UK Jews against Labour lawmaker who liked anti-Semitic post - Elad Benari

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by Elad Benari

British Jews protest election to Parliament of Labour candidate who liked Facebook post saying PM May has a “Zionist Slave Masters agenda”.

British Jews are protesting the election to Parliament of a candidate for the Labour party who “liked” a Facebook post saying Prime Minister Theresa May has a “Zionist Slave Masters agenda”, JTA reports.

The lawmaker, Lisa Forbes, on Thursday won a special election in the eastern English city of Peterborough, defeating a Brexit Party candidate and leaving the Conservative Party candidate far behind.

The Peterborough vote was held after the constituency’s former representative in the House of Common was jailed for lying over a speeding offence.

After Forbes was nominated the Labour candidate, it emerged that in April she had “liked” a post making the assertion about May. In 2014, she praised a post that repeated the conspiracy theory that the Mossad and CIA are behind the Islamic State terror group.

“I have enjoyed reading this thread so much,” she wrote about the 2014 post.

In a statement on Friday, the Board of Deputies of British Jews wrote the case typifies Labour’s spiraling anti-Semitism problem, which last month led the country’s foremost government watchdog on racism to initiate an official probe of Labour.

Forbes said the controversy over the “Zionist Slave Masters” was the result of a misunderstanding.

“I actually liked a video of children praying about what had happened in New Zealand and hadn’t paid much attention to the text above,” she wrote in a statement.

She did not address the 2014 post, which had no video.

“I’m really sorry. I just hope that people will understand that I don’t have a bad bone in my body towards any race of people and anti-Semitism is just something I condemn completely,” she added, according to JTA.

The incident is the latest in a series of troubling anti-Semitism involving Labour members. Dozens of Labour members who have been suspended and, in some cases, expelled from the party due to anti-Semitism over the last few years.

A report released in October of 2016 determined that the Labour party’s leadership is failing to seriously confront the anti-Semitism among its ranks.

More recently, nine Labour lawmakers left the party over its failure to tackle the problem of hatred toward Jews among party supporters and leaders.

And, last week, the United Kingdom’s Equality and Human Rights Commission officially launched an investigation into Labour’s anti-Semitism problem.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has come under fire not only for failing to tackle the anti-Semitism in the party but also for calling Hamas and Hezbollah his "friends" and for outright refusing to condemn those two terrorist organizations despite being urged to do so by local Jewish groups.


Elad Benari

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/264353

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