Labour’s Fictitious Anti-Semitism Problem

A supposed problem

According to much of the British media, Labour has had an ‘anti-Semitism problem’ since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015. The more impartial headlines call it a controversy or a set of claims. Corbyn critics speak of a crisis while his supporters complain of a witch-hunt.

As with any claim of anti-Semitism, the accusers refer to one or both of two things: that the party is racist towards some or all Jews, or that it is critical of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, in ways that it would not be of any other country.

Why use that term?

For Labour to be racist toward Jews would be strange. One would think that such a tendency would alienate the Jews deeply embedded and strongly over-represented within Corbyn’s Labour. Three of the four founders of the Corbyn-backing Momentum organisation — John Lansmann (no stranger to denouncing people for racism), Adam Klug and James Schneider — are Jewish, as are prominent Corbynist activists like Max Shanly. Several organisations supporting Labour, especially since Corbyn became leader, are Jewish, such as Jewish Voice for Labour and Jewdas. None of these, nor any of the many signatories to public letters supporting Corbyn against his critics, seem to have found any troubling signs that they are in fact supporting a party that quietly despises them and all their kind, whether defined by faith, ancestry or anything else. Several Jewish leftists, not unconcerned with racism against their own group, have examined the claims in good faith and at great length and found no particular problem in Labour [1]. Soon after the controversy first ‘erupted’ (though we can fairly doubt its spontaneity) following a re-tweet by Labour MP Naz Shah in 2016, Jamie Stern-Weiner wrote an article exhaustively demonstrating the alacrity with which the party excluded those who showed actual racial antipathy [2].

Nor is Labour’s opposition to Israel based on the country’s Jewishness. In a book claiming to explain ‘The Left’s Jewish Problem’ but actually almost entirely concerned with leftist opposition to the Israeli state, Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust showed clearly enough why leftists like Corbyn oppose Israel — because they see it as an outpost of Western imperialism and capitalism which oppresses, displaces and kills Palestinian Arabs who, until the last century, had dominated the region for centuries. The leftist position is consistent with their worldview, and that worldview is not founded on racial hatred.

If they were only referring to racism against Jews, opponents of anti-Semitism would use a more rational term like Judeophobia or anti-Jewishness. But those who defend Israel know that they are defending actions which they would reject if carried out by other, genuinely Western states and thus find it politically useful to use one term, ‘anti-Semitism’, which enables them to conflate criticism of the state with attacks on the people it claims to represent. [3]

Why don’t we speak about Semitism?

Apart from these obvious peculiarities, it is notable that ‘Semitism’ and ‘Semites’ are nouns rarely used. Yet in light of the strategic, pro-Israeli way in which ‘anti-Semitism’ and ‘anti-Semites’ are now used, we might expect that the opposing terms would be used just as frequently. Probably in order to forestall exactly such a response, various Semitic organisations and individuals have argued that we should speak of ‘antisemitism’ instead, deliberately removing the hyphen and capital. They assert that there is no meaningful ‘Semitism’ to speak of [4].

One such Semitic organisation is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), whose ‘Working Definition on Antisemitism’ was adopted in full by Labour in September 2018 after a long struggle against a fierce campaign in its favour. Labour had immediately accepted the definition but sought to dissent on some of the examples given to clarify each of its many clauses. Eventually all official dissent was overcome. The IHRA draws upon earlier advocacy for such a definition by the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer, the first prominent activist to explicitly dispute that there is such a thing as Semitism.

Labour is not suffering from any genuine crisis over racism. The party is in the midst of a struggle for power, the imposition of this definition and a range of incidents and accusations being among the weapons of the aggressors, who come from within and without the party. The nature of this power struggle shows exactly why ‘Semitism’ should be used routinely: the side trying to wrest power from the Corbynists, or at least bend them to their will, are what I will call the Semitic front. Those who naturally wish to avoid being forced to conflate Jews and the Israeli state have every interest in a conscious de-Bauerisation of the language used on such matters.

