Anti-semitism: Corbyn under pressure

Is Jeremy Corbyn an anti-semite? Naturally he resists the charge, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. Ask him what he thinks of Jews and he’ll say they’re “bloody marvellous”. Yet his actions tend to suggest a different story. He has called the “genocidal racists” of Hezbollah his friends; his leadership has shown deep wells of tolerance for members who’ve made anti-semitic remarks; and he was, until 2015, a member of a closed Facebook group that was full of anti-semitic posts. Now, we learn of his support for an anti-semitic mural in east London. Created in 2012, it depicted a “cabal” of hooked-nose bankers playing a Monopoly-style game, the board resting on naked figures’ backs. Tower Hamlets’ Muslim mayor saw it for what it was and had it removed; Corbyn posted a supportive note on the artist’s Facebook page, likening it to “Rockerfeller (sic) destroying Diego Viera’s (sic) mural” because it featured an image of Lenin.

Even this week, Corbyn was dragging his heels, said Matthew d’ancona in The Guardian. At first, he said he’d been defending free speech, and merely expressed “regret” for having failed to look “closely” enough at the mural to notice its anti-semitism. Yet it looked like “an homage to the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer”. How closely would he have had to look to spot its “vicious hostility to Jews”? I doubt such a defence would have cut much ice with Labour MPS had it been used in the context of a racist mural about black people, said Isabel Hardman in The Spectator. And it did nothing to appease leading Jews. On Sunday, the Board of Deputies of British Jews published a furious letter saying “enough is enough”, and noting that Corbyn is “repeatedly found alongside people with anti-semitic views, but claims always not to have heard or read them”. Only after it organised a protest outside Parliament did Corbyn acknowledge that his previous responses had been inadequate.

Typically, Corbynistas have dismissed all this as part of a plot to discredit their leader, said Matthew d’ancona. They point to his record as an anti-racism campaigner – and it is a proud one. Why, then, has he not done more to combat anti-semitism? Maybe the reason is that in the Left’s identity politics, Jews are “on the wrong side of the line: powerful, white, aligned with imperialism”. By that “twisted logic”, the mural couldn’t be racist. With anti-semitic attacks at record levels in the UK, we should ask this potential PM, “does he believe in universal rights and equality of worth, or not?”