Former Labour leader and current antisemite Jeremy Corbyn likes to tell people that Israel unfairly smeared him as an antisemite because he supported palestinian Arab rights. It is a refrain repeated by his supporters and fellow antisemites like Roger Waters.
But the more time passes, the clearer it becomes just how rotten to the core Jeremy Corbyn is. Just ask Lord Cryer, the former chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party.
The former chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) has revealed that Jeremy Corbyn ignored direct pleas from Jewish MPs for him to deal with the antisemitism they faced within the wider party.
Lord Cryer, who served in the role from 2015-2024, reflected on the weekly PLP meetings during which, he claimed, Corbyn failed to act on what his Jewish parliamentary colleagues were telling him.
“Part of the problem with those meetings was he just wouldn’t respond to the questions”, he told former Labour MPs Gloria De Piero and Jonathan Ashworth on their Politics Inside Out podcast, which will be available from November 6.
“He [Corbyn] just didn’t respond to the criticism”, the former MP for Leyton and Wanstead recalled. “You had MPs who were Jewish, who were getting threats, who were getting abuse from their own members.
“I can remember one particular MP – I don’t want to name anybody because it’s still pretty raw – who had somebody who was sending the most vile, antisemitic poison remain a member of the Labour Party.
“[Labour] wouldn’t suspend this person, so they used to come along, sit bang in front of the MP” at the monthly meetings of their local constituency party, “just glaring at this MP”, he recounted.
Cryer continued: “And when you had the leader there at the, at the PLP meetings on a Monday evening – not that he came particularly often – he would just not deal with these issues”.
“I think now we know why he wasn’t dealing with it because there was a culture around him of keeping people inside who were seen as supportive of the leadership.”
The landmark report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in 2020 on antisemitism in Labour under Corbyn found that “there were unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination for which the Labour Party is responsible”.
It also found “evidence of political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints throughout the period of the investigation”.
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Although he still believes in public ownership of key industries and stronger trade union rights, he was dismayed at the inaction of the leadership of the Labour Party to deal with antisemitism and by the anti-Western worldview of many of Corbyn’s fellow travellers.
“We’ve got racists in our ranks and they’re not doing anything about it and that goes with a worldview … which says, ‘the greatest evil in the world is Western imperialism’.
“Which basically means America, Israel, Britain; that is the absolute nub of evil in the world.”
“You end up supporting some pretty evil regimes”, including Iran and its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, he said.
Cryer went on: “I’ve met people not in Labour anymore, but they were, who have enormous sympathy with Hamas and Hezbollah and the clerical fascists in Tehran.”
“They want to murder Jewish people. They want to send women back to the Stone Age, they want to murder gay men. That’s something I just cannot associate with.
“There was this period when I started to feel… I can’t associate with that worldview anymore, which is basically, for want of a better phrase, clerical fascism. Sympathy with clerical fascism.
” And there are elements in the British left who are apologists for clerical fascists, and I can’t have anything to do with people like that.”
For a man who prides himself on “speaking truth to power,” Corbyn somehow lost his voice every time Jewish MPs begged him to confront Jew-hatred in his own ranks. Maybe it’s hard to talk when your mouth’s already full of Hamas propaganda.
Not to mention rotten teeth.
If he’s not willing to deal with the rot inside his own mouth, I guess he wouldn’t deal with the rot inside his party.
But let’s face it: Jeremy Corbyn didn’t just fail to fight antisemitism; he nurtured it.
