Largest Facebook group supporting Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey reportedly replete with antisemitic material
The largest Facebook group supporting the Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey is reportedly replete with antisemitic material.
The We Support Rebecca Long-Bailey group currently has 6,683 members, apparently including the new Labour MP, Tahir Ali, who is one of only three sitting MPs not to have signed up to the International Definition of Antisemitism; three Labour councillors; at least one member of Ms Long-Bailey’s campaign team; and family members of the current leader of the Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Among the problematic posts are that “Zionist Jews…do everything in their power to fight socialism”; that Israel “supplied ISIS, Al Qaeda, FSA [Free Syrian Army] with weapons and funding for years”; suggestions that Jewish organisations are “now running the Labour Party”; and references to “Labour’s fake antisemitism crisis”, “fake antisemitism accusations fomented by Israel” and “MI5 [who] conspired with right-wing Zionists to treasonously undermine free and fair elections.”
The social media group has numerous administrators but reportedly none of the posts had been deleted and the members who made the comments remained in the group.
The revelation comes as Ms Long-Bailey has been criticised for refusing to condemn a comment made by an attendee at a rally of hers referencing an “Israeli lobby”.
On 28th May 2019, the Equality and Human Rights Commission launched a full statutory investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party following a formal referral and detailed legal representations from Campaign Against Antisemitism, which is the complainant.
In the first release of its Antisemitism in Political Parties research, Campaign Against Antisemitism showed that Labour Party candidates for Parliament in the 2019 general election accounted for 82 percent of all incidents of antisemitic discourse by parliamentary candidates.
Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Antisemitism Barometer 2019 showed that antisemitism on the far-left of British politics has surpassed that of the far-right.
Campaign Against Antisemitism advocates for zero tolerance of antisemitism in public life, To that end we monitor all political parties and strive to ensure that any cases of concern are properly addressed.
