Study maps radicalisation under Corbyn
One party member went from making no public Facebook comments about Israel before the leadership campaign to posting more than 300 times per year LABOUR MEMBERS who were previously silent about Israel became “radicalised” about Jewish people and the Jewish state after Jeremy Corbyn became leader, a landmark report by prominent researcher David Collier has found.
The report identified a pattern whereby members who had previously said almost nothing about Jewish people or Israel then began to “dip their toes in anti-Israel ideology” online, culiminating in outright attacks on Jews.
Mr Collier, who exposed the infamous Palestine Live Facebook group of which Mr Corbyn was a member, identified one member who posted nothing on social media about the Gaza War in 2014, but who then shared two articles about Israel in 2015, the year Mr Corbyn became leader, followed by 22 in 2016 and more than 300 in 2018. In his 200-page dossier which has been submitted to equalities watchdog the EHRC as part of its probe into whether Labour is institutionally antisemitic, he provided 14 One self-described Labour member made two public posts about Israel in the year of Corbyn's election. In the following year, 22. By 2018, she was posting more on Israel than anything else, reaching over 300 articles case studies of members whose social media activity followed similar lines.
The pattern is of a sudden interest in Israel emerging when Mr Corbyn took power in September 2015, joining pro-Corbyn Facebook groups, posting often inaccurate claims about Israel, with more about Israel than any other subject, attacking the media for being “Zionist”, sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories from alternative news sources, insisting it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel, making antisemitic arguments in their own words, promoting Jewish AntiZionists’ defences of Mr Corbyn and finally displaying “outright hostility towards mainstream British Jewry”.
One woman who followed this pattern shared a link to a video by conspiracy theorist David Icke about “Rothschild Zionism”, writing on Facebook: “Bloody hell I agree with David Icke”. She also shared a link predicting “Israel’s next false flag”.
Mr Collier’s latest report also identified another “template” of Labour members who engage in antisemitism, showing one who was already sharing anti-Jewish content online before joining the party specifically to support Mr Corbyn. One such member wrote about “Zionists controlling the Tory Party” on Facebook in April 2015, before Mr Corbyn was Labour leader. In the first four months of 2015, this member shared 20 articles about Israel, compared with more than 100 in the last four. He joined Labour in November of that year, two months after Mr Corbyn’s election.
“When the enemy is viewed as allpowerful and all controlling, activists feel justified to cross almost any line,” Mr Collier wrote.
“Disinformation, demonisation and antisemitism is spread openly everywhere as ‘resistance’… Anyone who protests is part of the ‘Zionist lobby’ and defending the ‘indefensible’.
“In response they’ll protest and declare it is only ‘Zionists’ they don’t like — but most of these people cannot define Zionism and cannot define antisemitism.
“They don’t even really know what being Jewish is. They certainly have no idea of Jewish history and the real events of the Israel /Arab conflict — they’re the product of four years of a radical extremist disinformation campaign and the junk news websites they’ve been fed.
“They’re obsessed and they’ve been radicalised.
“How is this not Jeremy Corbyn’s fault?”
They have no idea of Jewish history or the Arab/Israel conflict’