JLM withdraw from anti-Semitism training after Labour ‘censored’ material

The Jewish Labour Movement has pulled out of an anti-Semitism training session planned for the national conference next month, accusing the party of trying to “censor” material.

The group criticised left-wing factions of Labour, who had allegedly tried to alter  the contents of a presentation it had planned for a session in September.

Amid charges that the party condones anti-Semitism under leader Jeremy Corbyn, the group planned on presenting a training session making reference to two Labour members accused of anti-Semitism.

Ivor Caplin, chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, said the group had withdrawn from the planned training session because its “content was censored.”

A Labour Party source said: “JLM were invited to deliver training at Conference but they declined”.

He accused party officials of acting “in a manner to deliberately undermine” their efforts and “add to further tension,” The Independent reported.

At issue was Labour’s decision last month to adopt parts of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism, but to exclude portions that specifically related to the ways anti-Israel activism can be seen as anti-Semitic. The Jewish Labour Movement had planned to discuss ways in which party members had crossed the line between anti-Israel rhetoric and anti-Semitism.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has come under increasing scrutiny over allegations that he has both engaged in anti-Semitic behaviour himself and failed to take action against anti-Semitic behaviour by members of his party.

On Friday it was reported that Corbyn had been filmed endorsing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Last week it emerged that he had met with the leader-in-exile of a Palestinian terror group in 2014 weeks before its members carried out an attack on a Jerusalem synagogue in which six people were killed. The meeting took place at an event in Tunis in 2014 at which the British politician was photographed laying a wreath near the graves of terrorists involved in the 1972 massacre of 11 Israelis at the Munich Olympics.

An old clip that surfaced several days earlier showed Corbyn saying in a 2011 interview with the Iranian Press TV station that the BBC has “a bias towards saying that Israel is a democracy in the Middle East, Israel has a right to exist, Israel has its security concerns.”

Jim Sheridan, a former MP and Corbyn ally, was suspended from Labour over the weekend after writing a Facebook post accusing Jews of plotting against Corbyn.

Sheridan wrote that he had  lost “respect and empathy” for Britain’s Jews over their opposition to Corbyn. He lamented what the Jewish community “and their Blairite plotters are doing to my party and the long suffering people of Britain who need a radical Labour government.”