Calls grow for Corbyn to quit in row over ‘anti-Semitic’ book
Jewish activists have called on Jeremy Corbyn to consider his position after it emerged that he had endorsed a book containing antisemitic ideas.
The Labour leader wrote the foreword for a new edition of JA hobson’s 1902 book imperialism: A study while he was a backbencher in 2011.
he described it as a ‘ great tome’ – even though it spread conspiracy theories about the Rothschild banking family and said finance was controlled ‘by men of a single and peculiar race’ who in turn controlled ‘the policy of nations’.
The Jewish Labour Movement slammed Mr Corbyn yesterday for endorsing ‘ antisemitic propaganda’ and said he should consider quitting. And the Board of Deputies of British Jews said he should provide a ‘full explanation’ for his actions.
Mr Corbyn still had not apologised last night, with a spokesman merely saying that ‘Jeremy completely rejects the anti-semitic elements’ of the book. in the foreword, he praised the ‘brilliant’ analysis of western imperialism at the turn of the 20th century, which was ‘very controversial at the time’.
he also praised hobson’s ‘correct and prescient’ passages ‘railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular Press with tales of imperial might’.
in his book, hobson invoked an antisemitic Rothschild conspiracy theory, saying: ‘ Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any european state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?’ And he claimed that ‘great financial houses’ have ‘control which they exercise over the body of public opinion through the Press’.
A Jewish Labour Movement spokesman said: ‘ Once again, Labour members find that their leader has endorsed antisemitic propaganda.
‘Given how much he says he abhors anti- Jewish racism, Jeremy Corbyn must be the unluckiest
‘Repugnant and racist language’
anti-racist in history. But in truth, it’s no accident that he’s praised an author who peddled what we would recognise as left anti-semitic tropes.’
The organisation said it would be submitting a complaint to the Labour Party and asking the equalities and human Rights Commission to include it in its potential investigation.
Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, said: ‘This is pure and unequivocal racism.’ Foreign secretary Jeremy hunt also condemned Mr Corbyn, adding that he should apologise for writing the foreword and accusing him of having ‘massive blind spots on anti-semitism’.
however, a party spokesman said the Labour leader stands by his contribution to the publication and denied that he was ‘blind’ to one form of racism.
he said the book contains ‘language which most people would regard as repugnant and racist not just in relation to Jewish people, but about Africans and Asians across the board.
‘it is not that he [Corbyn] didn’t notice those things. it is not that he couldn’t see that. it is the fact that he wasn’t talking about that.’
Meanwhile, Lord Prescott was accused yesterday of ranting at a Jewish journalist that the party’s anti-semitism crisis was all ‘about israel’.
The Jewish Chronicle reported that the Labour grandee was asked by the journalist, who asked to not be named, how best to resolve the issue, to which he said: ‘is there anything you can do about israel and its behaviour?’ he went on: ‘All of this is about israel... dead children... settlers on someone else’s land.’
OVER the past year Jeremy Corbyn has been attacked on two main fronts by his detractors in politics and the media. on the face of it, the grave charges against him are unconnected.
one charge has been that the labour leader is an anti-Semite, or at any rate someone who associates with antiSemites, and is strikingly indulgent towards such people whenever they are unearthed in the labour party.
Another reasonable charge concerns Corbyn’s support for the hard- left regime in Venezuela, whose insane economic policies have caused hyperinflation, empty supermarkets, and led to three million people fleeing their country in despair.
These are undoubtedly enormous black marks against him. They have served to harden the misgivings of his political enemies, and introduced a few doubts into the minds of those who had previously viewed him as a wellmeaning chap.
Now it turns out that these apparently unrelated blemishes are two sides of the same coin. To put it bluntly, Jeremy Corbyn would not support the odious regime in Venezuela if he did not sign up to some of the central prejudices of a long forgotten anti-Semite.
The anti-Semite in question is a radical writer called John A. Hobson, who in 1902 published a book called Imperialism which is said to have inspired lenin as he dreamt up the Russian Revolution.
even in 1902 there were plenty of people who did not like the european empires. What distinguished Hobson’s book was his belief that very rich Jewish financiers (he refers to them as ‘men of a single and peculiar race’) drove imperial expansion, and even fomented war.
Specifically he asks: ‘ Does anyone seriously suppose that a great war could be undertaken by any european state, or a great state loan subscribed, if the house of Rothschild and its connections set their face against it?’
WE would not be discussing Hobson’s bigotry (the sort of lethal nonsense the Nazis later swallowed) if Corbyn had not taken it into his head to write a foreword to his book when it was re-issued several years ago.
Indeed, as a hard-left labour Mp who no one imagined would get within a million miles of power, Corbyn gave a talk in 2010 on his hero Hobson at a gathering of Socialist historians in london.
In the foreword, Corbyn does not embrace Hobson’s anti- Semitism, though he doesn’t repudiate it either. What he does do is to buy the line that capitalism is the engine of imperialism in the modern world, just as it was alleged by Hobson to be in the 19th century.
And whereas Britain and France were the culprits in Hobson’s version of events, America is Corbyn’s bete noire. He writes of its ‘ military re- occupation [ of Western europe] under the guise of Nato’ and its ‘ creation of friendly and pliant governments’.
By contrast, the Soviet union’s infinitely more oppressive domination of eastern europe is not mentioned in the foreword, though its influence is implied to have been benign. Corbyn states, for the most part inaccurately, that ‘ its
allies often acted quite independently’. Cuba is singled out for praise.
According to Corbyn, what the revolutionary Marxist Che Guevara was ‘preaching in the Sixties has an even greater resonance today in the left of latin America. The popular Socialist movements of Bolivia, ecuador and Venezuela owe much to his vision’.
Ah, Venezuela. There we have it. The South American country is presented as a bulwark against American imperialism, underpinned by capitalism, as its spreads its cultural ‘empire of the mind’ around the world while it ‘actively suppressed and subjugated peoples in the poorest countries’.
I don’t know whether Corbyn believes that modern- day financiers ‘of a single and peculiar race’ are responsible for what he regards as American oppression of Venezuela and other supposedly exploited countries. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
At any rate, long before president Trump appeared on the horizon (the foreword was written in 2011, when the liberal-minded Barack obama was in the White House), the united States was in Corbyn’s ideologically rigid, and not notably sophisticated, mind the Great Satan.
That is why the labour leader can never bring himself to criticise the regime in Venezuela. unlike most of us, he does not judge its excesses by a normal yardstick of decency. When president Nicolas Maduro’s armed cars drive into crowds of protesters, as happened on Tuesday, Corbyn will not complain.
He embraced Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, when all fair-minded people could see he was an autocrat impoverishing his oil-rich country. After Chavez’s death in 2013, Corbyn preposterously lauded him as someone who ‘showed us there is a different, and better, way of doing things. It’s called Socialism’.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, also praised Chavez. So did Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary. And Corbyn has been no less generous in his support for Maduro, who in turn has described the labour leader as his ‘friend’.
Meanwhile Seumas Milne, Corbyn’s powerful spin doctor, fawned over Maduro when he visited Venezuela as a journalist in 2014, shortly after violence in the capital Caracas had left 40 people dead.
THE Deluded Milne claimed the regime had proved that ‘there are multiple social and economic alternatives to the neoliberal system that still has the West and its allies in its grip’. yes, and one of them is called ruination.
Maduro can preside over an inflation rate of 1.7 million per cent, cause millions of his fellow countrymen to flee, imprison his enemies and kill protesters — and still the Corbynistas will continue to support him because he presents himself as an enemy of imperialist America.
And Corbyn, having halfdigested a book by an antiSemite anti-imperialist, takes up the anti-American cause regardless of the gruesome company (dictators, terrorists,
general monsters) into which it has led him.
God knows, I’m no fan of Trump, but he has been elected, is leader of our closest ally, and, unlike some of those with whom Corbyn has associated over the years, is not in the habit of murdering his political opponents. And yet the labour leader won’t even break bread with him during his forthcoming State visit.
Is it really possible that such a man could ever become prime Minister of Great Britain? you bet it is. Despite his flaws being more apparent than ever, Corbyn inches closer to the door of No 10 because of the weakness and incompetence of this Tory Government, which yesterday got rid of Gavin Williamson, probably the worst Defence Secretary in living memory.
The other day — it was scarcely picked up elsewhere — I heard John McDonnell say on BBC2’s Newsnight that labour was planning a ‘revolution’ for the British economy. When normal politicians speak about revolution, they are bound to be exaggerating.
But McDonnell meant it. He is far cleverer than Corbyn, and under that genial bank-managerial exterior there lurks a true revolutionary who is just as capable of unleashing destructive forces as Chavez or Maduro. I do not jest.
Just occasionally one sees into their souls, and glimpses an extremism that is wholly foreign to our political experience. So it is with Jeremy Corbyn. Digging around in the hatreds of a forgotten author, you can find the key to a man who may soon be our prime Minister.