Speaker at UK Labour conference reportedly called for killing Israeli MKs
Anti-Israel activist Ewa Jasiewic urged Palestinians to ‘do the Knesset’ or ‘a politician bump-off’; she also vandalized a wall of the Warsaw Ghetto with ‘Free Gaza’ graffiti
A woman scheduled to speak at a UK Labour Party conference later this month once called for attacks against the Knesset and Israeli lawmakers, The Times reported Tuesday.
According to the report Ewa Jasiewicz, 40, a British-Polish anti-Israel activist, is scheduled to speak about the future of trade unions at the Momentum festival organized alongside Labour’s annual conference. Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who reportedly called her a “good friend,” is also scheduled to speak.
The Times said it had unearthed a report from Jasiewicz, written in 2002 when she was living and working in Jenin in the West Bank at the height of the Second Intifada, in which she suggested that terror groups should attack Israeli MKs instead of civilians.
According to the Times, Jasiewicz wrote that the son of the family she was staying with “went and opened fire on some Israeli civilians in a market somewhere a few months ago,” adding: “I don’t get why activists can’t go and do the Knesset or something, or do a sophisticated politician bump-off like the PFLP?”
She was referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist group that has conducted numerous terror attacks against Israel and Israeli citizens since it was formed in 1967, including the assassination of then-tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi in 2001.
Jasiewicz told The Times the comments were flippant and “in a private email which ended up being published on the PalSolidarity website in 2002 as was the case at times with emailed reports on Israeli occupation activity back then.”
“I do not and never have, advocated the harming of anybody and this was definitely not the intention of the comment in the email. I apologize for any harm or upset this has caused and I ask people to understand it in the context that it was written, both as a flippant comment in a private email and under conditions of a violent occupation,” she said.
Jasiewicz has a long history of anti-Israel activity and was deported from Israel in 2004, reportedly for aiding terror groups.
The announcement that Jasiewicz was set to speak at the Labour event initially drew outrage after it was revealed that she had in 2010 vandalized a remaining wall of the Warsaw Ghetto, spraying it with “Free Gaza and Palestine” graffiti.
I support #Scottish #indy & so not @UKlabour
However I find it worrying theres claims @momentum will have "an antisemite who vandalised jewish war graves" speak at an event
But she wrote "Free Gaza & Palestine" on the Warsaw Ghetto wall
Can there be a more poignant parallel?
. pic.twitter.com/MoVoYLZKfo— YES ???????????????????????????? Stay in & save lives (@YESthatcherDead) September 11, 2018
The wall was built in 1940, when the Nazi Germans occupying Poland closed the area of Warsaw they called the “Jewish district.” It was four meters (13 feet) high, including one meter of barbed wire on top.
Most of the ghetto’s 450,000 residents died of hunger and disease there or in the gas chambers of the Treblinka death camp.
The Germans destroyed the ghetto and most of the wall in 1943. Hundreds of residents resisted, but the Ghetto Uprising was crushed in May 1943 and almost all its fighters were killed.
According to the Daily Mail, Corbyn praised Jasiewicz during a rally in 2009 in support of Gaza and said she had moved him to tears with a description of the enclave he sent him.”
Euan Philipps, a spokesman for Labour Against Antisemitism, called for her to be removed from the program.
“Jon Lansman [founder of Momentum] and Jeremy Corbyn must personally intervene to ensure that Ms Jasiewicz is removed from the schedule for the Momentum Conference,” he told The Times.
The incident is the latest in a long stream of anti-Semitic incidents plaguing the UK opposition party and its virulently anti-Israel leader Corbyn.
Almost 40 percent of British Jews would “seriously consider emigrating” if Corbyn became prime minister, according to a poll conducted for The Jewish Chronicle published last week.
The crisis over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party — including its failure to fully adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance‘s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism until last Tuesday — has caused a major schism within its ranks and led Jews to express fears over their future in the country.
Corbyn says anti-Semitism has no place in the Labour Party, but he has been roundly criticized over reports of rampant anti-Jewish prejudice, for his own allegedly anti-Semitic statements and activities, and for not backing the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism. When the IHRA definition was adopted by his party last week, Corbyn sought in vain to add a caveat asserting that it is not anti-Semitic to call Israel’s existence racist.
