JEREMY Corbyn “left Jewish members to be bullied and abused” an ex-Labour MP has blasted as the ECHR report on anti-semitism is set to be released this morning.
Ruth Smeeth slammed the hard-left former leader for hanging Jewish members out to dry and “doing nothing” as they faced “torrents and torrents of abuse”.
Opening up about the horrifying abuse, Ms Smeeth told Good Morning Britain her and other Jewish MPs experience daily harrassment, which still continues today, at the hands of members of the Labour Party.
She said: “What was happening to Jewish women throughout the country at Labour party meetings, and nothing happening.
“Jeremy Corbyn could’ve intervened, he could’ve stopped this, he never politically showed leadership.
“He left Jewish members to be bullied and harassed, to be hanged out of the Labour party, to face death threats and abuse from Labour party members.”
She said today was a “black day” for the party, as senior Labour figures are braced for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to rule the party broke the law in its handling of abuse.
Another ex-MP, Louise Ellman said she was “driven out” of the party by “ugly antisemitism” which begun as Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader.
Writing in the Times today, She said the anti-Semitism of the party “became normalised with the entry of the far-left following the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.”
She said she was “targeted” by Labour party members in her own constituency who wanted to topple her as MP for being “a zionist”.
Despite revealing a horrible plot to remove her, and the Labour Executive Committee finding she had been subject to “obsessive interrogations”, no action was taken against members who bullied and harassed her.
Ms Ellman said: “The moves to oust me continued in a more subtle form including a campaign to dehumanise me by refusing to use my name. I became “the MP” or “Mrs Ellman”.
“At the Riverside celebrations following the 2017 general election, I was ostracised. I was studiously and deliberately ignored. “
“No one spoke to me. The celebrations continued as if I was not present. I was a non-person.”
Another former MP Luciana Berger said today would be “difficult and emotional”.
Sir Keir Starmer faces calls to boot Jeremy Corbyn out of Labour if the report finds the organisation became institutionally anti-Semitic under his watch.
Earlier this year he sacked loyal Corbynista Rebecca Long-Bailey from his shadow Cabinet after she shared an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory on Twitter.
Sir Keir has vowed to build bridges with the Jewish community in the wake of the anti-Semitic abuse.
But this morning, Jeremy Corbyn’s son Tommy heaped praise on him saying, “Interesting day ahead I’m sure.
“Whatever anyone writes in any report, this man is the furthest thing from a racist as it’s possible to be. I’ve spent my entire life watching him relentlessly fight every form of racism and oppression across the globe.”
And the shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said yesterday the day the investigation was launched was “the most shameful moment in Labour’s history”.
He blasted his own party for its “refusal to acknowledge the issue”.
He told Times Radio: “That was a shameful period in our history.
“And we have to be clear that we are never going back to that, and we will do everything we can to repair relations with the Jewish community who are understandably and quite rightly hurt by the Labour Party’s failure to deal with this in recent years.”
Labour grandee Ed Balls lashed Mr Corbyn for being “blinded” to the race hate being spouted by his supporters.
He said: “I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. He’s not a racist man, but he undoubtedly not only stood with anti-Semitic people, but said things which were anti-Semitic.
‘BIT OF A CON’
“And because he wasn’t able to acknowledge that, his sort of anti-American, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist belief in his own anti-racist credentials, I think blinded him to the reality.”
He added: “And if the leader can’t acknowledge that, and apologise and move on, it means that the whole party is then hamstrung in tackling the genuine anti-Semites who have always believed those anti-Semitic tropes and want to use it for their own political reasons.
“And so it was a tragedy and a disaster.”
But Ken Livingstone, who quit Labour after being accused of anti-Semitism and is named in today’s report – said he expects it to be “bit of a con”.
He told HOAR: “This was nothing to do with anti-Semitism – it was about getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn.”
He added: “Unless the report comes out and says this was a load of nonsense whipped up to undermine the Labour leadership, it won’t really be honest.”
Mr Livingstone said the problem had been overblown in a bid to oust Mr Corbyn as leader.
He said: “They whipped up anti-Semitism.
“If you go back over these last five years and try to find any details example of anti-Semitism in the party, out of half a million members 200 or 300 tweeted something anti-Semitic, that’s about it.
“There has been a complete absence of any serious incident.”
