Jewish actress Maureen Lipman scorns Miliband over Palestine vote

In an article for Standpoint magazine, Lipman launched a strongly worded and typically humorous attack on the increasingly hapless Labor leader.

By JERRY LEWIS
Ed Miliband (photo credit: REUTERS)
Ed Miliband
(photo credit: REUTERS)
One of Britain’s most popular actresses and comediennes, Maureen Lipman, has told opposition leader Ed Miliband that after five decades of being a socialist and voting for the Labor Party, she will no longer support his party “until it is once more led by mensches.”
In an article for Standpoint magazine, Lipman launched a strongly worded and typically humorous attack on the increasingly hapless Labor leader, citing a number of what she suggested were inexcusable ‘faux pas’ for withholding her vote in next May’s general election.
Miliband, Lipman said, “comes from a family of secular Jews, but his need for union approval is much greater than his need for Jewish support.” Noting that Jews make less than 1% of the UK population, she pondered, “Why should we care if we vote for him or not?” Answering her rhetorical question, she disclosed that at a recent gathering Miliband asked her whether she was a “practising Jew.” Lipman said she replied that she was “constantly practising, but seldom achieving,” before adding that she did “her best.”
The Labor leader then enquired whether she “did Shabbat dinners.” Lipman told him she did when she could and followed it up with an invitation to join her. Having expressed “enthusiasm to learn more about their religion” both sides agreed to let their assistants arrange a mutually convenient date.
But, Lipman noted, “Two days later, he was all over the papers knocking back a bacon sandwich” and while she accepted there was “nothing intrinsically wrong with a secular Jew chomping a thinly sliced pan-fried pig rump,” that was “his choice.”
That issue aside, she revealed she had delayed sending an invitation to Miliband, because since then he had got “something else between his teeth” – Israel.
“Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse,” Lipman noted, anti-Semitism was “mounting savagely” across several countries in Europe. “Just when cemeteries, synagogues, and shops were once again under threat” and when “virulence against a country defending itself against 4,000 rockets and 32 tunnels inside its borders, in steps Mr. Miliband to demand that the government recognize the “State of Palestine” alongside the State of Israel.”
She catalogued the inevitable reaction to the vote as “applause from the unions, smiles of approbation from the far Left, and shock and horror from the Jewish Board of Deputies” and asked, why did he do this and why now? She attacked Miliband, reminding him that as an actress she is often commended for her timing, and asserting, “Frankly, my dear, yours sucks!” She reminded him that the world is “exploding around us,” Islamic State is beheading civilians while raping and pillaging across Syria and Iraq, Hong Kong might see a replay of Tiananmen Square, and there is Islamist terrorism “in every spot of the globe.”
“If one Jew had been responsible for any of these bombings, there would, I am afraid to say, have been another Kristallnacht and at this point in our history, you choose to back these footling backbenchers in this ludicrous piece of propaganda.”
Lipman asked Miliband to explain where were the photographs of the civilian dead from the allied bombing of Iraq, or the daily count of dead and maimed babies and the howling mothers and screaming old women from Gaza” a reference to the Labor Party’s support for UK air strikes on ISIS in Iraq while registering strong opposition to Israeli air strikes on Gaza in response to rocket fire into Israel.
“May I remind you that no one is tunneling into Dover or sending rockets into Coventry, yet we seem to have every right to bomb the living daylights out of Iraq… Conclusion: one law for the Israelis, another law for the rest of the world. Plus ca change,” she said.
In conclusion, Lipman said she would vote for “almost any other party” until Labor is once again led by “mensches,” which one UK newspaper explained to its non-Jewish readership as meaning people with integrity and honor.