Corbyn’s clumsy cowpat
AS GENERAL secretary of the Columnar Operatives Federation and Union of Printers (Cofup), it falls to me to stray off my normal beat of geopolitics and regional unrest to address a topic that most journalists avoid like the plague: anti-Semitism and Israel.
The trouble is that, yet again, Comrade Corbyn has been caught with his foot in a cowpat of controversy. The “People’s Tribune’” has been exposed by some of his supporters in the Labour Party wallowing in the cesspit of antiSemitism. Over a dozen senior staff working for the Labour leader and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have been outed as members of Facebook groups posting violent anti-Semitic comments, including praise for Adolf Hitler, Holocaust denial and even threats to kill the prime minister. For a would-be prime minister this is not good, even by the standards of Momentum’s attack dogs and rag-tag army of VIth Form Marxists. The former independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, Lord Carlile, has warned that the comments risk breaching hate-crime laws.
Some examples of the Facebook comments by Corbyn’s supporters have been:
Support for Adolf Hitler, that he “should have finished off the job” and claiming the deaths of six million Jews in the Holocaust “was a big lie”.
A major Labour donor, Patrick Haseldine, posted an Israeli flag on Facebook, with the swastika replacing the Star of David.
Ian Love, a Momentum organiser, claimed former PM Tony Blair was “Jewish to the core”, and insisted that the Rothschild banking family controlled most of the world’s finances.
A Labour candidate recently posted: “Free yourself from a lifetime of Holo-brainwashing about ‘six million’ Jews ‘gassed’ in ‘gas chambers’ disguised as shower rooms.”
Other abusive messages have attacked Jewish public figures, as well as issuing violent threats against several other Labour politicians.
It turns out that Corbyn and his anti-Semitic friends have a record as long as your arm. For far too long this superannuated old revolutionary has happily dabbled in “the swamplands of far left politics”. However, what could be laughingly dismissed as immature student politics by an irrelevant back bench nonentity cannot be so easily ignored in the man who boasts that he is “Britain’s next PM”.
Corbyn’s problem is made worse by the very tools that won him leadership of the Labour Party. The various nutters on the political fringe with whom he has been cheerfully hanging around for decades now have their voices amplified by modern technology. The digital messages of terrorist sympathisers, anti-western extremists, anti-capitalists, antiIsraelis, conspiracy theorists, assorted far-left revolutionary groups, old uncle Tom Cobleigh and all nowadays spread like a bushfire — thanks to the megaphone of social media.
The problem is tweeting that “Trotsky was right”, or posting “Stalin never established real communism” are at best ill-founded statements of opinion. However, to pronounce that “Israel, you are murderers and everyone hates you — may God punish you and your families”, as someone did to the country’s ambassador in Germany, Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, is a hate-crime pure and simple. This is the mess in which cuddly old Jeremy finds himself. The question now is: how true is it all? And just where does this bitter row splitting Labour come from?
The story starts back in 1903 when the Bolsheviks, a minority of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, split from the Menshevik faction. Revolutionary movements are notorious for being hilariously fissiparous: remember the Life of Brian’s spoof, “Judean People’s Front”, on no account to be confused with its deadly rivals, the “People’s Front of Judea”?
Although Marx wrote in 1844, “Money is the real God of the Jew”, ironically many of the delegates to the 1905 Third Bolshevik Congress were Jews. The reasons were simple: both Marxists and Zionists were “millennialists” — men for whom a better future beckoned, come the revolution. Not for nothing have Jews for centuries toasted, “Next year in Jerusalem!”
So the attraction of revolutionary left-wing politics and a better world has been strong among Jewish activists for a century. The Labour Party in Britain became the natural party of British Jews. Not any more. The problem is Israel. Although anti-Semitism is deeply embedded in Russian history, and Stalin’s purges of the 1930s singled out Jews for slaughter or Siberia, today’s “progressive” Marxists hate Israel and by extension, Jews. But this anti-Semitism of the Hard Left is not based on religious intolerance; it is based on Marx’s belief that Jews are part of some global capitalist conspiracy against the masses.
For young Labour supporters, Zionism is a synonym for white supremacy and western colonialism. They see Israel as a capitalist, pro-American group of invaders, who have stolen Palestinian land and, through their “apartheid” Jewish state, brutally oppress the native Arab population. This has been the extremist radicals’ narrative of Middle East politics for decades. This is why Corbyn and his supporters openly support pro-Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas.
They confuse anti-Israel with anti-Semitic.
This is not only inaccurate; it is unwise. Because by doing so they play directly into the hands of apologists for Israel, who promptly claim that any criticism of Israel must be “anti-Jew”. It is not.
The paradox is that Corbyn and his supporters have a genuine case for criticising Israel. The country was founded amid terrorism in the late 1940s, as the exodus of Jewish refugees fleeing the horrors of Nazi Europe sought sanctuary in their ancestral homeland at British and Palestinian expense. Israel had blood on its hands from the start, from the murder of British soldiers vainly trying to keep the peace, to the atrocity of the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, where Menachim Begin’s Irgun partisans coldbloodedly slaughtered 250 Palestinians, according to the Red Cross. During the 1967 war Israeli planes and torpedo boats even attacked the signals ship USS Liberty, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 172. Israel’s behaviour over the years has alienated its friends. And, as many point out, the Jewish Holocaust is by no means the worst genocide. Stalin killed 20 million; and Mao at least 50 million. Hitler’s five to six million murdered Jews give Israel no monopoly of victimhood.
But disapproval of a foreign country’s policies is not the same as attacking Jews. That is Corbyn and his friends’ long-running blunder.
Dislike of Israel should never be confused with anti-Jewish cartoons worthy of the Nazis’ Der Stürmer, showing Jews with hook noses, Jews with bags of gold, Jews as rats, Jews exploiting the huddled masses. That is what Corbyn and his friends have been supporting for far too long. In the circumstances it is hardly surprising that many British Jews have now withdrawn their support for Labour in disgust at its takeover by anti-American, anti-Capitalist revolutionary fanatics, with their hatred of all things British. George Orwell’s strongest criticism was always reserved for champagne socialists and Marxist intellectuals who attacked their own countrymen: “Sometimes squishily pacifist, sometimes violently proRussian, but always anti-British.” That description fits Corbyn and his Jew-baiting friends to a T.
But such a distorted world view plays straight into the hands of Israel’s numerous apologists. By mixing the two issues, Israel and Judaism, any criticism of Israel’s activities, however brutal or grasping, is all too easily presented as “anti-Semitism” by powerful lobby groups.
The tragedy is that the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is fast becoming a cult of Momentum, anti-Semites and Marxists. Labour is involved in a bloody civil war which could end in tears. The party that under Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan effected massive social change and gave working people a voice, now risks splitting. That is bad news: democracy requires a united opposition to hold any government’s feet to the fire. But Corbyn and his supporters see only class enemies — traitors and apologists for Israel to be expelled from the party, versus Corbyn’s righteous revolutionaries, chanting their adoring anthem, “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”.
No wonder Jews are deserting the Labour Party.