LABOUR was mired in another row over anti-Semitism after one of Jeremy Corbyn’s key allies said Holocaust Memorial Day was too Jewish.
Speaking at anti-Semitism training session organised at the Labour party conference, Momentum vice-chair Jackie Walker incorrectly said Holocaust Memorial Day only remembered the Jewish victims of the Nazi’s genocide. “In terms of Holocaust day, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Holocaust day was open to all people who experienced Holocaust?” she told organisers the Jewish Labour Movement.
In a recording of the event, other people in the room can be heard telling Walker Holocaust Memorial Day actually commemorates all victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and other genocides.
“In practice, it’s not actually circulated and advertised as such,” she said. “I was looking for information and I still haven’t heard a definition of antisemitism that I can work with.”
Walker had previously been suspended from Labour party after she took to Facebook to claim Jewish people were “chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade” and arguing “the Jewish Holocaust does not allow Zionists to do what they want”.
Jeremy Newmark, the chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, said Walker should resign: “I am appalled that somebody who has already caused great hurt and pain to so many Jewish people by promoting an antisemitic myth would come to a training session designed to help party activists address antisemitism and use the occasion to challenge the legitimacy of the training itself.”
Karen Pollock, the Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust said there were still questions for Walker to answer. “Whilst Holocaust Memorial Day rightly and proudly commemorates the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, one has to wonder why Ms Walker takes issue with commemorating the mass extermination of Jews in its own right.”
The training event on Tuesday was one of the recommendations in a recent report on anti-Semitism in the Labour party.
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