The Semitic front is typically granted the favourable name of ‘the Jewish community’. This was probably where extreme left pro-homosexual and pro-transsexual activists learnt the utility of referring to themselves as ‘the LGBT community’. But, just as ‘the LGBT community’ conspicuously excludes homosexuals who don’t approve of homosexual marriage or Pride parades, so ‘the Jewish community’ excludes those Jews who don’t want Israel to be a Jewish state. Thus leftist Jews like Michael Rosen or Mike Leigh are unrepresented by the community, despite its name, and foreign Jewish supporters of Corbyn like Norman Finkelstein are not only outside it but fiercely denounced by it. Nor are leftist beliefs the determining criterion; the intensely religious Orthodox sect Neturei Karta oppose Zionism on theological grounds but are denounced by and excluded from ‘the Community’ all the same.

Using the term ‘Semitic front’ also helps account for it being led by Jews but composed to a significant degree of intensely Judeophilic gentiles. Indeed, these may outnumber the Jews involved. Labour’s treacherous deputy leader Tom Watson is a notable example [5], as is the often-absurd and pompous backbench MP John Mann. Wes Streeting is another. Mike Gapes left the Labour Party early in 2019, citing his unbearable dismay over the ‘anti-Semitism scandal’, another way of saying that his allegiance to Semitism was stronger than any he might once have had to the working class Britons for which Labour was originally named. Pro-Semitic journalists like Dan Hodges and James Bloodworth work to align as much of the British political class, and the electorate, with the line established by organisations of ‘the Jewish community’ like the Board of Deputies and the Community Security Trust and disseminated via journalists like Jonathan Freedman. And though Hodges and Bloodworth might be seen as being on the right of the left, the ardent socialist Owen Jones has worked to enforce the pro-Semitic line too.

What do the Semitic forces want?

The primary aim of the Semitic front is to force Labour, and ideally everyone else, to comply with its own support for Israel. It is no coincidence that all of the MPs, Jewish or gentile, who speak of Labour as being in a crisis over anti-Semitism happen to be enthusiastic Zionists, members of their parties’ Friends of Israel groups and, in nearly every case, strongly in favour of every war and global power arrangement that favours Israel.

The front is not concerned with racial hatred toward Jews, which is no stronger in Labour than in other parties. It simply makes use of the social cachet of racism and blurs it with anti-Zionism out of pure expediency. Anti-Zionism is not a euphemism for anti-Semitism, and those, such as Jonathan Freedland who aver that it is, know that they are perpetrating a falsehood [6]. Semitists baselessly aver that terms like ‘Zio’ are equivalent to ‘Paki’ despite Zionism being a political position. Calling someone a Zionist, unless as a compliment, is said to be an unacceptable use of an anti-Semitic trope. Suggesting that politicians like Luciana Berger, Ruth Smeeth and Margaret Hodge and Louise Ellman have greater loyalty to the Jewish state than to the people they rule over, which is obviously true, is dishonestly portrayed as a slur against Jews in general.

Labour’s inept defence

This is all easy to defend against, at least if the media would report one’s words accurately, as long as one is not committed to the complex of left-wing doctrines called ‘anti-racism’. Sadly for Labour, it, even more than other parties, has led the cause of imposing political correctness in Britain since World War II. Thus the party would never dare use such terms as ‘Semitism’ or ‘the Semitic Front’, no matter how appropriate they are given the language its enemies so freely use.

Political correctness, which in other ways has been so useful to Labour and Britain’s ruling class, is used to control what people can do politically by prohibiting non-conformist expressions on almost anything, especially matters of identity. Most of all, it is used to prevent native Britons freely discussing race and ethnicity. The growing range of prohibited expressions include acknowledging race as being real or having any meaning or importance other than in the theoretical sense of racism, in which powerful groups invent racial divisions (‘racialisation’) in order to justify their oppression of others they wish to portray as, or earnestly perceive to be, inferior to themselves. This is, for leftists, something which ethnic Europeans have done to the rest of the world since the age of colonialism began several centuries ago. Other empires have existed, but their effects have been superseded by ethnic Europeans, who came to refer to themselves as White and everyone else as Black or coloured, establishing the system of “racism” which leftists claim endures today.

