This is a guest post by JewishLabourMole
There is wilfull blindness to the top-down institutional propagation of Labour’s Antisemitism
I was brought up to beware the following set of circumstances: an economic recession; the emergence of a populist leader with an antisemitic following and the inexorable flow downwards to an increase in antisemitic abuse, violence and murder. That sequence is no fable: it’s history on repeat, and it’s happening now.
It’s true that Antisemitism is a society-wide phenomenon: but it rarely flourishes unless sanctioned by leaders and institutions. The caveat in this classic narrative is that the conditions required for that evil to triumph is that Good Men Do Nothing.
I was given to believe that never again would ‘Good Men Do Nothing’. I was sold a pup.
On the day of Corbyn’s coronation as leader, we Jews waited to see how he would handle his well-known antisemitic inheritance, an inheritance that was news to the wider public, but not to Jews nor his fringe antisemitic fan-base. The Jewish Chronicle immediately published a list of some of those items on their front page. But in the weeks that followed, as Jews were engulfed by the ensuing overflow of antisemitic sewage online, we heard Yvette Cooper, for example, speak up about the rise in online misogyny: but there was no public defence of the Jews. Ditto Burnham. Ditto … all of them.
The silence of those first few weeks still stuns me, and makes me feel viscerally sick for having pledged my allegiance to Labour. It wasn’t so much the promotion of Corbyn & his tribe, whose Soviet-infused Marxism’s embrace of ‘Anti-Colonial’ Islamism had brought together two smouldering brands of antisemitism & re-kindled a phoenix-fire of Jew-hate: no, we knew about that. It was that mainstream Labour leaders were silent on the eternal hatred that they knew full-well was now encamped in their home.
Perhaps, like us, they wanted to give the crank-rank outsider — a man who’ddefied the whip 428 times — a chance to readjust to his lottery win and to re-assess his past associations in the context of the moral responsibility of leadership … but five months later, at an ‘acid test’ meeting with the Board of Deputies he moved not one jot. The event for the Jewish community was seismic; yet the press and Labour Party barely registered a tremor.
All of his behaviours signalled antisemitism, but none were antisemitic acts per se. However, on the 5th of April, 2016, as chronicled here, Jeremy Corbyn crossed a line. In short: when the Antisemitic fringe that he had so emboldened led to a Jewish MP complaining of antisemitic abuse, Jez agreed with his brother Piers that her complaint was disingenuously got up as a plot to defend ‘Zionist’ interests. The Jews are crying wolf. The Jews have other motives. The Jews are not what they seem. With three words: ‘He’s not wrong’, in defence of a sibling so antisemitic he believes ISIS is a Jewish creation, he flagrantly and publicly moved from fulsome backer of antisemites to antisemite.
I watched, knowing that Jewish leaders, senior members of the Labour Party and newspaper editors would have understood exactly what they had witnessed. What would they say?
The Board of Deputies spoke, but all they could coax from dry lips was to pronounce his statement ‘Deeply disturbing’. As for the rest of the polity:
Nothing.
Perhaps some were distracted by Jan Royall’s (now supressed) review, as Labour HQ insisted that her investigation was in place to address the issue. Some were somewhat stupified by Ken’s volcanic Hitler eruption. But while a stream of mostly Muslim Councillors were suspended for stupidity (that is, being so utterly ignorant of what constitutes antisemitism that they left their Jew-hate up in public for anyone to find) — the leadership’s racism marched on in plain sight.
And so, on May 1st, enabled by the Labour Party and the press’s reluctance to call out its leader, Diane Abbott was able to state on the Andrew Marr show to an audience of millions that ‘it is a smear to say that the Labour Party has a problem with antisemitism.’ On the same day, Len McCluskey, the Unite chief, complained on BBC Radio that the antisemitism row had been “got up” by the right-wing press, “aided and abetted by … Labour MPs”. Ken (of course) and the MP Rupa Huq, averred.
Do read the rest here
