U.K. Labour Party Suspends Activist for Saying Jews Have 'Big Noses'

Vicki Kirby’s suspension over anti-Semitic tweets from 2014 adds to the growing sentiment that relations between Labour and the Jewish community have hit ‘rock bottom.’

JTA

Mar 16, 2016

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Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain's opposition Labour Party, speaks during the 2016 British Chamber of Commerce annual conference in London, U.K., on March 3, 2016.Credit: Luke MacGregor/Bloomberg

JTA

Mar 16, 2016

The Labour Party in Britain has suspended a member for the second time for saying Jews have “big noses” and “slaughter the oppressed.”

Vicki Kirby, a former parliamentary candidate, was suspended Monday. Her comments in old tweets resurfaced after she was made a local vice chair of the party last week.

Other tweets claimed that Hitler might be the “Zionist God” and that she would make sure to have her “kids teach their children how evil Israel is.”

Kirby originally was suspended from the party in 2014. She was readmitted and appointed vice chairman of Labour’s branch in Woking, a town in the southeast Surrey county.

Party leader Jeremy Corbyn had been under fire for allowing the appointment. Several party members brought up the issue at a parliamentary meeting on Monday, the Guardian reported. Senior Labour leader Louise Ellman said relations between the party and the Jewish community had hit “rock bottom.”

The party announced Kirby’s suspension hours after the meeting.

A spokesman for Corbyn said “he thinks that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are vile, he has spent his whole life campaigning against it and will continue to do so.”