While anti-Zionist leftists like Corbyn correctly deny that opposing Israel implies racial hatred, they maintain as strongly as ever that all racism must be crushed. Given their view of racism — an essentially imperialistic, capitalistic system of oppression centred in the White world — and of Israel — an outpost of White imperialism and capitalism — they are unable to speak of Jews as in any way holding power over Whites. No doubt many leftists privately believe that many Jews do, in fact, possess a particular racial consciousness, work together and exceed most Whites in terms of power, and occasionally they let slip with this, further fuelling the accusations of anti-Semitism in Labour and in the left in general, but none will deliberately say so unless they are prepared to be shunned by almost the entire global left. Leftism has come to rely, more than anything else, on anti-racism and anti-Whiteness, which mean much the same.

Whatever differences of perspective leftists have in private, the worldview they mutually subscribe to and enforce upon one another requires them to treat Jews as a sub-category of Whites. They can admit only two difference : that Jews have different religious beliefs to other Whites, and that Jews have been oppressed by other Whites throughout history and especially in the 1940s. Both these differences oblige leftists to treat Jews with a degree of formal reverence of the same kind, though in a lesser degree, to that with which they treat ‘people of colour’. Leftists cannot speak of anything like a Semitic front trying to control Labour for the sake of Jewish racial supremacy, however strongly all evidence points to that very conclusion.

Crippled by their own anti-racism

The Semitic front, whose aim is racial supremacy, makes use of anti-racism out of expediency. Semitists know that earnest anti-racism is crippling; the anti-Semites are forced to defend themselves without saying what they really defend against. Thus the likes of the MP Chris Williamson have been easily bowled over and may yet be permanently expelled from the party, as the activist Jackie Walker already has been.

Williamson knows full well that when he said that the party had been too apologetic over anti-Semitism claims, he wasn’t engaging in anything like racial hatred or even opposition to the Jewish state in saying that Labour has given too much ground in regard to claims of anti-Semitism, and he ought to know that those who have vilified him for saying so don’t believe that what he said was racist. But if he was to allow himself to think clearly about, let alone spoke of, their real motives — to compel Labour to obey the Semitic front, and rigorously exclude anyone non-compliant — he would stray into territory that he himself has long shunned as racist. Thus, instead, he was reduced to pathetically reminding people of his own anti-racist pedigree proven by his history of ‘anti-fascist’ assaults on pro-native demonstrations [7]. Even so, this self-abasement, simultaneously shameless and shameful, was in vain. At present, he remains suspended from the party whose stated values, lamentable as they are, he embodies as well as anyone else.

Williamson caved, apologised and retracted his statement even though it was right. An apologetic attitude in the midst of a power struggle is a mistake. The pressure under which Williamson apologised is evidence of the rectitude of the statement he retracted.

The Conservatives are consistent in the worst possible way

The self-imposition of anti-racism has crippled Labour’s ability to defend against the Semitic front, but also, owing to shifts in power and pressures flowing from other concurrent issues, Labour also been inconsistent in its application of its rules. Williamson and Walker might not have been suspended had their supposed transgressions entered the news at other times. When accusations have hit Labour at weaker moments, they have been more effective.

True opponents of Labour who sincerely opposed their ideology would have been able to spend the years since Corbyn’s ascent criticising both sides in the power struggle and exploiting the opportunities it presents. But the Conservatives long ago adopted ‘anti-racism’ too. It was fully in place by the time Enoch Powell made his famous Birmingham speech in 1968, and has only taken a firmer hold of the Tory party since.

