Excellent article here regarding “The Jewish Question”.
Yet Corbyn still thinks he is our leading anti-racist
February 24 2019, 12:01am,
Dominic Lawson
Perhaps his slogan needs to be rewritten: ‘For the many, not the Jew’
‘Not the Jews, again!” This, roughly, must be what Jeremy Corbyn and his closest associates are thinking, as a clutch of MPs quit on the grounds that Labour’s leadership has abjectly failed to root out anti-semitic bullying and abuse within the party.
A fortnight ago the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, responded to Luciana Berger’s complaints about the attempt to deselect her — one official in her Liverpool Wavertree constituency denounced her as a “disruptive Zionist” — by demanding she show her own loyalty. Now that this Jewish MP has turned the tables by walking out in disgust — declaring herself “ashamed” of what has happened to a movement her family has been associated with for almost a century — Corbyn’s left-hand man has hastily changed tone.
Moving from threat to contrition with a speed that invites cynicism, McDonnell admitted the party needed to conduct a “massive listening exercise” to address the concerns of its (rapidly decreasing) Jewish membership. Echoing this, Labour’s representative on last Thursday’s Question Time, Andy McDonald, told the BBC audience that anti-semitism in the party was a “hugely difficult issue which we are addressing”.
That’s awfully good of them. But these belated admissions fail to answer the first and most important question. Just why does Labour now find the filth of anti-semitism to be such an intractable problem within its ranks? And the truth (which McDonnell will never admit) is it is a direct consequence of the leadership of his best mate, Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn’s consuming passion over decades has been the cause of the Palestinian people: he regards the post-Holocaust creation of a Jewish homeland in 1948 to have been not a blessing but a curse — and a colonialist curse, at that. Hence his furious resistance to signing Labour up to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-semitism: for months he refused to accept the clause that said one example of anti-semitism was the claim that the Jewish state was “a racist endeavour”.
You can see Jezza’s problem. He has spent decades on platforms with people who habitually denounce the existence of Israel in precisely those terms. Indeed, he has welcomed to the House of Commons and claimed as his friends Hamas, an organisation that embeds that monstrous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in its charter, and is sworn not just to eliminate the state of Israel but Jews wherever they live.
Corbyn, in his own defence, argues he has always criticised anti-semitism and down the years has signed a number of parliamentary motions to that effect. The accusation that he is racist is said to have made him deeply miserable. His entire sense of identity is based on the view that he is the country’s leading anti-racist; it must be mental torture for such a man to be denounced as a racist himself.
But I suspect he doesn’t see the Jews as in any sense a race. In this country, at least, they — we — are white. And, on average, better off than non-Jews. This leads to a peculiar form of double standard among a type of left-winger. The sort described in these pages last year by David Baddiel: he had been told by a “progressive friend” that while it was vile to call people of colour the n-word, it was less so to refer to Jews as “yids”. When Baddiel asked for the basis of this distinction, he got the reply: “Because Jews are rich.”
Actually, there are poor Jews as well as rich ones, but that’s not the point. This is the bit where the hard left are prey to the classic anti-semitic tropes: that “the Jews” are manipulative financial bloodsuckers, exploiters of the masses. And it is the hard left (such as former Militant members) who have flooded back into the Labour Party to support Corbyn and McDonnell, both of whom fought against the expulsion of Militant in the 1980s.
Of course, this indestructible prejudice is also endemic on the far right, which is why some people move effortlessly from one to the other: they find the same comforting conspiracy theory about Jewish capitalists pulling the strings of governments to oppress the workers. Karl Marx was of this opinion.
Thus Corbyn thought it unexceptionable to defend the artist whose East End mural depicting grotesque hook-nosed bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor was removed after complaints by locals. Those locals were mocked by the artist as “older white Jewish folk [who] had an issue with me portraying their beloved Rothschild or Warburg etc as the demons they are”. It was Luciana Berger who questioned a Facebook post by Corbyn defending the mural. Initially, she got no response. Only when she went public last March, tweeting the image and Corbyn’s endorsement of it, did the Labour leader express “regret”. He claimed a sort of invincible ignorance — he hadn’t appreciated the anti-semitic nature of the imagery.
This episode helps to explain why Liverpool Wavertree wanted the “disruptive Zionist” Berger deselected and why she was so loathed by the party’s leadership. It also explains why one of Corbyn’s staunchest supporters in the parliamentary party, Ruth George, suggested that those of her colleagues who resigned with Berger last week were being funded by “the state of Israel”. Yes, it’s all part of the worldwide Jewish plot to destroy the anti-capitalist leadership of the Labour Party.
I suggested earlier that it was incredulity on the part of that leadership that it could ever be guilty of any form of racism, which prevented it from taking condign action against abusively anti-semitic party members. There is another explanation provided by the chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, Jonathan Goldstein — who had a tetchy meeting with Corbyn last year. He insists he was told by someone close to the Labour leadership that “they were convinced the perception of anti-semitism would play well for them electorally, that the Jews were part of ‘the few’ and, as oppressors, deserved no protection”. Goldstein adds: “This seemed crazy to me at the time but, as this awful saga drags on and on, maybe that person was right after all.”
It’s a remarkable allegation: that Corbyn and his coterie thought being seen as anti-semitic would mix well with their core message. In other words: for the many, not the Jew. The poll published in last week’s Sunday Times, showing that the anti-semitism row is repelling many Labour voters, is an encouraging refutation of any such sordid calculation.
On the other hand, if this causes a terminal split in the party and extinguishes the hard left’s chance of capturing national power, I think we know whom they will blame above all. The Jews, again.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk