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Anglo-Jewry has long despised some in its self-proclaimed leadership whose relationships with the Government and Opposition are crippled by insecurity, pusillanimity and a supplicant disposition. Yet it is that strain of non-leader whom you reported about on your front page last week (Let’s give Corbyn benefit of the doubt).
Giving Mr Corbyn the “benefit of the doubt” is exactly what we Jews did to get into our current predicament.
In the past, the JC has rightly called the Labour Party out on its endless disappointments such as Chakrabarti and Livingstone. The Labour insiders you gave prominence to last week suggested that Mr Corbyn be given the “benefit of the doubt” once again, but there is no doubt any more. We know he has no intention of rooting out antisemites on the far-left having spent so many years fraternising with them. Instead of making yet another approach to him, like a torture victim afflicted by Stockholm syndrome, let our community show some backbone and insist that Mr Corbyn does what we have demanded for so long, namely attacking antisemitism in his Party without fear or favour. On the day he does that, I will be the first to congratulate him. Until then, let us hold our nerve and make antisemitism our indelible red line.
Gideon Falter
Chairman, Campaign Against Antisemitism
Your writers are no doubt entitled to indulge in speculation about the impact of the Jewish vote on the outcome of the recent general election. What is impermissible, however, is to mislead your readership by basing such speculation on erroneous data. Your paper variously states that the national swing to Labour was 7.5 per cent (page 4) and 9.5 per cent (page 5), suggesting that a lesser swing in certain seats was due to a socalled Jewish factor. However, the national swing to Labour was in fact two per cent, comfortably exceeded in many seats with a significant Jewish population, including both Finchley (4.1 per cent) and Hendon (2.7 per cent), described by Geoffrey Alderman as “underperformance”. He further implies, bizarrely, that “outraged” Jewish voters in these two constituencies could have been more likely to vote for non-Jewish Labour candidates. It is equally plausible that, starting from a low electoral base and despite months of unremitting antagonism to Labour in your pages, many Jewish voters, turned off by the fumbling Tory leadership and negative campaign and/or energised by the positive Labour one, decided in common with other British citizens that “enough is enough” and made their own contribution to the overall swing to Labour.
Dr Anthony Isaacs
London NW3