A Labour Party activist has been suspended for comments he made on social media about Labour’s Deputy Leader, Tom Watson, claiming the MP was in the pay of “Jewish donors” to attack Corbyn.
Tom Watson has been subject of online abuse this weekend after he spoke out against Labour’s handling of the anti-Semitism crisis. A hashtag campaign also emerged to try and get Mr Watson to resign.
George McManus, who the Jewish News reports is backed by Momentum and was standing for a place on Labour’s National Policy Forum, tweeted that Watson had received “£50,000+ from Jewish donors”, adding “at least Judas only got 30 pieces of silver”.
Momentum founder Jon Lansman also decried the McManus tweet as anti-Semitic.
Lansman tweeted: “Do you not realise that Trevor Chinn is associated with the most progressive Jewish causes and charities like the New Israel Fund and Yachad! Your assumptions about Jews’ political attitudes are I am afraid anti-Semitic”. He later deleted this tweet, possibly due to a backlash from Corbyn supporters.
McManus later apologised to Watson, writing on Facebook: “I’d like to apologise to Tom Watson for my drawing an analogy between accepting money from Jewish donors and the biblical story of the betrayal by Judas.”
“I fully accept that such an analogy is wrong and am sorry for making the comparison. I have now deleted the original post.”
McManus’s Facebook page also shows that he recently denied any problem of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, saying the “row has been deliberately manipulated to undermine Corbyn”.
McManus has been suspended from the Labour party and is under investigation.
