 I think it's fair to say that Labour's anti-semitism row isn't going away any time soon, especially after one of its longest-serving MPs likened the party's disciplinary investigation to Nazi Germany, so it seemed. Jeremy Corbyn today refused to answer questions on the controversy after becoming involved in a row last month with Dame Margaret Hodge. Well, for more than this, we're joined by the co-founder of Navarra Media, Aaron Bostani. I'm always lovely to see you. And what is... Can we just start with the very straight, quirk forward question? What is the charge laid at the door of Margaret Hodge in all of this? Well, it's subjective, isn't it? I watched the interview yesterday and what I heard was a comparison of her experience to that of 1930s Germany. She explicitly said, this... I thought to myself, this must be what it felt like. She compared Labour supporters and party members and activists, the very people who helped her win her seat again in 2017. She compared them to the sports of Donald Trump Boris Johnson and she compared her experience, the investigation into her, to McCarthyism. So I heard a series of increasingly absurd propositions. I just want to be absolutely clear as to your argument. You tweeted something earlier on and we're not springing in this on you. These are your website, but involving Beth Rigby, our deputy political editor. I just want to put it up. It was basically posing two questions to both Beth Rigby and Dan Hodges, the political commentator. Highlmayer, actual Holocaust survivor, racist to compare Israel's treatment of Palestine to 1930s Germany. And then the second question, who are we to judge Margaret Hodge when she compares a disciplinary letter to the Holocaust? First and foremost, when has Beth Rigby ever said that Highlmayer was racist? That was a central pivot of the mainstream media's coverage of the anti-Semitism crisis for the best part of a week. If you want, I mean, you've said this to me now in a studio. I'm happy to come back on tomorrow and I'll be incredibly well researched. If you want, I can give you five minutes. No, no, no, just not quite much. I can talk very substantive. But Beth Rigby hasn't ever said the words there. Highlmayer was racist. No, what you've done to me is your research has asked me to come in to talk about Margaret Hodge's words. You've then sprung this on me. Again, we're reproducing a vicious cycle, which means that the public aren't particularly well informed. And I think the people who spoke to Margaret Hodge yesterday spoke to that because this is a person who's in public office. She's a member of parliament. She's meant to elevate the debate. And instead, she said the most ridiculous, bizarre things. And people should hold her to a very high standard because she's a very important person. The point simply was, I mean, it is your argument in that tweet that it is somewhat hypocritical on the one hand for some people to say that under the era definition, Highlmayer would be anti-Semitic for the comments that he's made. Margaret Hodge wouldn't be anti-Semitic when she compares that disciplinary letter to the Holocaust. Is that the answer? My personal view is this. It's clearly, deeply inappropriate for anybody to compare a Jewish person to a Nazi or to stigmatise or make fun of or make comical gestures around somebody's experience. Clearly, Margaret Hodge, I'm sure, lost loved ones in the Holocaust. A hugely important issue. But yes, there does seem to me to be a double standard where Hajome Meyer had his name taken through the mud for days on end. Somebody who actually was in the Holocaust in concentration camps and survived. And yet somebody, I think says something quite ridiculous, which is that a letter from the Labour Party is equivalent to 1930s Germany, is given a free pass. And to me, that shows a fundamental point, which is that the media wants to use this issue. And there is some truth to obviously elements of it. Clearly, people have said anti-Semitic things. But the media is interested in it primarily because it's a tool to attack Jeremy Corbyn. OK, can we then just, Andrew, I wonder if we can just get the points in the interview where Margaret Hodge, the comments that seem to have caused the foray. I just want to play those. Here's the first part. On the day that I heard that they were going to discipline me and possibly suspend me, it felt almost like I kept thinking, what did it feel like to be a Jew in Germany in the 1930s? That's the first part. But then she then went on to say that the Labour Party's decision to open disciplinary proceedings against her, it took her back to some comments that our father made, and we just want to play that as well. He always said to me as a child, you've got to keep a packed suitcase at the door, Margaret, in case you ever have to leave in a hurry. And when I heard about the disciplinary, my emotional response resonated with that feeling of fear that clearly was at the heart of what my father felt. I understand your perspective on things, but when I listen to that, I do not hear Margaret Hodge saying the disciplinary process, comparing the disciplinary process to the Holocaust. She said her experience of receiving that letter, the disciplinary process being initiated, she draws a clear equivalence between that and how a German Jew would have felt in the 1930s. She says it resonates. She's not saying that the Labour Party are going to round up Jews and put them into camps. I don't think anybody's saying that. My precise word was an equivalence, which by the way, if we're talking about the IHRA, is exactly the kind of language that is focused upon. So I think it's, for me, I think it's, I think it's almost, how can I put this, it's belittling the experience, it makes it a political frivolity. The Holocaust was, without doubt, the greatest tragedy of the 20th century, a century defined by tragedy, you know, a letter from the Labour Party saying you've used quite ugly language with the party leader, it's not in the same mental universe. But who are you? And Chris Williams. Who are any of us? Who are any of us? Who are any of us? It's my opinion. But this is the thing, but who are you to tell a second generation Holocaust survivor not to feel afraid? I'm not saying don't feel afraid, I'm saying do not compare. That's what she was talking about. I mean, this isn't part of the problem with all of this. In this discussion is that the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom, and I don't know whether you're part of this number, so I'm not going to include you in it, but the vast majority of people in the UK have not had their father tell them, in all seriousness, to keep a packed bag by the front door, because they might have to leave it. My grandmother is an Iranian Jew, and I can tell you, there are 100,000 of them in Iran, they don't have easy lives. So many people, you know, Armenians, British Jews, people from around the world, various diaspora communities, her words