Like Labour, they are inconsistent in their application of ‘anti-racism’, sometimes even making use of racist allusions if they can get away with it. But the Tories are remarkably consistent in their avoidance of any corresponding anti-Semitism controversy. While Labour has fought the Semitic front since 2015, the Tories’ are fully incorporated into it, and so is much of the Tory-supporting media. [8] They lack an anti-Semitism problem not because they have sustained no pro-Semitic activism but because there has been no need for any; there is no opposition to Semitism and thus no problem. [9]

The Tories also have a controversy

Various identitarian groups over the last two decades have adopted what they call the MacPherson principle, wherein purportedly oppressed groups can ‘define their own oppression’ [10]. This has been beneficial to what I will call Muslimists, activists who seek to advance the ethnic interests of Muslims, be they religious or simply born into Muslim communities.

Upon seeing the success of the Semitic front, and with some encouragement from Semitic organisations like the Community Security Trust (which co-founded the ‘hate crime monitor’ group Tell Mama), Muslimists, including some like the Tory peer Baroness Saeeda Warsi, have taken the opportunity to assert that the Tories have an ‘Islamophobia problem’. One Muslimist, Miqdaad Versi of the Muslim Council of Britain, has highlighted numerous examples of ‘Islamophobia’ in order to goad the Tories into a direct pro-Muslim attack on its own members. Versi refers to a report by the primarily Jewish ‘anti-racist’ group Hope Not Hate which showed that a majority of Tory members saw Islam as a threat. [11]

Such residues of genuine conservativism would be infuriating for the leadership if their revelation didn’t also serve as a pretext for the government to impose further measures against freedom of expression. Tories of the more dim-witted kind think that their party scored an easy win against Labour by breezily accepting the IHRA’s anti-Semitism definition while Labour debated the fine details at length. Yet the Tory leadership is now deciding just how strong a prohibition on ‘Islamophobia’ to impose. Tory members continue to support the leadership, no matter how blatantly it works to defeat their own wishes.

Both parties accede to Muslimists and Semitists

The Tories have long tended to enjoy the favour of much of the mainstream media. The same media have agreed that Labour has at least some problem with anti-Semitism, even after the many expulsions the party has made.

The Tories readily give ground on Islam. Doing so does not diminish its freedom to show total servility toward Israel, especially given that the Jewish community has promoted Islam. Labour continues to awkwardly try and maintain its anti-Israeli stance, but thanks to the solid consensus that Semitic activism must never be named, let alone opposed, for what it is, Labour has essentially conceded the moral ground to the Semitic forces. The IHRA seldom needs to be mentioned now that its deliberately slanted definition has been adopted in full by both parties and will likely be incorporated into British law. When the organisation is mentioned, its name is uttered in hallowed tones as though it’s an authority on truth and morality. From the very start, its supporters, and alas its victims too, neglected to mention that it’s a Semitic activist body which created and propagated this definition exactly so that it could be used as a weapon by Semitists against the likes of Corbyn,  and now by the political class as a whole against everyone else, to portray any non-conformity with Semitism as outrageous and intolerable.

In 2015, various right-leaning commentators insisted that although they expected Corbyn to be an incompetent leader and thus facilitate Tory power, they lamented this fact because, they said, Britain needs a proper opposition. After all, Her Majesty’s Opposition plays an important constitutional role, even when heavily outnumbered in Parliament. But all the same commentators have taken smug delight in seeing Labour’s opposition to Semitic power crushed, leaving British voters with no electoral option by which it can try to free itself from the control of people who choose to act as servants of a foreign state.

The Semitic front may yet fracture as Labour, and perhaps the Tories too, become ever more dependent on Muslim votes. Muslims will probably ride the ‘anti-racism’ horse, largely Jewish in origin, as far as it can carry them. Even if it hampers their ability to attack Semites, it will help them in the more urgent task of subjugating native Britons. And power-seeking climbers like Sadiq Khan and Sajid Javid, perhaps in one or two elections’ time Britain’s duellists for the Prime Ministership, both evidently see the value of obeisance to the Semitic front. But other Muslims, authentically allied with their co-religionists worldwide, are likely to retain and build upon anti-Semitic beliefs, and while Britain’s Jewish population grows slowly or even declines, Muslim numbers continue to climb rapidly. Their votes will not all be bought off as cheaply as Khan and Javid have been, and Jewish-led inter-faith initiatives like those fronted by Fiyaz Mughal may in the long term prove insufficient to channel Muslims away from anti-Semitism and toward mutually beneficial, anti-White ends.

