Labour: ‘Anti-Semitic’ Warsaw Ghetto Vandal to Speak at Corbyn Event

Warsaw ghetto wall
Sean Gallup/Getty
Liam Deacon

A leftist activist who sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on the last surviving walls of the Warsaw ghetto, who has been ejected from Israel has been invited to speak alongside the Labour Party conference.

Ewa Jasiewicz, a British anti-Israel activist, will speak at an event convened by Momentum, the powerful pressure group formed around the leadership campaign of Jeremy Corbyn.

She caused outrage in 2010 with her “desecration” of the site in Poland, where an estimated 92,000 Jews died and 300,000 more were detained before being sent to extermination camps, The Times reports.

“The graffiti is antisemitic and so is trying to defend it”, wrote left wing Jewish activist Mikey Franklin in reply to communist blogger and key Corbyn ally Ash Sarkar.

“This graffiti hijacks Jewish historical trauma to assign collective blame to Jews for the occupation of Palestine”, he added.

Jasiewicz and fellow activist Yonatan Shapira sprayed the words “Liberate all ghettos” and “Free Gaza and Palestine” on one of the few original walls from the ghetto.

Speaking alongside Jasiewicz at Momentum’s rally will be party leader Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, the Labour shadow chancellor.

The so-called ‘World Transformed’ event will take place in parallel with Labour’s party conference in Liverpool and amid an on-going anti-Semitism row in the party.

The Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, said at the time Ms Jasiewicz’s graffiti was “tainted with anti-semitism”.

A British Jewish charity, the Community Security Trust (CST), called it an act of “arrogance and callousness” marking a “new low” in “cemetery desecration”. The entire ghetto was in effect a mass grave, they added.

The CST added Sunday: “This is exactly the kind of obsessive anti-Israel hatred and abuse of the Holocaust that is central to Labour’s problem of anti-semitism.

“If Momentum have any decency or integrity, they will withdraw their invitation.”

Jasiewicz was also expelled from Israel in 20o4 after a court said her anti-Israel activist group had been “exploited, whether consciously or unconsciously, for different and dangerous goals”.

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