(JTA) — Labour demoted a lawmaker who compared party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s handling of anti-Semitism allegations to Adolf Hitler’s bunker mentality.
Dianne Hayter, a member of the House of Lords, said Corbyn’s handling of Labour’s growing anti-Semitism scandal to a film “about the last days of Hitler, of how you stop receiving into the inner group any information which suggests that things are not going the way you want.”
On Thursday she lost her position as the holder of the Brexit portfolio within Labour.
Although Hayter was clearly speaking in defense of Corbyn’s Jewish critics, a Labour spokesperson who on Thursday announced her demotion cited the purported sensibilities of Jews.
The analogy is “truly contemptible, and grossly insensitive to Jewish staff in particular,” the unnamed spokesperson was quoted in the Evening Standard as saying.
Hayter’s rebuke of Corbyn follows the signing by 67 House of Lords lawmakers of an ad accusing him of giving Labour a legacy of anti-Semitism. It represented the latest salvo in the clash between centrists and Corbyn’s far-left supporters since he was elected to lead Labour in 2015.
In 2009 Corbyn described Hezbollah as his “friends” and Hamas as “dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about peace and social justice.”
Last week, the BBC aired an hour-long documentary alleging that Corbyn’s team directly subverted the ethics’ panel review of anti-Semitic hate speech.
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