Thread by @schneiderhome

Interesting to see Ruth Smeeth and Lee Harpin spring to Keir Starmer’s defence over the use of Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a backdrop for a social media video, with Harpin calling criticism an attempt “to manufacture a political row.”

1/9

A different line was taken in 2019 when Smeeth stormed out of a meeting of Labour’s MPs accusing the party leadership of failing to “even get the dates of the Holocaust right”.

She left the meeting in what looked like tears & briefed journos waiting in the corridor outside. 2/9

She was referring to a pamphlet, ‘No Place for Antisemitism’, that Labour published as part of member education.

I was the author & it was also my job to answer questions from the journos after the meeting.

At the back of the room, I worried: had I made a terrible mistake? 3/9

I pulled up the pamphlet on my phone and found the supposedly offending passage.

“Between 1941 and 1945… the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews.”

Correct, I thought, but I triple checked the historical consensus which takes 1941 as the start of genocide. 4/9

I’ll just explain to the journalists that Smeeth is mistaken, I thought, and it will be fine. They won’t write it up once I explain because they’d have to say she’s wrong.

Then proceeded one of the weirder exchanges I ever had when taking questions from a pack of journos.

5/9

Lee Harpin, then of the Jewish Chronicle, who I presumed must have known that I was right and Smeeth was wrong, led the questioning on the dates of the Holocaust.

I explained that “the policy of extermination began in 1941, which is why the academic consensus is 1941-1945.” 6/9

I went on to say that “of course, there were grotesquely discriminatory policies for the entirety of the antisemitic Nazi government, from 1933 onwards, but the commonly accepted time period for the Holocaust is 1941-1945.”

Harpin provided no alternative to the consensus. 7/9

So I was surprised to read him write:

“Jewish Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has launched a furious attack on Jeremy Corbyn's bid to launch a fightback over the party's antisemitism crisis - accusing the leadership of bungling the dates of the Nazi Holocaust in campaign literature.” 8/9

His article suggests Smeeth was correct & Labour was wrong (using language like “later tried to claim” for our rebuttal), despite either him knowing that’s not the case or able to take five minutes to look it up.

Manufacture a political row indeed.

9/9
thejc.com/news/uk/jewish…