Andrew Feinstein

Andrew Feinstein

JVL controversy

In 2022 Al Jazeera produced four films about machinations designed to discredit Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters.

According to Leah Levane, co-chair of Jewish Voice for Labour, writing in Morning Star:

The series shows that there is a hierarchy of racism, that anti-semitism has been used as a factional tool, that there has been inappropriate trolling of left-wing party members and much more. Some of the findings echo those outlined in the equally ignored Forde report.

JVL’s media officer Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi and JVL co-chair Jenny Manson also appear in the films, explaining the abuse they and other left-wing Jews critical of Israel have suffered.

We hear a recording of vile insulting and anti-semitic abuse Manson received calling her “Nazi scum” and more, and saying that she would die in a gas chamber. Such abuse is surely related to these oft-repeated allegations of Labour anti-semitism and the grievous insult that Jewish Voice for Labour members are “sham Jews and anti-semitism deniers.”

Many readers will know that Idrissi was elected as one of the representatives of constituency Labour parties to the party’s governing national executive committee (NEC). Two days before this year’s conference, she was suspended and so denied access to the conference and to the NEC.

There is coverage of how Palestinian voices and perspectives are ignored. Ghada Karmi, a Palestinian activist, expelled from her Jerusalem home as a child in 1948, was stopped from speaking at her CLP about her own experiences as a Palestinian. She has now been expelled from the party.

Peter Oborne, a Conservative and one of the makers of the programme along with Richard Sanders, wonders whether, in the summer of 2019, it was possible to “say anything you liked about Corbyn’s Labour Party.”

Andrew Feinstein is a Jewish South African activist who was an ANC MP when Nelson Mandela was president. He said that, in effect, he was being asked whether “to choose anti-racism as defined by my constituency MP Keir Starmer or to continue to live my principles and values as taught to me by Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.” He is under investigation.

The findings of this documentary series must be investigated and the allegations of racism, if found to be true, must result in disciplinary action.

The Forde report called for, above all, a change to the culture in the Labour Party. The experiences revealed in these documentaries show the culture to be toxic.^[1]