Labour candidate Laura McAlpine heckled for defending Corbyn’s record on Hamas and terrorists, and her own campaign staff
Labour’s Harlow general election candidate was heckled at a hustings for defending Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s relationship with the genocidal antisemitic group Hamas and other terrorists.
Laura McAlpine, who is fighting to unseat the Conservative MP in the marginal seat, described Mr Corbyn as “a man of peace”, and dismissed a questioner asking about Mr Corbyn’s relationship with Hamas and other terrorist groups by telling him to “do a little bit of reading and then come back to me.”
She insisted that the “Labour Party is an anti-racist Party” and has “robust procedures” to deal with antisemitism, a comment that was met with jeers.
Ms McAlpine also clearly had supporters in the audience.
Mr McAlpine also again defended her campaign chief, Brett Hawksbee, who was revealed to have written to colleagues that “the fear of many on the left is that the ideological successors of the bombers of the King David Hotel, the mass murderers who decimated Deir Yassin, would be quite happy to see a pogrom in Gaza and the West Bank, a Jewish final solution to the Palestine problem.” The comment, which clearly breached the International Definition of Antisemitism for drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, was even criticised by a Labour Party official, but Ms McAlpine stood by Mr Hawksbee. Mr Hawksbee has been a vocal defender of Chris Williamson, the disgraced MP who resigned from the Labour Party after being told he could not stand as a candidate for the Party.
On 28th May, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In recent months, thirteen MPs and three peers have resigned from the Labour Party over antisemitism, along with a large number of MEPs, councillors and members.
Over 57,000 people have now signed our petition denouncing Jeremy Corbyn as an antisemite and declaring him “unfit to hold any public office.”
On 8th December, regardless of religion, race or politics, Jews and non-Jews alike will gather in Parliament Square to declare that they stand together against antisemitism in the face of Jew-hatred in politics and mounting anti-Jewish hate crime.
Video Credit: Your Harlow
