London
– According to the ‘Sunday Times’, Labor Party club members called Jewish
students ‘Zios’, dubbed the Auschwitz death camp ‘a cash cow’, sang about
rockets being fired at Tel Aviv.
Members
of a prominent Oxford University student group affiliated with the British
Labor Party laughed at Jewish victims of terrorism and made fun of the
Holocaust, the Sunday Times reported.
According
to the British weekly, club members called Jewish students “Zios,” dubbed the
Auschwitz death camp “a cash cow,” sang about rockets being fired at Tel Aviv
and expressed approval for both attacks on Parisian synagogues in 2014 and the
shooting of four Jews in a Paris supermarket the following year.
A
number of students belonging to the club spoke to the newspaper following the
failure of the group’s national leadership to publish the results of an
internal investigation more than a week after its completion.
The
Labor Club first came under fire last month due to the resignation of Oxford
co-chairman Alex Chalmers, who alleged that “the attitudes of certain members
of the club towards certain disadvantaged groups was becoming poisonous.”
“Whether it be members of the Executive throwing around
the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux
Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their
‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of
indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former co-chair claiming that ‘most accusations
of anti-Semitism are just the Zionists crying wolf,’ a large proportion of both
OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem
with Jews,” Chalmers lamented on Facebook.
Soon
afterwards, an investigation was announced, with the club’s leadership stating
that it “wholeheartedly” condemned anti-Semitism and that it would cooperate
with the investigation, encouraging its members to come forward.
Members
of the group that did testify, however, were soon disillusioned, turning to the
press rather than wait for the results to be published.
Last
month the group received a harsh repudiation by former Labor Party chief Ed
Miliband, who announced that he would not speak at Oxford until the
investigation was completed.
