UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn dodged giving an apology for his party’s record on antisemitism four times during a television interview broadcast in the run-up to December’s snap general election.
The one-on-one interview with Andrew Neil, one of Britain’s top political interrogators, is one of a series in the lead up to the December 12th general election, and saw Corbyn asked about antisemitism on the day he and his party were called “unfit for office” by the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom.
When asked to account for the comments of Ephraim Mirvis, Mr Corbyn contradicted the Rabbi, saying his assertion that Labour had failed to fight antisemitism within the party was “not right”. In all, ten minutes of the 30-minute interview was dedicated to the issue of antisemitism, which has dogged Mr Corbyn’s leadership since he took the helm of the Labour Party.
As interviewer Andrew Neil told Mr Corbyn members of the British Jewish community were afraid of him taking power and were even planning to leave the country if he did, the Labour leader reacted with clear frustration.
When invited to apologise to the Jewish community, Mr Corbyn repeatedly ignored the question, instead making references to broad themes of combatting racism in society, which he called a “poison”.
In an explosive public intervention in the general election campaign on Tuesday morning, the first of its kind by a chief Rabbi, Mirvis said: “It is a failure to see this as a human problem rather than a political one. It is a failure of culture. It is a failure of leadership. A new poison – sanctioned from the top – has taken root in the Labour Party.”
Jewish Leaders Condemn Corbyn’s ‘Meaningless’ Response to Labour Party’s ‘Institutional’ Anti-Semitism https://t.co/0Lb3uRSw8V
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 4, 2018
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