Mr Corbyn has set up an inquiry into anti-Semitism within Labour, following a series of revelations about anti-Semitic comments from party members.
Advertisement
The UK Labor party secretly suspended 50 of it’s members on Monday night for anti-Semitic and racist comments amid a whirlwind of controversy according to The Telegraph.
The next day, the Labour Party said that it would launch an investigation into anti-Semitism within the party.
Salim Mulla, from Blackburn, is said to have made comments including one in which he wrote: “Zionist Jews are a disgrace to humanity.’ Nottingham councillor Ilyas Aziz was suspended over a Facebook post saying Jews should be ‘relocated” from Israel to the U.S., which he denies writing.
This follows around 10 other similar suspensions in recent months, as well as the suspensions of Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone last week.
Corbyn used a May Day rally to say the party “is absolutely against anti-Semitism in any form” after a tumultuous week that focused attention on the party’s attitude toward Jews instead of its campaigning efforts.
The latest elected representative to be suspended pending an investigation is Burnley councillor Shah Hussain, who told an Israeli footballer on Twitter “you and your country” are “doing exactly the same thing” that Hitler did, in a reference to the violence against Palestinians.
The row has deepened splits between Mr Corbyn and many of his MPs, but the leader vowed to face down any challenge to his position.
Ilyas Aziz, a lawmaker in Nottingham in north-central England, was suspended hours after the Guido Fawkes website posted screenshots of his Facebook posts, including the one in July 2014 during the Israel-Hamas war calling for the relocation of Israeli Jews.
Wading into the debate at the Britweek gala in Los Angeles, Ms Peake, one of the celebrities who backed Mr Corbyn’s leadership bid, said: “I don’t think what Ken Livingstone’s saying was (anti-Semitic)”.
Livingstone was suspended from the party, where he sits on the national executive, after telling in an interview with BBC London that Hitler initially “was supporting Zionism… before he went mad and ended up killing 6 million Jews”.
She said she would be “dismayed if some people were hurling around accusations of anti-Semitism as part of some intra-Labour Party dispute”.
“Two hundred thousand people have joined the Labour Party”.
Shadow cabinet minister Diane Abbott said it was “a smear to say that the Labour Party has a problem with anti-Semitism”.
Senior sources reveal that Labour’s compliance unit has been swamped by the influx of hard-left supporters following Jeremy Corbyn’s election. When confronted, he defended himself by saying, “I have very, very many Jewish friends”.
Advertisement
Abbott, who helps set the party’s global development policies, spoke on the BBC’s widely viewed Andrew Marr talk show as the anti-Semitism debate dominated the final days of electioneering.
