John McDonnell and Labour implausibly attempt to explain away Jeremy Corbyn’s membership of antisemitic Facebook group
Since the publication by blogger David Collier of screenshots showing that Jeremy Corbyn was a participating member in a secret Facebook group in which vehement antisemitism was posted, Mr Corbyn and the Labour Party have attempted to claim that he saw no antisemitism in the group.
However, Mr Corbyn repeatedly joined in discussions within the group, even stooping to personally comment in threads that include the term “Zio”, which even Baroness Chakrabarti’s whitewash report into antisemitism in the Labour Party condemned as an unacceptable term of abuse.
The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, implausibly claimed on Sky News that Mr Corbyn left as soon as he became aware of the group’s antisemitic content, but Corbyn’s team even more impausibly claimed that Mr McDonnell was “not right” and that Mr Corbyn had not seen any antisemitic content in the group prior to leaving it.
The screenshots from the group catalogue exchanges between a veritable Who’s Who of antisemites, showing members of the group discussing whether they prefer the term “ZioNazi” to “JewNazi’, and even neo-Nazi comments such as one member’s comment: “am reading Mein Kampf [by Adolf Hitler]…everybody should be forced to read it, especially Jews who have their own agenda as to why they were not liked”. Mr Corbyn, Clive Lewis MP, Mr Corbyn’s son Seb, Jack Bond and other key figures within the Labour Party were all members.
Mr Corbyn’s statements create the impression that he did not know what was happening in the secret Facebook group of which he was a member. That was always implausible, not least because he himself commented on antisemitic posts. But today, John McDonnell told Sky News that Mr Corbyn left the group ‘when he discovered…that there were some people in it who were expressing antisemitic views’. This means that Mr Corbyn knew exactly what was going on but chose not to report it, and in doing so, knowingly protected the antisemites in the group (some of whom the Labour Party has now suspended pending investigation).
The reality is that Mr Corbyn will likely have seen all manner of antisemitic filth from this group in his Facebook feed and sometimes he posted comments on it, so it is probably that he knew exactly what was going on in that group, legitimised it by his participation, and never once stood up to it, in breach of the social media guidelines that his Party has now adopted. Not for the first time we are filing a disciplinary complaint. If Mr Corbyn had any decency he would resign, but as we well know, when it comes to antisemitism he has no decency or credibility whatsoever, and under his leadership neither does the Labour Party.
