Dutch Activist Says He Was Beaten While Protesting Jeremy Corbyn Visit
AMSTERDAM (JTA) — A Dutch anti-discrimination activist said he was assaulted while protesting a visit to the Netherlands by the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
The chairman of the CiJo group said he received several blows to his neck after he and two activists from the group unfurled a banner reading “Labour: For the many, not the Jew” at a meeting in The Hague hosted Thursday by the Dutch Labor party for Corbyn. Hidde van Koningsveld also said his glasses were damaged and that he intended to press charges.
The protest was over claims of anti-Semitic behavior by Corbyn, who in 2009 called Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends” and in 2013 defended an anti-Semitic mural, and within his party.
Lodewijk Asscher, the leader of the Dutch Labor party, condemned the violence, as he called it.
“Terrible that this happened, no one is justified to use violence in my name, ever,” Asscher wrote on Twitter.
But a spokesperson for Dutch Labor, who was not named, told the De Telgraaf daily that whereas there “may have been some pushing, violence is a strong word for it.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO