British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is at the center of yet another anti-Semitism row after recently surfaced photos show him attending an anti-Israel rally where Israel was compared to Nazism.
The pictures, posted on Twitter on Wednesday, show Corbyn walking in a 2009 march in Birmingham, England, where protesters held banners that described the Jewish state as “child killers” and “thirsty for blood,” while calling for a boycott of the Jewish state. At the front of the march demonstrators held a banner that called Gaza a “21st Century Concentration Camp” and accused Israel of war crimes.
One poster read “Zionism is the real terrorism,” and another turned the Star of David into a swastika. Images taken at the same rally show protesters burning the Israeli flag and comparing its government to Nazism, according to the United Kingdom’s Daily Mail.
The publication noted that Corbyn also gave a speech at the event.
EXCLUSIVE – In January 2009, @JeremyCorbyn attended an anti-Israel demo in Birmingham which was, for all intents and purposes, an antisemitic hate rally. Notably, he marched at the front of the demo behind an antisemitic banner that read “Gaza-21st Century Concentration Camp”… pic.twitter.com/CoDEkiejoM
— The Golem (@TheGolem_) July 31, 2019
A Labour Party spokesman responded to the photos saying, “Jeremy has a long and principled record of support for Palestinian rights and human rights, and that is the right thing to do. Like other politicians, he has attended many demonstrations, and is obviously not responsible for the banners that other people bring along.”
The photos surfaced a day before the Community Security Trust (CST) released a report noting that during the first six months of 2019, the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents to date were recorded in the United Kingdom, in comparison to the same period in previous years.