Here’s a good illustration of left-wing blindness to anti-semitism in action.
Les Levidow is an academic at the Open University and a Jewish leftist. Here he is lecturing Socialist Resistance on “imperialist” support for Israel.
Les is very concerned about “the infiltration of antisemites and holocaust deniers into the solidarity movement”, and presented a motion to that effect, along with Tony Greenstein to the AGM of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign: which was defeated. He was talking about Gilad Atzmon and his pals, of course.
But look here. Les is speaking at the Annual Al Quds demonstration: organised by the Khomeinist pro-Iranian pressure group, which calls itself the Islamic Human Rights Commission. The demonstration is officially supported – and advertised on the Muslim Council of Britain’s website as such – by the clerical fascist Hizb ut Tahrir, which has published a series of racist pamphlets, and whose leader in Denmark, Fadi Abdelatif, has been convicted of inciting racial hatred. And Les is actually speaking on the same platform as Hizb’s Taji Mustafa!
Les Levidow is not an anti racist. He’s either a selective pro-racist, or neutral to racism. Only such a person would share a platform with a racist group.
His defence, I’m sure, will be that Hizb ut Tahrir are primarily an anti-imperialist Muslim group, and their racism ought to be excused because they’re fighting against oppression, or some such nonsense. But look at Taji Mustafa. He’s no Palestinian suffering from persecution, is he?
Will Levidow withdraw from this rally? You can bet your bottom dollar that he won’t. If he says anything at all on this, he will claim that he has been subject to “incredible Zionist pressure”, simply because I’ve pointed this out, and that he has “bravely” resisted attempts to “smear” him. Utter crap.
This, incidentally, is precisely how anti-semites have managed to “infiltrate” the Palestinian solidarity movement. But socialists like Lev Levidow don’t understand that.