The British Labour party has extended its suspension of former London Mayor Ken Livingstone over his 2016 assertion that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism in the 1930s, JTA reported Thursday.
The party’s National Executive Committee decided to prolong Livingstone’s one-year suspension past its April 27 expiration, until the conclusion of an internal probe into his conduct over allegations that his claims were anti-Semitic or otherwise offensive to Jews.
Livingstone has been suspended since April 2016 when he made the claims on Hitler and Zionism.
He has repeatedly refused to apologize for the comments, even after being harangued as a "racist, Hitler-apologist" by an MP from his own party.
Livingstone is one of dozens of Labour members who have been suspended and expelled from the Labour party due to anti-Semitism over the last few years.
A report released in October of 2016 determined that the Labour party’s leadership is failing to seriously confront the anti-Semitism among its ranks.
The move regarding Livingstone is the second measure applied in recent weeks against a high-profile Labour official accused of anti-Semitism.
Last month, Tony Greenstein, a Jewish anti-Zionist who supports Corbyn, was expelled from Labour for breaching three of the party’s rules: “offensive comments online; offensive posts and comments on his blog; and an email in which he mocked the phrase ‘final solution.’”
Among the offensive comments was the use of the term “Zio,” an anti-Semitic term used to describe supporters of modern-day Israel. Greenstein was first suspended from the party in 2016.