Baroness Jenny Tonge, who is known for her anti-Israel attitude, claimed following the Conservative party’s victory in the British election that the country’s Chief Rabbi “must be dancing in the street”.
Tonge, a former Liberal Democrat politician who quit the party after being suspended in 2016, took to Facebook following Thursday’s overwhelming Conservative victory, reported the UK-based Jewish News.
“The Chief Rabbi must be dancing in the street. The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn,” she wrote.
Before the election in an unprecedented move, the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, published an article in which he criticized Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s "utterly inadequate" response to anti-Semitism within its ranks.
In a subsequent interview with the BBC, Corbyn was asked four times whether he would like to apologize over the party’s failure to clamp down on the anti-Semitism within the party, and refused to do so.
Later, Corbyn gave an interview to ITV’s Philip Schofield in which the interviewer pressed the Labour leader to apologize to the Jewish community. Corbyn then replied, “Obviously I’m very sorry for what has happened, but I want to make this clear, I am dealing with it. I have dealt with it.”
This is not the first time that Tonge has spoken out against Jews and Israel.
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.”
Four years later, 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”.
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.
In 2016, Tonge was 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.
The following year, she accused the Community Security Trust (CST), which authored a report finding a rise in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, of displaying “a perpetual victim mentality” and of failing to help “real decent Jewish people”.