Malia Bouattia, NUS president-elect (NUS)
An offensive against the elected Labour leadership and the Palestine solidarity movement is being waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The attack began back in February, when a co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) resigned claiming that ‘a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews’. This sweeping condemnation boiled down to a handful of allegations, most of which were made anonymously and none of which were accompanied by evidence. The only claim whose veracity can at this point be checked – that an OULC member was disciplined by his college for organising a group of students to harass and shout ‘filthy Zionist’ at a Jewish student – turns out to be a sheer fabrication: according to the (late) Principal of that college, the student in question has never been the subject of complaint or disciplinary proceedings, for antisemitism or anything else.
The OULC allegations were used to smear two left-wing candidates in the Young Labour elections in February. These baseless attacks were likely decisive in securing the Labour Right candidate’s wafer-thin victory in the race for Youth Representative to the party’s National Executive Committee. Next came a torrent of media headlines alleging that as a result of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership the Labour party is increasingly, and perhaps pervasively, antisemitic. This is an extraordinary allegation to level against the UK’s largest political party and a pillar of mainstream British politics. The evidence for it comprised, in addition to the unproven allegations against the OULC, a handful of alleged antisemitic tweets and Facebook posts, some of which date back years, by eight low and mid-level party members. Most of these individuals had joined Labour before Corbyn’s leadership campaign; hardly any were close to the Corbyn leadership or prominent in the Corbyn-aligned Momentum movement; and all were suspended or expelled from the party as soon as the allegations were aired.
