Britain’s Labour Party Suspends Member for ‘Big Noses’ Jibe at Jews
The Labour Party in Britain has suspended a member for the second time for saying Jews have “big noses” and “slaughter the oppressed.”
Vicki Kirby, a former parliamentary candidate, was suspended Monday. Her comments in old tweets resurfaced after she was made a local vice chair of the party last week.
Other tweets claimed that Hitler might be the “Zionist God” and that she would make sure to have her “kids teach their children how evil Israel is.”
Kirby originally was suspended from the party in 2014. She was readmitted and appointed vice chairman of Labour’s branch in Woking, a town in the southeast Surrey county.
Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had been under fire for allowing the appointment. Several party members brought up the issue at a parliamentary meeting on Monday, the Guardian reported. Senior Labour leader Louise Ellman said relations between the party and the Jewish community had hit “rock bottom.”
The party announced Kirby’s suspension hours after the meeting.
A spokesman for Corbyn said “he thinks that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are vile, he has spent his whole life campaigning against it and will continue to do so.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
