Jeremy Corbyn audaciously refers to “horrors of the past” in hollow comments in Parliament on the Holocaust
Jeremy Corbyn has audaciously referenced the “horrors of the past” in comments in Parliament on the Holocaust that are insulting to the Jewish community.
The Labour leader told MPs: “Next Monday we will be commemorating National Holocaust [Memorial] Day. It’s a time for us all to reflect on the horrors of the past and remind us of the evils of Nazism, genocide, antisemitism and indeed all forms of racism which we must always all be implacably determined to root out wherever it appears.”
The remarks were particularly audacious, given that Mr Corbyn has spent his time in office cultivating antisemitism in the Labour Party — quite the opposite of working to “root it out wherever it appears”.
Moreover, on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010, Mr Corbyn hosted and chaired an antisemitic event that compared Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, in contravention of the International Definition of Antisemitism.
A year later, on Holocaust Memorial Day 2011, John McDonnell, a fellow beckbench MP who would go on to serve as Mr Corbyn’s Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr Corbyn himself respectively proposed and seconded an Early Day Motion in Parliament calling for the word “Holocaust” in the name of the day to be replaced with “Genocide”, thereby removing its particular signifiance for Jews.
Given Mr Corbyn’s record and his consistent refusal to address the institutional antisemitism in his Party, much less learn the lessons of the Holocaust more generally, his remarks on “the horrors of the past” is empty and hollow.
In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Jeremy Corbyn is personally responsible for 24 incidents of antisemitic discourse, which was equal to fifteen percent of all recorded incidents involving parliamentary candidates and party leaders in the 2019 general election. Overall, Labour Party candidates for Parliament accounted for 82 percent of all incidents.
On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.