Labour reinstates senior activist who said Jews were responsible for slave trade
Jackie Walker, vice chair of the Labour Party’s influential Momentum pressure group, has reportedly been reinstated by the Labour Party after her suspension over allegations of antisemitism. Walker was suspended following an exchange on Facebook. She asked “what debt do we owe the Jews?” When another Facebook user responded by saying “the Holocaust”, Walker accused Jews of having special responsibility for what she called “the African Holocaust”. Walker claimed that “many Jews (my ancestors too) were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade” and then suggested that Jews murdered during the Holocaust were “victims to some extent through choice”.
According to the Guido Fawkes political blog, a Labour spokesman said: “Following the outcome of an investigation, Jacqueline Walker is no longer suspended and remains a member of the party.”
If the Labour Party has truly readmitted a member who publicly subscribes to antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jews financing and causing the slave trade, their ongoing inquiry into antisemitism can barely be taken seriously. To suggest that over six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust in part through choice to be victims is a grotesque and deliberate twisting of the historical facts. People do, however, choose to be antisemites and spread malicious myths about Jewish people, and for the Labour Party to readmit them so easily tells us that antisemitism in the Labour Party has become institutional.
