Jeremy Corbyn reportedly applauded antisemitic poetry at Palestine Solidarity Campaign meeting

Jeremy Corbyn applauded the reading of an antisemitic poem during a meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in 2012  at which he was a guest speaker, according to a report from 2012 that has now come to light.

Anti-racism activist Richard Millett wrote in 2012 that Mr Corbyn sat on stage and listened while an anti-Israel activist, Claire Quinn, recited a poem entitled Israel is dying, applauding afterwards. Mr Millett says that the poem included the lines: “It is now not the Nazi state but Israel that blocks the seas. ¬ It is not Auschwitz that stops the ship that carries hope and messages, ¬ But those that might have died there. ¬ So let this poem drive the Hope that heads for Gaza. ¬ The victims are now the torturers. ¬ Freedom must be for all not just the victors ¬ Whose victory brings forgetfulness of what they suffered once now brought to others.”

In other allusions to the atrocities of the Nazi regime, speakers compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, where tens of thousands of Jews were forcibly imprisoned prior to being despatched to extermination camps, and asserted in reference to Israel that “no oppression or injustice has ever gone without falling. The apartheid regime ended, the collapse of Nazism…”

The International Definition of Antisemitism states that, “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is antisemitic.

With each new revelation about Mr Corbyn’s past activities, his motivation for seeking to dilute the definition becomes increasingly clear. Were he to allow the Labour Party to adopt it in full, he himself would be clearly identified as an antisemite by the very definition he is so determined to rewrite.

Last week, Campaign Against Antisemitism made a third disciplinary complaint against Mr Corbyn and referred the Labour Party to the Equality and Human Rights Commission over discrimination and victimisation in the Party.