Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn: Fighting the Jewish Establishment
It is hard to think of two politicians further apart than Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and Donald Trump. Corbyn is a Marxist class warrior steeped in identity politics while Trump is, well, Trump.
The similarity is in who they have managed to antagonise. For both have incurred the wrath of the media through the perception that they are not totally beholden to Jewish political priorities.
Since the moment Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the opposition in Britain in September, he has undergone a media demonization that is surely unprecedented in its intensity and duration. Like phosphorous bombs on Gaza, the abuse rains down on him from all points on the compass, day after day. It is hard to keep up with all the accusations but broadly, Corbyn is accused of harbouring or sympathising with “anti-semitism” which is defined as previous association with Islamic preachers, sympathy with the Palestinian cause and his insistence that the Iraq war was a criminal mistake. It has now reached the stage where ‘anti-semitism in the Labour Party’ is a bigger daily story than the impending referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
All the elements of Jewish communal defence have been mobilized in this campaign but it has been spearheaded by the British Board of Deputies and the main Jewish newspaper, the Jewish Chronicle. The Jewish vigilante group, the CST have weighed in.
How did this happen? Corbyn is probably the most left-wing leader Labour has ever had and a believer that borders are a thing of the past. He would flood Britain with refugees tomorrow, if he could.
The problem, of course, is that his far-left and Muslim support represents a distinct threat to Jewish power. Britain’s Labour party has accommodated itself to Jewish priorities for most of the last century and under Tony Blair and his successor Gordon Brown, the Labour Party was as captured by Jewish political power as it is possible to be. For 12 years as prime minister Blair was under the sway of the one of the tightest Jewish cabals that has ever been seen in Western politics. Blairite New Labour eagerly signed up to George W Bush’s neocon wars for Israel, and British bombs fell on Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
But all this was at huge cost within the party. Northern Labour MPs, especially, were becoming more dependent on the Muslim bloc vote. Thanks to mass immigration more and more of the Labour constituencies are turning into Muslim fiefdoms and they have not taken kindly to a party that openly kowtows to the Jewish lobby in all its guises.
The public sector rank and file was also disgusted with how Labour had become a servant of the corporate financial sector.
Until his election as Labour leader, Corbyn was seen as a quaint left-wing eccentric, a relic of a bygone age. But his election took the whole party establishment by surprise, and no-one was more outraged than the Jewish lobby as the TOO showed last year.
Since then the campaign has been unremitting and no charge is too wild. Corbyn has been accused of sympathising with terrorism; of being an ally of Vladimir Putin; of undermining the armed forces; of giving comfort to Holocaust deniers. He has turned Labour into the home of conspiracy theorists. This culminated in a front-page article in the Jewish Chronicle accusing Labour of attracting anti-Semites “like flies to a cesspit.” This week Corbyn was condemned again for refusing to condemn Osama Bin Laden — in a vote taken sixteen years ago and six months before 9/11(!). Again this transparently cooked-up story can rely on getting widespread, national , coverage.
As with Trump, all of this is being carried out by the traditional method of smearing by association. Needless to say, Corbyn’s own protestations of some Jewish ancestry have done him no good (though revealing he knows exactly what signals are important.) Well, maybe Corbyn himself isn’t anti-Semitic, they concede — but he should be more careful of the people he surrounds himself with.
The herd of independent-minded political hacks are queuing up to land a punch. Conservative Mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith took a swing. Even Tony Blair’s bagman, fund raiser Lord Levy, threatened to quit Labour “unless the anti-semitism problem was sorted out.” Naturally, the Prime Minister is happy to play his part and stand up in the House of Commons denouncing Labour Party anti-Semitism.
It all culminated in a particularly hysterical article in which Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard describes anti-Semitism as “a cancer in their party and it is getting worse by the day”, and wrote that in order “not to lose the last residue of trust from our community, it must recognise and deal with that cancer”.
But the most laughable aspect of this is that the evidence of “anti-Semitism” is so ridiculously thin. It effectively amounts to peddling hate crime hoaxes. Take the main story from Oxford University where the resignation of the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club was being ramped. Here, the disgruntled student cited the fact that the club had endorsed the campus Israel Apartheid Week.