will resonate with them, and I can understand entirely what she's saying. But the focus of this, this discussion around the archery really is around that one example. And what I would say is yes, those words in a way are actually very important, what you're saying is very important. So let's apply also to the Palestinian people. We're talking about the right to national self determination, we're talking about the right to express and articulate a struggle which is defined not just you but previous generations. Those people that Jeremy Corbyn went to see in Tunis, they can't be buried in their own homeland, they can't be buried in their homeland, he then goes to a cemetery to lay a wreath, and he is made to be a villain. Are you entirely happy though? Are you entirely happy though, and with the way in which the hashtag, the hodge comparison's hashtag is gone today. I mean, just the quickest of glances through it. My teenage son and I were allocated one seat away from each other on a Ryanair flight, he couldn't reach his pringles, from that moment on he knew exactly how his African ancestors felt when they were forcibly separated in the transatlantic slave trade. At school when I was 13 I was shown a diagram of a male reproductive appendage in my biology class. I realised now that the trauma I experienced was akin to that suffered by children in Islington care homes in the 1980s. I mean, these are jokes that are being directed at a woman who you may disagree with her interpretation of events, you may even disagree with her fear of, you know, the fear that she expressed. But we're talking about, we're making jokes to someone whose family members died in the Holocaust. Yeah, I mean, we can, we can obviously point at stupid things that people have said on Twitter. I mean, I'm happy to hear you say that that is stupid. Yeah, of course. We could, we could, you know, we could probably dedicate a whole, a whole, you know, TV network to it. But fundamentally, and I'll return to the original point, this is not a frivolous thing. Anti-Semitism racism is not a frivolous thing. She, later on in that interview says that, oh, well, I thought maybe this complaint has come in because I'm Jewish and she compared it to McCarthyism. And that's a hugely important thing to say. And if she sincerely believes that, we have to have an, we have to have an investigation. No, no, really. This is, this would be a crisis of one of the most important political institutions in this country if she really believes this. So I think we can't say these things lightly. And what I think that hashtag was generally was a frivolous and silly response to what people perceive to be frivolous and silly comments. But do you understand that why there are those in the Jewish community this evening? Obviously, for obvious reasons, we'll not be able to appear on this, on this channel. You hear the comments of Chris Williamson, you know, someone who's very closely... What can he say? Yeah, indeed, sorry. What can he say? He has accused, you know, someone who was a second next, the second generation Holocaust survivor of weaponising the Holocaust. So, I mean, is there no point at which you think, do you know what, even if I disagree with Margaret Hodge, perhaps it might not be best for people like Chris Williamson, particularly given that there has been an admission at the highest levels in the Labour Party, that there is, to a degree, we can debate the degree, a problem with anti-Semitism, that it is probably not the best thing to do, to speak to someone who has had that experience, who's talked honestly about that experience, and accuse them of weaponising the Holocaust. I mean, it's deeply offensive. Well, I mean, that's Chris Williamson's opinion. My opinion would be we need to take very seriously those feelings and say, like I said, extend them to the Palestinian people. They have been completely invisibilised in this whole conversation. 711,000 people were expelled from Palestine between 1944 and 1948. 300 Brits died in Palestine before 1948. Prince Harry was in Jerusalem, I think, in June. Didn't say a word. You had diplomats being assassinated. You had a British ambassador assassinated in 1944 by the Lechie by a terrorist organisation. None of this is talked about, and yet Jeremy Corbyn goes to lay a wreath at people that can't be buried in their homeland, and they're called terrorists by Israel with no evidence. They were killed in an extrajudicial killing without a trial or without a jury, and yet him laying a wreath there makes him the bad guy. I think most people look at that and say, this doesn't add up to me, this doesn't look right, and it isn't right. When you've got people like Len McCluskey now saying, actually, do you know what, I think the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition and examples needs to be put in to the Labour Code of Conduct in full. What does that mean for people like you who have been very, very critical of that because of those examples which were dropped, that a state of Israel was a racist endeavour, that comparisons with Nazi Germany are prima facie racist. If they had hoped the full definition, what does that mean for all the work that you've done, all the complaints that you've made about the definition itself? My grievance in regards to the IHRA is not the definition which was accepted in 2016. In the recent Code of Conduct, eight of those 11 we had this conversation before, were accepted wholesale. The politically contentious one is the one around, is it a state of Israel or the state of Israel being a racist endeavour? Now what Palestinian activists tell me is that this has and will continue to obstruct them in their pursuit of justice. And so I have to subordinate myself to them, I have to listen to them. That's what they're telling me in good faith. And so my complaint is we had a compromise originally. Do you think though that the Board of Deputies is not acting in good faith? Do you think that the Jewish Chronicle is not acting in good faith? Jewish News is not acting in good faith? I'm not saying it's not good faith, I'm sure there's a great deal of ambiguity in mixed feelings and people are unsure about intentions and motives and all sorts. What I'm saying is the original Code of Conduct which should have been put out as a consultation had the definition verbatim. Eight of those 11 examples repeated verbatim. And so it comes down to that's just one of these examples and people are saying well we need to have a compromise. We had a compromise. It wasn't like Labour said you know what we're going to create our own definition of anti-Semitism, all our own examples. There was a compromise and the people that advanced that compromise were called racists, anti-Semites, bigots. So that doesn't sound to me like an educated adult conversation that takes racism seriously. Unlike the adult educated conversation that you and I have just done. Aaron, thanks very much for joining us. I appreciate it.