Labour's Sturmer: witchhunter supremo

Email from the Witchunters of the London Labour Party

From: London General

Date: 24 January 2023 at 20:09:05 GMT

To: stephenkapos@gmail.com

Subject: FAO: Stephen Kapos

Dear Stephen,

It has been brought to the attention of the Labour Party that you have been advertised as a speaker for an event entitled ‘Zionism During the Holocaust - Reclaiming the Memory of All Those Who Died’, hosted by Socialist Labour Network on Friday 27th January 2023.

In line with Labour Party rules, Socialist Labour Network is a group which the NEC of the party has determined is incompatible with Labour Party values. Any support for the organisation would likely be deemed in breach of Party rules and may lead to expulsion.

Yours sincerely,

London Labour

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Stephen Kapos’s Reply to Labour’s Witchhunters

To: London General

Labour Party 26th January

2023

Dear London General,

Thank you for your emailed letter of the 24th of January giving me advance warning that I am likely to be expelled from the Party if I were to speak from the panel as a Holocaust survivor at the SLN (Socialist Labour Network) Webinar on the 27th January — on Holocaust Memorial Day.

The Holocaust is the most important single example of genocide, which at its worst descended into an industrial process of mass murder of millions.

As a child survivor and one of the fewer and fewer still living direct witnesses to the Holocaust I feel a compelling duty to bear witness and speak out about it at any platform that would invite me and to any audience ready to listen.

I am an activist for Palestinian human rights and an active member of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in its Camden Branch. The defence of Palestinians living under a brutal occupation is very important to me, particularly as a Holocaust survivor. Palestinians live under a system of apartheid as recognised by Amnesty International and other major human-rights organisations. Those are my political beliefs which I claim are protected characteristics under the Equalities Act 2010.

I am not a member of SLN nor have I been following its activities, but via the book to be discussed on the 27th I have a general understanding of SLN’s views on present-day Zionism (as a political movement ) and on some of the actions of the Zionist movement during the Holocaust and WWII. I am in sympathy with some of those views on the grounds of my political beliefs mentioned above. I have personal experience of the Kastner project in Hungary which was driven by Zionist ideology.

My father was a victim of Kastner’s scheme and ended up stranded in the Belsen and Theresienstadt concentration camps. I was myself briefly interned in a Kastner-run detention camp in Budapest.

You make mention of Labour Party values.

I learnt about Labour values during my party activism in the period when Frank Dobson was our MP and I worked in a warm and friendly atmosphere prominently on various election campaigns.

Those values were very different to that of the present leadership whose values permit intimidation, banning of discussion of some of the most vital political topics, disregard for the Party’s own rules, and for natural justice, the drastic reduction of inner party democracy, extreme factionalism, lack of support for striking workers.

I do not share these values.

Please accept my immediate resignation from the Labour Party effective from tomorrow, i.e. from the 27th of January 2023. Your attempt to effectively bar me from speaking about the Holocaust on Holocaust Memorial Day was the last straw for me.

In the short term the Tories are self-destructing which may well bring the Labour Party into government soon.

In the long term this period of the Party’s history will be remembered with shame: this was when MacCarthyism was revived and imported into the Labour Party — and into the political life of the UK itself.

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Kapos

Copies to : Sir Keir Starmer MP,

The Secretary, Holborn & St. Pancras CLP.

(pls forward)

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With thanks toTony Greenstein.