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Jackie Walker compares her Labour suspension for alleged antisemitism to a 'lynching'

Ms Walker was suspended from Labour twice last year. In neither case was she suspended for anything she had said about Israel

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Jackie Walker, the former vice-chair of the hard-left Momentum organisation, has appeared to compare being suspended from the Labour Party after making allegedly antisemitic comments with being lynched.

The activist is due to stage a one-woman show called The Lynching at the Edinburgh Festival in August.

A poster promoting a preview performance in Kent includes the slogan: “What they wouldn’t let Jackie Walker tell you”.

It describes The Lynching, to be performed at the Red Hall in Broadstairs on Sunday.  as “the one woman show about a real-life witchhunt: an attempt to destroy Jeremy Corbyn and an entire political movement”.

The poster also includes a picture of Ms Walker next to a dangling rope, overlaid by the words “To oppose Israel is not to be antisemitic”. Near the bottom of the poster is a quote attributed to Noam Chomsky, the Jewish far-left linguist and philosopher. It reads: “I wholeheartedly support the right of anyone to criticise Israel without being branded antisemitic. That goes in particular for Jackie Walker”.  

Ms Walker was suspended from Labour twice last year. In neither case was she suspended for anything she had said about Israel.

Last May, the JC reported comments Ms Walker had made on her Facebook page, in which she referred to Jews as “chief financiers of the slave trade”.  She was suspended, only to be reinstated later the same month. She subsequently appeared together with Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party, at an event in Kent in early September.

Two weeks later, at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, Ms Walker attended a Jewish Labour Movement training session on tackling antisemitism in which she claimed that she had not seen a definition of Jew-hate which she could “work with”.

She also questioned why Jewish schools needed particular security to protect themselves from possible attack, and said that Holocaust Memorial Day should remember genocides other than the Shoah.

HMD does in fact mark genocides other than the Holocaust.

Ms Walker was suspended from the party again in early October for her new comments, with Labour’s National Executive Committee referring her case to the party’s National Constitutional Committee in March of this year. There has been no date specified for a final ruling on her status within the Labour party.  

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