking about "Jew process" also backed the suggestion Labour Friends of Israel supporters to be barred from the party, the JC has learned.
Jo Bird had her suspension from Labour lifted only days after the JC published a recording of her speech to Labour activists that included a joke that the term "due process" should be dubbed "Jew process".
Countdown presenter Rachel Riley was among those to say she was “aghast” listening to the speech by the Wirral councillor, made to Labour supporters at a meeting in Manchester last year.
Cllr Bird, who is a member of the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice For Labour group, and her supporters protested about her brief suspension, claiming she was being victimised for merely telling a joke.
But closer inspection of comments on her Facebook page reveal attempts to dismiss the Labour Jew-hate crisis as a smear, open antipathy to Jewish communal organisations and aggressive hostility to supporters of Israel.
Last September, Cllr Bird posted an invitation to her friends on social media to join Labour writing: "Join Labour! It’s a purposeful, friendly, broad church. Or what I call, a broad synagogue.”
A friend replied "there have to be limits" and said LFI should not be in the party, calling them “people who make excuses for ethnic cleansing or condone racially motivated murder".
Cllr Bird wrote back: "I'm glad you are a member of Labour. The party needs people like you. You make a good point.”
Cllr Bird also attacked what she called the “obsession with antisemitism” over “other forms of racism.”
She also wrote of Labour's antisemitism crisis: "A lot of claims that have been made don’t actually stand up. They are fake claims and they are being pursued by Friends of Israel and political opponents.”
Last March, writing in the aftermath of the Enough Is Enough demonstrations against antisemitism in Parliament Square, she said: "Special treatment for antisemitism over other forms of racism is damaging for the many not only the Jews.”
That same month she attacked the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council for “trying to smear anti-racist Corbyn with antisemitism".
She added: "Unlike Jeremy, these self-appointed speakers for some Jewish people in Britain choose 'selective outrage' - deliberately defining antisemitism as criticism of Israel. Crying wolf with anti-Jewish racism makes it harder to deal with real thing.
"I would yawn it off, only their smearing campaign is headline news at the same time as local election campaign.”
In January, Cllr Bird directed her Facebook followers to an article headlined "Fake Labour accounts fuelling ‘antisemitism crisis".
She wrote: "Don't believe the hype! Sound research shows fake antisemitic twitter accounts deliberately smear Labour.”
Last September, after a bomb scare halted pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour's planned screening of a film made in support of Jackie Walker, the former Momentum vice chair suspended by Labour over antisemitism allegations – Cllr Bird wrote: ”I experienced a small fraction of what people in Palestine have to deal with every day.”
Last July, with the row over Labour’s refusal to adopt the full IHRA definition of antisemtism raging, she wrote: "Oy va voy!
"I don't know how we Jews managed to find so many examples of antisemitism for centuries, before the IHRA list arrived to save us from ourselves.
“Actually, it sickens me to see establishment media weaponise willing right-wing Jews to attack Labour, again.”
Cllr Bird has subsequently accused the JC of altering a recording of her recital of the poem "First The Came For.."
She wrote on Facebook: "I'm sorry Rachel Riley is sickened. My quotes were truncated and taken out of context. I did not remove Jews from the Holocaust poem - removal must have been done by whoever edited the recording.”
But the recording confirms Cllr Bird did remove the word “Jews” from the famous poem, referring instead to “anti-racists, anti-Zionists and Socialists”.
