Peter Lazenby
This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
LABOUR leader Sir Keir Starmer was accused of exploiting a Holocaust memorial today by using it in a campaign video.
During his visit to Germany last week, Sir Keir and shadow foreign secretary David Lammy visited Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The memorial was used as a backdrop in a Labour campaign video, although the Holocaust was not mentioned in the video’s audio content.
The Campaign Against Anti-semitism said that the video breached a longstanding convention that politicians avoid using the memorial to promote themselves.
Joe Glasman of the group said: “Exploiting a visit to the Holocaust memorial like this for campaigning purposes is not just tasteless, it is manipulative and repulsive.
“But to incorporate the memorial as the backdrop for a political clip that does not even mention the Holocaust is an insult.”
A Labour spokesperson said: “Visiting the Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe was a very moving experience for [Sir] Keir Starmer which is why we wanted to include it in our record of his visit to Berlin.
“As Labour leader, [Sir] Keir Starmer has shown an absolute determination to rid the Labour Party, and our wider society, of the scourge of anti-semitism.”
But Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists’ Group said that there is a longstanding debate among anti-fascists about the misuse of Holocaust memorial sites for unconnected purposes — a phenomenon that has become known as “Auschwitz selfies.”
She said: “You might hesitate to pass judgement about a 14-year-old on a school trip posing with friends, but Starmer’s USP is rooting out anti-semitism.
“The current Labour Party leadership’s claimed sensitivity to Jewish history has been used to justify disciplining and suspending unprecedented numbers of Jewish and non-Jewish members.
“Such heightened awareness apparently didn’t suggest to them that it might be grotesque to take a film crew to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to use it as a backdrop for Starmer and Lammy to make an election video.
“But maybe they didn’t realise where they were, because they didn’t even mention the Nazi genocide in the film.
“This would be consistent with their actual commitment to challenging racism which we can judge by the Forde report into racism in the Labour Party being kept under lock and key gathering dust for the last two years.”
