It wasn’t long before a letter to the Daily Telegraph from a group of concerned members of the Anglo-Jewish community about Labour’s attack on the Tories new Euro extremist friends came under close scrutiny.
So a hat tip to the Left Foot Forward site, who worked out after some not too time-consuming research, that most of the signatories weren’t neutrals in the debate by any means, but significant players in the Tory party too.
People like former Conservative cabinet minister Lord Young, Howard Leigh, co-treasurer of the Conservative party, party supporters Flo Kaufmann and Benjamin Perl, Richard Harrington, the chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel, Tory Brent councillor Alan Mendoza, and 21 others.
Although the letter didn’t name Foreign Secretary David Miliband MP, it clearly alluded to his recent attacks on Michal Kaminski, the Polish leader of the European Parliamentary group set up jointly with the Tories, and Roberts Zile from the Latvian LNNK Party, who both visited last month’s Conservative Party conference.
Subsequently, JLM Chair Louise Ellman MP hit back at those authors of the letter seeking to defend the Tories’ new friends, as reported in the JC:
…in a statement, Mrs Ellman retaliated by launching a fresh attack on leading ECR members Michal Kaminski and Richard Ziles the two men and saying concern about them was above party politics.
She said that Mr Kaminski’s opposition to the Polish president’s apology for the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by their fellow-Poles “stands condemned”. His defence, that to expect Poles as a nation to apologise for the crime would be equivalent to asking Jews to apologise for the crimes of Jewish Communists, she said, “shows at best, grotesque insensitivity to the unique horror of the Holocaust”.
As for his pro-Israel position, she contended: “Are we to embrace the BNP leader, Nick Griffin because he now ‘supports’ Israel? It is good that Polish-Israeli relations are so positive, but this does not mean that we should ignore Kaminski’s dubious stances.”
She described as “repulsive” the Fatherland and Freedom Party’s [LNNK] support for the “annual commemoration” for the Latvian division of the Waffen SS.”