DOMINIC LAWSON

WHEN the veteran Labour MP Frank Field declared he was resigning from the parliamentary party because it had become ‘a force for anti-Semitism’ under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, you could sense his disbelief.

How could Labour, traditionally the political home of most Jewish voters, and of opposition to racism, have come to this?

But this is not really so surprising, given it is a group of Marxists — Corbyn, advised principally by his chief strategist Seumas Milne, an actual apologist for Stalinism — which is now at the apex of the party’s power structure.

It used to be said that the Labour Party ‘owed more to Methodism than Marxism’, and Frank Field is firmly of that tradition. But he’s regarded as an unwelcome fossil by the ruling clique of eternal student revolutionaries.

It is not widely enough known that their ideological hero, the now weirdly fashionable Karl Marx, was a raging anti-Semite. It’s true Marx came from a line of Rabbis, but he himself was baptised as a Lutheran, after his father converted.

Archaic

In his 1844 tract, On The Jewish Question, Marx wrote: ‘What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous God of Israel. The Bill of Exchange is the real God of the Jew.’

And in an article for the New York Daily Tribune in 1856, the founder of Communism thundered: ‘We find every tyrant backed by a Jew . . . in truth the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless . . . if there were not a handful of Jews to ransack pockets. Here and there and everywhere, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to . . . place a little bit of a loan.

‘Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the children of Judah.’

Those on the hard Left nowadays do not use such archaic language. But scratch a little beneath the surface (as Frank Field has felt obliged to do) and you find the modern equivalent. For example, at a recent event designed to defend Corbyn against the charge of anti-Semitism, a pro-Israel demonstrator encountered the following remarks from attendees (filmed by a reporter for The Jewish Chronicle): ‘You like silver, you like gold, that’s all you care about’; and ‘If you walk around expecting to be treated like Jewish scum, that’s what’s going to happen to you.’

One of the ironies is that Momentum, the hard-Left pressure group affiliated to Labour, which targets its ire against party MPs thought disloyal to ‘Jeremy’, was founded by Jon Lansman, who is Jewish.

In an interview with the FT at the weekend, Lansman said he thought it ‘strange’ that some of his Left-wing allies could not acknowledge their ‘unconscious bias’ in relation to anti-Semitism.

He went on: ‘I’ve had times . . . when I was just horrified at things on my Facebook page from people I regarded as friends.’

But then he hastened to add that Labour is ‘not absolutely riddled with anti-Semites’. Not absolutely riddled? How encouraging for British Jews!

Corbyn, of course, denies the charge — put yesterday on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show by the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks — that he himself is anti-Semitic.

There’s nothing anti-Semitic, he says, in campaigning on behalf of two men jailed for their part in the bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the headquarters of a number of Jewish charities in London in 1994.

There’s nothing anti-Semitic, he says, about calling members of Hezbollah, an organisation sworn to the destruction of Jews worldwide, ‘friends’. There’s nothing anti-Semitic, he says, in inviting a proPalestinian campaigner to the Commons, who just happened to be a notorious Holocaust denier. As far as Corbyn is concerned, all these acts of his were purely exercises on his part in defending the rights of Palestinians displaced from their historic home by ‘Zionists’.

But anti-Zionism — the view (expressed openly by Corbyn’s closest adviser Seumas Milne) that the very creation of the state of Israel was a crime — itself has its roots in professed Marxism. To be precise, it began with a campaign emanating from the Soviet Union towards the end of Stalin’s rule and which intensified in the Sixties.

As Dave Rich points out in his essential book The Left’s Jewish Problem: ‘Articles accusing Israel of racism and colonialism, comparing Zionism to Nazism and using traditional anti- Semitic tropes, were published with increasing regularity in the Soviet media and then distributed in pamphlet form in the West.’

Distributed, that is, to people like Corbyn, who identified (and still does) with the Soviet side during the Cold War.

Preaching

One such booklet from 1970 — Zionism, Instrument Of Imperialist Reaction — is the sort of debased pseudo-Marxist rant whose faithful echo continues to resonate in hard-Left circles in Britain today.

‘Zionism,’ it declared, is ‘the ideology, the ramified system of organisations, the policy and practice of the Jewish big bourgeoisie that have become closely knit with the monopoly circles of the United States.’

It is this sort of Marxist-inspired thinking that led the leader of the Labour Party to hail as an ‘honoured citizen’ such a man as the Arab Israeli Raed Saleh, who preached the ancient anti-Semitic blood libel (that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children in the baking of Passover bread).

It is the same ideological idiocy that led the British magazine International Socialism to declare: ‘From the standpoint of Marxism and international socialism an illiterate, conservative, superstitious Muslim Palestinian peasant who supports Hamas’— another anti-Semitic group welcomed to the Palace of Westminster by Corbyn — ‘is more progressive than an educated liberal atheist Israeli who supports Zionism (even critically)’.

No wonder Frank Field wants out.