Fifth columnists at Labour HQ

Pete Gregson
4 min readAug 7, 2019

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The Labour Party appears set to expel me for voicing opposition to Zionist racism and Israeli apartheid. I am a Party activist of some 40 years standing and have, since 1st October, been subject to an Investigation by the Labour Disputes Team. I responded to the first tranche of 19 questions which I believed were fair- I was given two weeks to respond; my answers are at tinyurl.com/investigationresponse

However on July 24 I received a second tranche; my answers were to be put before Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC). This time the questions were vicious, slanted and accusatory. I responded within the time but am angry about the Disputes Team’s attitude. I have complained along the following lines to the Labour Leader’s Office, all 39 members of the party’s NEC and the Party’s Complaints Team. The submission to the Disputes Team is in the embedded document at the end.

“I write to complain about the 50 questions that were put to me a week ago by the Disputes Team, demanding an answer within 7 days. They seek confidentiality, but the Legal and Governance Unit, of which they form part, breaches confidentiality whenever it suits. My suspension from the Party was broadcast to the Jewish News a week before I knew of it.

There are big problems with the Disputes Team; the Panorama programme that slated Labour about bogus anti-Semitism did not reveal the most important problem — that we are still riddled with fifth-columnists at HQ.

These people, clearly from the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), do not favour a Labour Government under Corbyn and are doing their best to expel leftie Labour activists like me. They support apartheid in Israel; they have not a care about how much their questioning reflects a bias; not once do they acknowledge Israel’s racist nature. By siding with that racist colony so enthusiastically, they betray the most appalling Islamophobia.

They cannot comprehend how much they undermine Labour’s commitment to social justice. They undermine our ability to combat racism. They are utterly in breach of the rulebook. In short, one wonders not only why they are in Labour but why they have been recruited into this most sensitive area of Labour investigations, that of anti-Semitism, when they exhibit such flagrant support for the Zionist creed.

I disagree with Corbyn’s statement that the Labour Party must be a home for Zionists. In the same breath, almost, he says we must support the Palestinians also. Yet Zionists are relentlessly expansionist for yet more land from Arabs in the middle east, in addition to what they have already stolen from Palestine. They will never accommodate the Arabs and give them equality, for by definition their state must be Jewish. That means, to them, that Jews always must rule and all other ethnoreligious groups must lose out. Corbyn’s position is therefore contradictory. He cannot support Zionists in Labour, for that means supporting racism and the ubiquitous Islamophobia they peddle.

I hope the complaints team will investigate how many of the Disputes Team are in the JLM and reflect upon the pro-Zionist nature of that body. I hope they see we must replace these racists with non-racists for without such a rational action we shall face many more attacks from within. Our Labour Party can no longer tolerate this bogus anti-Semitism, for it risks promoting real antagonism against Jews.

For every time one challenges a Zionist, they retort that they are a Jew. But that is an insult to decent Jews. As Rabbi Cohen says in my attached statement to the Disputes Team “Judaism is an ancient, ethical, moral, compassionate and religious way of life. Going back, as stated earlier, thousands of years. Whereas Zionism (the movement and concept that begat the State of Israel) is a nationalistic, harsh, inconsiderate, secular and racist way of life, barely 120 years old, a totally new concept. It is totally incompatible with and diametrically unacceptable to Judaism on grounds of religious belief and religious humanitarian grounds.”

So there you have it. These Zionists are incompatible with Judaism. Let’s see the back of them.”

My response to the 50 questions (which runs to 65 pages), and which was drafted with some help from Labour Against Zionist Islamophobic Racism (LAZIR) members (of which I am chair) can be viewed at tinyurl.com/disputeresponse

If readers would also like to complain about the creeping Zionism at Labour HQ, I urge them to email Labour using tinyurl.com/zionistcomplaint

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Pete Gregson

Edinburgh-based, with 30 years activism in Labour, fired from the Council for whistle-blowing on a scheming Council officer; now employed again. Campaigner..