Antisemitism is “repulsive” and must be exposed and defeated, David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, has said amid growing controversy over racism against Jews within the Labour party.
Miliband, who narrowly lost the Labour leadership contest in 2010, said the response to antisemitism “can’t be to turn away. It must be to engage, not to ignore.”
There was a duty to “highlight and expose the perpetrators and what they stand for. To fight and defeat their ideas”, he added.
Speaking at the annual dinner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Miliband added: “It should not be the Jewish community’s fight alone. It is everyone’s fight, everyone’s responsibility.”
Miliband, who is Jewish, did not explicitly mention Labour but his comments came as the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is facing mounting calls to root out antisemitic statements and behaviour by members.
Corbyn, who has launched an internal inquiry, said on Sunday that any member committing an act of antisemitism would be automatically excluded from the party.
Antisemitism was “abhorrent” and Labour was “absolutely resolute” in tackling it, he told the BBC. “Anyone who commits any act of antisemitism is auto-excluded from the party and an inquiry follows immediately. We will suspend any member who behaves that way.”
A Labour councillor from Luton was suspended at the weekend after a message claiming that Hitler was the “greatest man in history” appeared on her Twitter account. Aysegul Gurbuz, 21, apologised for the post, which dated to 2011.
Vicki Kirby, a former Labour parliamentary candidate from Woking, was suspended for the second time last month after a series of Twitter posts in which she apparently suggested Hitler might be a “Zionist God” and that Jews had “big noses”.
The party is also investigating allegations of antisemitic behaviour and intimidation at Oxford University Labour club after its co-chairman, Alex Chalmers, resigned claiming a large proportion of members “have some kind of problem with Jews”.
Last week, Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies, called on Corbyn to take concrete action to tackle antisemitism within the party’s ranks. “It would be incomprehensible for Mr Corbyn to remain inert and refuse to take this form of racism in his party seriously,” he said.
Claims of antisemitism among political activists spread to the Conservatives this week when the Bradford Telegraph and Argus reported that the deputy chairman of Bradford Conservative Association had been suspended for allegedly making inappropriate comments in a speech.
Abdul Zaman endorsed “misogyny and antisemitism” in his remarks, according to the local Labour MP, Naz Shah, who complained to David Cameron. Zaman’s party colleagues denied the claims.
