britain

Non-Jews are fighting Labour anti-Semitism

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Steeped in anti-Semitism accusations, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has made many Jewish enemies — including inside his own party.

But one of his most effective critics is not Jewish. He is a meteorology student at the University of Reading who describes himself as  “just a kid with a laptop.”

Denny Taylor, 20, has used that laptop to keep a running tally of party members who have flouted Labour’s own guidelines against hate speech and report them to the party’s ethics review panel.

Horrified at the revelations about Corbyn’s ties to anti-Semites, Taylor set up Labour Against Anti-Semitism, or LAAS, in 2016, with a few dozen non-Jewish and Jewish volunteers. He was 18 and had voted for Corbyn the previous year.

The group has flagged 1,200 alleged members who it said breached the party’s guidelines against hate speech and has a backlog of about 2,000 additional cases of people engaging in what LAAS considers anti-Semitic rhetoric.

LAAS “punches far above its weight,” said Jonathan Hoffman, a British Jew who has been involved in protests against Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The volunteers (Hoffman is not one of them) “[have] achieved great success in raising the profile of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and [are] now the first port of call for media like the BBC, The Times and Sky News,” he told JTA.

Corbyn, a far-left politician elected to lead Labour in 2015, has alternated between vowing to address Jewish concerns and dismissing them. In August, he called many Jews’ existential fears about a Corbyn-led government “overheated rhetoric.”

He also refused to apologize for controversial actions, including his honoring in 2015 of dead Palestinian terrorists and saying in 2013 that local “Zionists” lack a sense of irony.

Corbyn’s worsening relationship with British Jewry sank to a new low in August when former chief rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks called him an anti-Semite. The Jewish Labour Movement has threatened to sue Corbyn and dismissed his promises to fight anti-Semitism as lip service.

Such criticism is harder to pin on LAAS. Beyond having non-Jewish members from across Labour’s political spectrum, “we primarily file complaints that are well-documented,” Taylor said. He traces his commitment to fighting anti-Semitism within Labour to a desire to “make up for the damage” that Corbyn and his supporters have caused the United Kingdom.

The ethics board of Labour is forced to act on the complaints on Corbyn’s behalf, making subsequent disciplinary actions more difficult for supporters to dismiss.

LAAS said it follows Labour’s definition of anti-Semitic hate speech, which as of last month is identical to that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The definition notes that anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric often take anti-Semitic forms.

Among LAAS’s recent successes is the April suspension of Pam Bromley, a local lawmaker from northern England. LAAS reported a 2017 Facebook post in which Bromley urged followers to remember that the “Rothschilds are a powerful family (like the Medicis) and represent capitalism and big business — even if the Nazis DID use the activities of the Rothschilds in their anti-Semitic propaganda. We must not obscure the truth with the need to be tactful.”

Anne Kennedy was suspended in May for writing that Israeli Jews are “Hitler’s bastard sons.” Jane Dipple, a university lecturer, was suspended and possibly fired for inveighing against “a Zionist attempt at creating a pure race” in a post that linked to an article on the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer headlined “BBC to Replace Male Jew Political Editor with Female Jew.”

This rhetoric is something that Emma Feltham, a London painter-decorator and longtime Labour voter, had never imagined existed.

“I’m a white English person; I had never seen anything like this. I remember crying the first time I did,” recalled Feltham, who joined LAAS following that experience.

The fact that she’s not Jewish makes it harder to dismiss her criticism, Feltham said. “They can’t say, ‘oh, it’s just because she’s a Zionist, what she says doesn’t matter because she’s Jewish’.”

When rank-and-file non-Jewish members of Labour fight in the trenches against anti-Semitism, she said, “it shows there are people out there who care, who find if unacceptable.”

Nevertheless, Labour’s highly public anti-Semitism problem seems to have only marginally hurt its popularity. Corbyn’s approval rating in a YouGov poll from Sept. 27 was 10 points higher than in 2016. (He currently enjoys 51 percent approval versus 49 percent disapproval.)

With positive ratings and a Conservative government in shambles over internal disagreements, Corbyn seems nearer than ever to becoming prime minister.

Feltham said she understands British Jews who say they view a Labour government led by Corbyn as an existential threat — a statement that, unprecedentedly, all three major British Jewish newspapers put on their front pages in July, and which the Board of Deputies of British Jews has echoed.

“I don’t think it’s an overreaction,” she said. She believes that a “party that can target one minority or group will target others when it becomes expedient. It’s a danger to society at large.”

Still, Feltham, Taylor and Philipps, the LAAS spokesman, said they are not sure whether they can win the fight for Labour’s identity.

“This question is beyond my control,” Feltham said. “All I know is I can’t stop fighting. I don’t want to have to say that I did nothing when all of this was happening.”