Chris Williamson suspended: ‘We’re not anti-Semitic’ but white privileged Jews have it easy, says Labour
It’s a “hateful new low” says the Mail in the paper’s take on Chris Williamson, the Labour MP suspended for comments about the party’s handling of anti-Semitism. Williamson, Labour MP for Derby North, opined to a group of Jeremy Corbyn supporters that the party had “given too much ground” in the face of criticism over anti-semitism. He now “deeply regrets” his thoughts. He is “determined” to clear his name. He is aghast and affronted that anyone could believe he was “minimising the cancer of anti-Semitism”.
We know Williamson’s views that fighting racism has its limits when you’re dealing with the Jew hatred rife in Labour ranks because the Yorkshire Post broadcast footage of him telling activists Labour had been “too apologetic” over anti-Semitism and was being “demonised as a racist, bigoted party”. The audience applauds.
Williamson then does as all MPs must: he takes to Twitter to issue an apology built on a sympathetic backstory. He reminds us that there are “very few cases” of Jew hatred within Labour. Not so. There are many.
Too little, too late, says the BBC.
The suspension of Chris Williamson was relatively swift, but not swift enough to suggest there has been a sea-change in dealing with the problems of anti-Semitism in the party.
The initial briefing from sources close to the Labour leadership was that Chris Williamson needed to apologise, withdraw his comments and be subject to an investigation into “his pattern of behaviour”.
If he had also been suspended at this stage, it would have been a clearer signal that the leadership were imposing their avowed policy of “zero tolerance” on the issue.But it wasn’t until Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson, its reviewer of anti-Semitism cases Lord Falconer, and some of the party’s prominent Jewish MPs intervened that the suspension took place.
The Mail does the numbers: “38 moderate MPs pressed for Mr Williamson’s removal in a letter.” Yep. Just 38. And one of them wasn’t Corbyn, who “is believed to have intervened personally to block his suspension”.
Why do they appear to have it in for Jews? Make a list. And now riding at the top is the line that Jews are white and privileged. It’s got legs.
The Jewish Chronicle has more:
Labour MP Chris Williamson described the parliamentarians who marched in solidarity with Jewish MP Ruth Smeeth at an antisemitism hearing against a black activist who was later expelled by the party as “white privileged,” the JC can reveal.
In a recording obtained by the JC, the Derby North MP repeatedly attempted to portray the hearing into the black activist Marc Wadsworth, who was expelled by Labour for bringing the party into disrepute, as an example of “white people trying to shout down a black guy.”
MPs including Luciana Berger, Dame Margaret Hodge and Jess Philips were photographed walking with Ms Smeeth ahead of last year’s hearing into Mr Wadsworth’s conduct.
Mr Williamson compared it to a film that dramatises the KKK’s murder of civil rights activists, saying: “It looked like a scene out of Mississippi Burning. It was disgraceful, absolutely despicable in my opinion.”
In the Left’s sad game of identity politics, Jews always come off worse. Sure there’s the Holocaust, say the enlightened and righteous. But with your Jew wealth, Jew power, Jew influence, Jew barbarism and support for Israel, a country cast by the hard Left as Nazism’s bastard child, you Jews don’t deserve it. In the hunt for victims and victimhood, Jews have been pushed back to their age-old societal position of being the nadir of humanity, a people whose only redeeming feature would be self-hatred and guilt.
The old anti-Semites never went away. But now they can blend in with the knowing and good.
Posted: 28th, February 2019 | In: Key Posts, News, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink