Corbyn trips again

It has not been a good few weeks for Jeremy Corbyn. His reluctance to see a Russian hand behind the Salisbury outrage has been roundly denounced by his own backbenchers. But his leadership has also been rattled by allegations that he has failed to quash anti-semitism in the Labour Party. This has reached a fever pitch with the attack by two leading organisations, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, who staged a protest in Parliament Square last night.

So rattled was Mr Corbyn at this prospect that he rushed out a statement on Sunday evening in anticipation, admitting that Labour had a problem with “pockets of anti-semitism”, but until Monday afternoon had declined to apologise for his admiration for a mural depicting Jewish financiers playing Monopoly on the backs of the oppressed.

The Labour leader denies he is anti-semitic – and no-one had accused him directly of holding such views. But Mr Corbyn’s outlook lends itself to such an unsympathetic interpretation. He dislikes Israel, not merely its government but its usurpation of what he felt to be Palestinian Arab land. He supports organisations such as Hamas, who wish Israel did not exist. As an old-style Leftwing agitator he is motivated principally by the politics of victimhood. His outlook is entirely binary: there are those he considers to be oppressed and there are the oppressors, the latter invariably capitalist, Western, democratic and allied to America.

This purblind world-view is unable to distinguish between criticism of Israeli foreign policy and hostility to Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. It is yet another reason why Mr Corbyn is unfit to be prime minister.