The haters have their panties in a bunch as UK Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves has suggested that director Ken Loach is antisemitic.
Rachel Reeves has provoked outrage on social media after she appeared to brand film director Ken Loach an ‘antisemite’.
Speaking to the Guardian, Labour’s shadow chancellor was questioned over whether Labour had become “gung-ho” in “labelling people antisemitic who simply aren’t.”
The newspaper’s leading interviewer Simon Hatterstone, who is Jewish himself, said he agreed with Keir Starmer’s zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism in the party, but said that in some cases “there is a danger of destroying lives in the process.”
Reeves stressed she was not personally involved with decisions around those found guilty of downplaying or denying antisemitism, and did not know the details of all cases.
But she added that it is “so important that we are seen to – and we do – tackle antisemitism.
“Ken Loach, you might like his films, but his views … well, certainly, they are not ones I share.”
Hatterstone responded by telling the shadow chancellor that in the case of Loach “this doesn’t make him antisemitic”, to which Reeves replied:
“You don’t think Ken Loach is antisemitic? OK. Well, I think we might have to agree to differ.”
I’m definitely on Team Reeves here. Loach’s Jew-hatred is not based on mere criticism of Israel, but by his essentially defending Holocaust denial:
Not to mention accusing some Zionists of collaborating with the Nazis, attacking those opposing Jew hatred, denying the existence of antisemitism in Labor while accusing the Israeli government of infiltrating the party.
So the shoe here definitely fits.