Otherwise this entire anti-Semitism hate crime hoax amounts to no more than playing whack-a-mole with social media comments made by nonentities. Typical is a gormless woman called Vicki Kirby. This Labour activist from Surrey got into trouble for tweeting in 2011 that Jews had “big noses.” She’d already been disciplined for this in 2014 but it was thought important enough to make a lead story in Britain’s national media again this month and so once again she has been suspended.
Then there was some Muslim activist’s following of a Twitter account which has said positive things about Hamas. Somehow this was worth a page of condemnation in the Spectator. Another local activist was expelled from the Labour Party after tweeting his refusal to condemn the 9/11 bombers and opposing the bombing of Syria. Then a Muslim former Mayor of Bradford has been suspended for sharing a Facebook post that complained that the deaths of millions of Africans are not taught in schools but “your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler”.
Readers of the abuse poured on Trump will be wearily familiar with the tone of the coverage devoted to anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. There is the blithe assumption that the moral degeneracy is so self-evident that it need not be explained.
But there is no hiding the fact that a few injudicious tweets do not a Shoah make. The raw material you need for a good anti-Semitism scare is just not there. Once again, demand is exceeding supply.
The anti-Semitism drought has got so bad that professional Jewish dissidents are having to drum up business by themselves. One such is Sir Gerald Kaufman, a Corbyn ally and veteran British parliamentarian who caused a storm last week by saying that the ruling Conservative Party is influenced by “Jewish money” and that the Israeli government made up the recent spate of violent attacks in order to allow it to “execute Palestinians.”
In a wide ranging attack he said. “It’s Jewish money, Jewish donations to the Conservative Party — as in the general election in May — support from the Jewish Chronicle, all of those things, bias the Conservatives,” Kaufman said.
There is now a big group of Conservative members of parliament who are pro-Israel whatever government does and they are not interested in what Israel and the Israeli government does.
Kaufman caused controversy earlier this year when he said that Israel uses the Holocaust to justify murdering Palestinians.
This must have caused a sigh of relief in the Jewish organisations who worked themselves up into their usual fury. Led by the Board of Deputies, Community Security Trust vigilantes and the Jewish Leadership Council, it was demanded that Labour exert “swift and appropriate disciplinary action,” on this new outbreak of anti-Semitism from a (Jewish) politician.
Another interesting casualty of the Corbyn affair is the Labour party membership of the Jewish founder of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Tony Greenstein. For years Greenstein has been making the Palestinian cause safe for the Jews. If there is one thing Greenstein hates more than Israel’s policies, it is anyone who questions the Holocaust narrative (see comments in this link). And for two decades he has slandered and harassed the genuine pro-Palestine activists such as Gilad Atzmon. Now he’s been kicked out of the Labour Party and is moaning that that’s all the thanks he’s gotten for fighting for his people. In his letter Greenstein wrote “even the Zionist Board of Deputies of British Jews and other Zionists have acknowledged my role in combatting Gilad Atzmon.” It is a sorry state of affairs when not even the controlled opposition are safe!
There have been other unusual twists and turns. For years we have been lectured that Jews and Israel are not the same thing and to conflate the two is anti-Semitic. Now it seems that attacking Israel alone is anti-Semitic.
To his credit Corbyn, the old Marxist, has never lost his composure and his stuck to his guns. He has said that Britain’s entry into the Iraq war was based on a lie and has hinted that he wants to see Tony Blair tried for war crimes. Corbyn has a difficult tightrope to walk. He has to placate not only the far-left public sector group that elected him but the rapidly growing assertive Muslim lobby within the party.
But have you noticed whose concerns are missing in all this? It is ironic that of all the charges that have been levelled against Corbyn, the one that has never been uttered is the one that is most self-evidently true. In placing the needs of others before his own, Jeremy Corbyn is a traitor to his own White people. One wonders how he feels about throwing the White working class under the bus in favour of Guardian-reading liberals and non-Whites.
But no matter how fraught Jeremy Corbyn’s relations with the official Jewish community there is one thing you can guarantee. There will always be some people who differ from the official communal line. Playing both sides is, of course, a fundamental rule of the game.
This weekend Corbyn has been on the receiving end of another media barrage. In the Telegraph the President of the Board of Jewish Deputies was given all the space he needed to say what has been said many times before. The Mail is pretending it has a new angle on this story. Meanwhile The Times is claiming that Labour has re-admitted Greenstein, the activist who is said to have compared Israelis to Nazis. The fact that there is nothing much new in any of these stories is irrelevant because as every good propagandist will tell you; the secret is repetition.
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