Labour Party Suspends Diane Abbott For Minimizing Antisemitism

Diane Abbott is a Labour Party MP who appears to believe that only black people suffer from racism. Whatever it was that Jews suffered during centuries of massacres and expulsions in Europe, culminating in the German murders of six million men, women, and children because they were Jews, according to Diane Abbott it was not “racism.” For expressing this astonishing view, that “Jews do not suffer from racism,” Abbott has been suspended from the Labour Party while her views are being investigated. More on her statement, which is contained in a letter she sent to The Observer, can be found here: “Labour suspends Diane Abbott after letter claiming Jews do not suffer racism,” by Simon Rocker, The JC, April 23, 2023:

The Labour Party has suspended Diane Abbott, the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, following a letter in today’s Observer which argued that Jews do not suffer from racism.

Ms Abbott apologised earlier today and withdrew the letter, which had argued that “Irish, Jewish and Traveller [Roma] people” experienced prejudice but this was not the same as racism.

A Labour spokesman said, “The Labour Party completely condemns these comments which are deeply offensive and wrong.”

The chief whip had “suspended the Labour whip from Diane Abbott pending an investigation,” he added

In a statement on Twitter this morning, Ms Abbott, whose constituency has a large Strictly Orthodox Jewish population, said she wished to “wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and dissassociate myself from them”.

If Diane Abbott can so mischaracterize, and minimize, the hair-raising murderous antisemitism that over the centuries has resulted in the expulsions of Jews — from France, from England, from Spain — and the murders of millions of Jews, from those massacred in the Rhineland by Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land, to the Jews murdered for having engaged in altogether fictional “ritual murders” of Christian children, to the pogroms conducted by the Black Hundreds in Russia, as merely the result of “prejudice,” not “racism,” then she has no business being in Parliament. If she thinks that the latest and most horrifying mass killings of Jews that took place within living memory, in Europe between 1933 and 1945, was the result not of “racism” but of mere “prejudice,” she does indeed need to be suspended, not temporarily, but permanently, from the Labour Party. Her attempt to “wholly and unreservedly withdraw” her remarks and to “disassociate” herself from them ring hollow, an attempt to save her political skin after she realized the enormity of her misstep, and the ferocious, and justified, criticism her letter elicited.

“The errors, she explained, “arose in an initial draft being sent. But there is no excuse and I wish to apologise for any anguish caused.”.

Abbott’s short letter to The Observer did not read like a draft but as the carefully considered remarks of a black woman who thinks that only blacks suffer from racism. All others suffer only from “prejudice.” Was it “prejudice” that caused the killings of six million Jews? Wasn’t it, in fact, something far deeper and more sinister, a desire to eliminate the entire Jewish race from the face of the earth? Abbott wanted to lay claim, as a black person, to blacks being the sole victims of “racism,” and to minimize, as mere “prejudice,” what other groups have had to endure. The Jews would have been happy to endure “prejudice.” It was the gas chambers, the mobile gas vans, the crematoria where Jews were burned alive, the shooting of tens of thousands of Jews at one time at the edge of pits where the bodies would topple in, some still alive, the hangings, the diabolical tortures, Dr. Mengele’s “medical experiments” on Jewish children, that entitles us to be speak not of mere “prejudice,” but of the greatest atrocity in world history, fed by the worst racism.

Racism “takes many forms, and it is completely undeniable that Jewish people have suffered its monstrous effects,, as have Irish people, Travellers and many others.”

Does Abbott really think that just as “Jewish people have suffered its monstrous effects” so – to the same degree — have “Irish people” and “Travellers”? The suffering of the Jews throughout history has been on a completely different scale, in time and space, and of a completely different type – mass murder, mass torture — than what other groups have had to endure.

In her published letter, she had written that prejudice was “similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable.”

It was true, she had written, that “many types of white people” could experience prejudice. “But they are not all their lives subject to racism. In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote.”

Jews did not have to “sit at the back of the bus” in “pre-civil rights America” [sic], but on the other hand, black people were never herded into death camps, murdered by the millions with Zyklon-B, or murdered with shots to the back of the neck, or by being shoved into cattle cars, locked in for long trips during which so many of them died of suffocation, or were burned alive when thrown into crematoria, or shot at the edge of open pits. There is nothing comparable to the historical hell of the Jews, and Diane Abbott’s denial of this is intolerable. Her minimizing of Jewish suffering is akin to those who minimize the numbers killed in the Holocaust. She deserves to be taken to task by the Labour Party and its admirable new head, Sir Keir Starmer, the scourge of the Corbynistas, who expelled the antisemitic Corbyn himself from the party. It is likely that Abbott will remain suspended from the party; she has certainly earned such treatment.

But in any case, Diane Abbott – who had a brief affair with Jeremy Corbyn – is unlikely to be returned to Parliament after the current debacle. She has represented Hackney North and Stoke Newington since 1987; Hackney North has the largest Orthodox Jewish community in Europe; I don’t think she can any longer count on their support. So good will come of evil.