(JTA) — A major Jewish donor to Britain’s Labour Party has compared supporters of party head Jeremy Corbyn to Nazi storm troopers.
Michael Foster, whose family in the last election contributed more than $500,000 to the party, in an op-ed Sunday in the Daily Mail newspaper referred to Corbyn backers as Sturmabteilung, or SA.
Foster had sued to stop Corbyn from running again for the party leadership without first getting the backing of at least 51 members of Parliament as proscribed by the party’s rules. Corbyn recently lost a vote of no confidence by Labour parliamentarians and faced mass resignations from his top team, the BBC reported.
Britain’s Supreme Court ruled last week against the Foster suit. In the op-ed, Foster alleged anti-Semitism from Corbyn supporters.
“Oppose them as a Jewish donor and the riposte from Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s mouthpiece, is that you are part of a Blairite, Right-wing ‘conspiracy’ (the ancient racist rhetoric is that Jews don’t act alone, the malevolent Jew always conspires) to destabilize the democratically and legitimately elected leader,” he wrote.
But Foster lauded a Court of Appeal ruling later in the week that effectively reintroduced a voting ban on nearly 130,000 Labour members in the leadership election in what is seen as a disadvantage to Corbyn.
Corbyn, who has called Hezbollah and Hamas “friends,” has been accused of fostering an atmosphere of anti-Semitism in the party.
