UK’s Corbyn, whose party engaged in antisemitic discrimination, campaigns for Mamdani

NEW YORK — The former head of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, highlighted New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s anti-Israel position in an address to Mamdani’s supporters on Sunday.

Corbyn and Mamdani are both known for their far-left anti-Israel activism.

Corbyn dragged the Labour Party through a series of antisemitism scandals, and faced allegations of antisemitism himself, before a decisive general election defeat in 2019 and his resignation as party leader in April 2020. In October 2020, Labour under Corbyn’s leadership was found guilty by Britain’s anti-racism watchdog of antisemitic discrimination.

New York Jewish leaders have said Mamdani has also crossed the line into antisemitism, and his expected victory in Tuesday’s election has alarmed swaths of the Jewish community in New York.

Corbyn gave a speech to Mamdani volunteers during a Zoom meeting, saying that Mamdani will be “a voice for peace, a voice for justice around the world, and a voice that will ensure that the world doesn’t pass by on the other side while the terrible genocide goes on in Gaza.”

Corbyn said that the UK has had 32 “national demonstrations” since October 2023, and that he had spoken at “every single one of them.”

“What I’ve said is that we’ll be there for as long as it takes to bring about justice for the Palestinian people,” he said.

“There’s so much that we can work together on and I admire the DSA and what it does,” Corbyn said, referring to the far-left Democratic Socialists of America, which hosted him.

Organizers said more than 100 people were on the call. Mamdani is a longtime Democratic Socialists of America member, who is running for mayor as the Democratic party’s nominee.

Introducing Corbyn, DSA organizers did not mention Corbyn’s antisemitism scandals, only that he had “stepped down” after Labour’s loss in 2019 and had been “barred from standing as a Labour candidate.”

The advertisement for the event that the New York DSA sent to its members said the advertisement had been paid for by Mamdani’s campaign.

After Corbyn’s speech, DSA organizers instructed volunteers on the call about how to phone bank for Mamdani’s campaign. The general election is on Tuesday.

Corbyn’s speech also applauded Mamdani’s policy proposals, including for subsidized child care, housing and transportation. Critics have called the policies unrealistic.

“I’m very excited by Zohran’s campaign, by his ideas, and to help him on the campaign,” Corbyn said. “There’s an awful lot of us around the world looking on in admiration.”

Mamdani did not appear on the call.

A reporter from The Forward, a Jewish news outlet in New York, said he had been removed from the call. Last week, a reporter for a Jewish outlet in Portland, Oregon, said he had been booted from a virtual event hosted by the local DSA chapter. A reporter from the conservative City Journal said he had been blocked from a Mamdani rally last week.

Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a pro-Israel centrist who is Mamdani’s leading challenger in the mayoral race, condemned the event with Corbyn.

“Having Jeremy Corbyn — someone whose party was found to have committed unlawful acts of discrimination against Jewish people under his leadership — phone-banking for [Mamdani] says everything you need to know,” Cuomo said on X.

Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the ADL, shared a flier for the event and said, “You. Can’t. Make. It. Up.”

Since leaving the Labour party, Corbyn has remained a member of the UK parliament, serving as an independent. He launched a new anti-Israel party earlier this year.

A landmark October 2020 report by the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission ruled that Labour under Corbyn had broken the law in its “inexcusable” handling of complaints about antisemitism.

The period saw Jewish members and lawmakers leave the party in droves as criticism of Israel and Zionism veered into toxic antisemitism from Corbyn supporters.

The party suspended Corbyn in 2020 after he claimed opponents had “dramatically overstated” the scale of antisemitism in Labour for “political reasons.” He had represented Labour in parliament since 1983.