London – A far-left newspaper, for which Jeremy Corbyn has previously written, is at the centre of an antisemitism row after it blamed “Israel’s crimes” for the rise in Jew-hate.
The Morning Star published an article headlined ‘Rising antisemitism cannot be tackled without addressing Israel’s crimes’ but later removed it from their website.
Campaign group Labour Against Antisemitism (LAAS) demanded a “full apology” and called on Mr Corbyn to condemn it.
The article said “mainstream Jewish communities everywhere… appear unwilling to accept the connection between developing international antisemitism (or anti-Israel sentiment) and Israel’s decades long … acts of barbarism”.
It continued: “No amount of protestations about the symptoms of rising antisemitism or anti-Israel sentiment in Britain and elsewhere will end the problem until its root cause, Israel’s criminal behaviour, is dealt with.”
On Wednesday, the Morning Star published a new article under the headline ‘Jews and all citizens should be encouraged to challenge actual and existing antisemitism’, co-written by “long-time supporters” of the paper, Mary Davis and Mike Katz.
The second article called the first article “shambling” and said: “It cannot be acceptable in a daily paper of the left (to say) Jews everywhere are responsible for the actions of the Israeli government”.
The article continued: “This is collective guilt whatever way one comes at it. We argue forcefully as a paper, that British Muslims should not be stigmatised for the actions of Saudi rulers, or Isis. But when it comes to Jews, other standards apply.
“As if antisemitism didn’t exist across the world, before Israel was formed, when in fact, it was common before capitalism appeared.”
Euan Philipps, spokesman for LAAS, said the now-deleted article was “a typically ugly example of the antisemitism that has become normalised across the Labour movement”.
He added LAAS could find “no trace” of “John Elder”, who was listed as the article’s author.
Mr Philipps said the article “ticks off a list of offensive positions including suggesting rising antisemitism is something imagined by Jews”.
“[The article] smears the antiracism charity Campaign Against Antisemitism, demonises Israel, misreports the recent conflict in Gaza and completely disregards the history of antisemitism,” Mr Philipps said.
“We demand that Jeremy Corbyn explicitly condemns the article and asks the Morning Star editors to issue a full apology for its publication. Until they do so, no Labour MPs should associate with or contribute articles to it.
“We need to see zero tolerance of antisemitism in action: this is a chance for Mr Corbyn to deliver just that.”
Mr Corbyn has regularly written for the Morning Star along with other senior figures within the party’s left-wing.
The paper was founded in the 1930s as the Daily Worker by the Communist Party of Great Britain.
