Jenny Tonge, the British lawmaker well-known for her virulent anti-Israel statements, is again blaming Israel for the rise of anti-Semitic incidents in her country, the British Jewish News reports.
Responding to a report which found that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain had risen to a record number in 2016, Tonge accused the Community Security Trust (CST), which authored the report, of displaying “a perpetual victim mentality” and of failing to help “real decent Jewish people”.
“Do you NEVER consider that the actions of the Israeli government are contributing towards this rise?” wrote Tonge in response to the report.
“The perpetual victim mentality of your organization is counterproductive and does not help real decent Jewish people,” she charged, according to the Jewish News.
This is not the first time that Tonge has linked anti-Semitism in Britain with Israeli policy. In October, she claimed that Israel's treatment of Palestinian Arabs was behind the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain.
Tonge was later suspended by the Lib Dems after hosting a meeting at the House of Lords in which one audience member blamed Jews for the Holocaust and Israel was compared to the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist group.
In 2004, she said that she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were an Arab living in the Palestinian Authority.
In 2006 Tonge said that “the pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the western world, its financial grips. I think they've probably got a grip on our party.”
In 2010, Tonge accused Israel of being the “cause of terrorism” and said that the West's treatment of Muslims was caused by what she called “Holocaust guilt” and the “power of the pro-Israel lobby”.
And in 2012, she resigned from her position of party whip, a task equivalent in the United States to speaker, after she spoke about Israel’s demise at an event promoting the boycott of the Jewish state.
(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)