Members of Britain’s Labour Party will be holding a symposium on anti-Semitism within their party “reflect and consider the challenges facing us,” the Jewish Chronicle has reported.
Organized by the Jewish Labour Movement, the conference comes in response to a number of anti-Semitism scandals within the party following the ascension of Jeremy Corbyn to its leadership in 2015.
MPs Louise Ellman, Ruth Smeeth, Wes Streeting and John Mann are expected to attend, as are senior representatives of Liberal Judaism and the United Synagogue.
More than 80 percent of British Jews see Labour as overly tolerant of anti-Semitism, according to a new YouGov poll commissioned by the Campaign Against Antisemitism.
The party has been wracked with anti-Semitic scandals over the past two years and is in the midst of conducting an internal investigation into anti-Semitic comments made by former London Mayor Ken Livingstone.
According to the Jewish Chronicle, Labour sources have confirmed that another probe “is under way” due to the former London mayor's lack of remorse for his comments. Livingstone was suspended from the party last April after stating that "when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism – this before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”
Jeremy Newmark, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, has described the party’s relationship with the Jewish community as being in “crisis” while Jonathan Arkush, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, has previously gone on the record saying that "most people in the Jewish community can’t trust Labour.”
A number of party members have been banned or suspended for anti-Semitic remarks, including one senior official who tweeted that Jews have “big noses” and that Hitler is the “Zionist God.”
A high-profile report on anti-Semitism within the party by MP Baroness Shami Chakrabarti released last year was derided by many within the Jewish community and described as incomplete and lacking by the Board of Deputies, which expressed disappointment.
Following the report, Chakrabarti was granted a peerage, leading to the Jewish representative body to allege that the new title was a reward for "her so-called ‘independent’ inquiry” which was "was weak in several areas.”
Last June, MP Ruth Smeeth, who is Jewish, walked out in tears during an event marking the report’s unveiling, after a party activist accused her of collusion with conservative media.
