Stop Calling Labour Antisemitic – Barely More Than Half Of Us Hate Jews

by Ann Teasemythe, party activist

London, November 28 – Slander of our anti-racist political organization as racist against Jews continues despite the fact that only fifty-six percent of our members harbour such animosity towards those of the Hebrew persuasion. The libel must end.

A few bad apples will occur in every group of significant size, and with a roll of 485,000, we can expect a handful, just statistically speaking, of cranks and bigots in our otherwise upstanding party. That handful of antisemites doesn’t even exceed 272,000. But disingenuous, tendentious elements continue to characterize Labour as “institutionally antisemitic” and demand that Jeremy Corbyn apologize for the Jew-hate that comes from that small number of exceptions to our tolerant rule.

Moreover, that figure of 271,600, give or take, fails to convey the nuance necessary to understand whatever antisemitism does occur among Labour members: it all has to do with Israeli policies, which makes it justified and not really a problem. Boris Johnson’s Tories are the real bigots.

Jeremy Corbyn’s mother was at Cable Street! That alone should be good for a few thousand cases of Labour members sharing Nazi and KKK propaganda without it being a big deal. His repeated declarations that our party opposes violence of all sorts, racism in all its forms, should outweigh any minor incidents such as prominent party figures including the chairman himself participating in discussions that liken the Jewish state to the Nazis. We are the party of anti-racism, as I stated. That much is clear.

Consider the basic numbers: we spend much of our time on this issue trotting out the small minority of Jews who do not believe Jeremy Corbyn to be racist of antisemitic, or that Labour has an antisemitism problem. The media complies, amplifying those minority voices to give the impression that those Jews can serve as authentic representative of their people or faith community. The same applies to the more than 213,000 bona fide non-antisemites in our ranks: if 13% of all Jews in the UK must be believed over the rest of British Jewry who consider Corbyn antisemitic, then of course the 44% of Labour members who are not antisemitic, a much higher figure than 13%, get to define the party. Simple maths.

Good on Jeremy for not cowing when repeatedly challenged to apologize to British Jews in that BBC interview the other day. We cannot allow the Jewish-run media to define us as something that only a bare majority of our membership espouses.

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