The leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has acknowledged the problem of anti-Semitism within his party and apologised to Jews who had been hurt.
“I am sorry for the hurt that has been caused to many Jewish people. We have been too slow in processing disciplinary cases of, mostly, online anti-Semitic abuse by party members,” Corbyn said in a video message released on social media yesterday.
He has come under fire for months from critics, including his own lawmakers, who accuse him of failing to tackle the issue.
“People who hold anti-Semitic views have no place in the Labour Party,” Corbyn said. “They may be few – the number of cases over the past three years represents less than 0.1% of Labour’s membership of more than half a million – but one is too many.”
A Sunday Times’ investigation this year into 20 of the biggest pro-Corbyn Facebook groups – with a total of around 400,000 members – uncovered routine attacks on Jewish people, including Holocaust denial.
In April, Sir David Garrard, a major Jewish donor to Labour, said that he quit the party because it “has failed to expel many of those who have engaged in the grossest derogatory fantasies about Jewish/Zionist conspiracies”.
The latest flare-up in the controversy came over a debate within the party on whether it should fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism for a new code of conduct being hashed out.
Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, told the Observer newspaper that the anti-Semitism row threatened the future of the party.
He took aim at Corbyn saying the party had to “take a long, hard look at ourselves, stand up for what is right and present the party as fit to lead the nation – or disappear into a vortex of eternal shame and embarrassment”.
“I think it’s very important that we all work to de-escalate this disagreement.”
He called on Corbyn to adopt in full an internationally-accepted definition of anti-Semitism.
Labour says it has concerns about part of the definition but had re-opened discussions to take into account Jewish community concerns.