London – The Labour Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for
Hastings and Rye, Michelle Harris, has been dropped from the local Labour
Party’s shortlist of candidates following a furore on
Twitter about her social media posts.
Ms Harris, who is a barrister at London-based law firm One Pump
Court, is said to have shared a number of offensive posts including an
illustration showing a small barbed wire enclave entitled “Palestine”
surrounded by Israel with a caricature of Benjamin Netanyahu saying: “It looks
like a modern version of the Warsaw Ghetto”. Disturbingly, Ms Harris commented
alongside this: “I have often said the Holocaust victims who died with dignity
must be turning in their graves at the horrors done in the name of Judaism.
Gaza is a ghetto being shelled.”
Ms Harris is also alleged to have shared posts incorrectly
claiming that the Israel Defence Force deliberately targets pregnant
Palestinian women in order to kill their babies.
Mr Harris has also reportedly posted that she would be
protesting against what she called “the antisemitic Witch hunt run by the
media, Israel Lobby and Traitorous Blairites against Jeremy Corbyn, Ken
Livingstone and the Labour left”.
Ms Harris has now deleted a number of tweets and Facebook posts,
announcing on a Labour Party supporters’ Facebook page that she was no longer
shortlisted to become Labour’s parliamentary candidate following what she
described as a “smear campaign” and claiming that the allegations made against
her are false and are an attempt to “silence Corbyn supporters”.
As a practising Barrister, Ms Harris is bound by her
profession’s Code of Conduct and Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Regulatory
Enforcement Unit is now filing a complaint.
At present,
there is no record of any disciplinary action being taken against Ms Harris by
the Labour Party, however, the circumstances and outcomes of any such action
would remain unknown, owing to the conditions of secrecy imposed
by the Chakrabarti report into antisemitism in the Labour Party.
Campaign Against Antisemitism is grateful for information
provided by anonymous sources and by Labour Against Antisemitism.