All groups gain against British people

Still, the Semites have gained a huge amount from their activism, no matter how inconvenient its latest results. They have gone from having a few influential figures in British politics in the nineteenth century to now having the full allegiance of the governing party and holding sway over the opposition. Globally, they have gone from being small minorities in many countries to having their own explicitly Semitic state to which parties all over the West are ardently loyal.

They also control important bodies in the UK like the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The EHRC, feigning impartiality, is currently investigating Labour ‘for alleged discrimination against Jews’, though this is very unlikely to include discrimination against pro-Corbyn Jews like Tony Greenstein or Moshé Machover. The EHRC may yet investigate the Tories too over Islamophobia. Both parties will now be informed of their degree of moral acceptability, and even legality, by an organisation of the state whose chief executive is the highly ethnocentric Jew Rebecca Hilsenrath.

The broader battle

The Labour anti-Semitism controversy is part of a multi-sided power struggle which ranges across many countries. Muslims are a growing factor in this struggle, and it is partly because Corbynists are so implicitly pro-Islamic that Labour attracts the majority of Muslim votes in Britain and the opprobrium of Semitists who dread that this will permanently alter the party’s foreign policy in favour of Palestinian Arabs.

Currently, the Islamic and Semitic fronts, and Britain’s three biggest political parties, together constitute one broader front which relies upon the use of ‘anti-racism’ against a giant, potentially vengeful ethnic British front that they all hope remains unconscious of its own interests lest it turn against them all. As Tobias Langdon has written,

“The battle in Labour over “anti-Semitism” is a battle for control of the party. Should it serve Jewish interests and support Israel, as it did under Blair? Or should it serve Muslim interests and oppose Israel, as it is now doing under Corbyn? Obviously, White interests are nowhere in sight: the Labour party is now a “Plague for the Proletariat” whom it was originally created to champion.” [12]

The interests of ethnic Britons are nowhere in sight for the Tories either. The Tories occupy the space in which a pro-British front would otherwise exist, and at least since 1968, when Edward Heath fired Enoch Powell from his Shadow Cabinet, they have consciously tasked themselves with preventing any such front from arising. Against such clear-eyed determination to hold Britons down by the throat until they are a small minority in their own land, there is no chance whatsoever of any rebellion from within the highly centrally-controlled Conservative Party, and those who continue to support the party merely to keep Labour out are colluding in the destruction of their own people. Of course Labour should be brought down, but with the ostensible party of the right under the control of traitors and the Semitic front, this cannot yet be done. Indeed, all the Conservatives do is observe the left’s ideological stance on every matter other than economics (and still there to an extent) and impose it with a show of reluctance that only stimulates leftist fervour and hatred.

Not only should the destruction of the Conservative Party be the highest priority (more important and urgent than leaving the European Union) for any genuine nationalist, but any rightist movement that rushes into the breach will need to rigorously exclude the Tory-supporting oafs who have blithely joined in the denunciation of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism since his leadership began. People who finds themselves on the same side as the likes of Luciana Berger, effectively a foreign agent who has spent her whole career proudly opposing the ethnic interests of British people and using our resources for the service of her people, can never be anything better than a liability to those who truly want to liberate and revive our nation. The same goes for the likes of Richard Kemp, who devotes much energy to campaigning against anti-Semitism [13] and defending Israel as the Jewish homeland while saying nothing equivalent in favour of Britain’s indisputably rightful owners.

For all their differences, the Zionists with whom Kemp willingly allies, and the far-left, anti-White Jews whose ‘anti-racism’ and ‘anti-fascism’ [14] the likes of Williamson have spent decades serving, are virtually unanimous on one issue that is more consequential to British people than racism or the Jewish homeland can ever be: whether we should retain and regain control of our homeland. Currently it is a battlefield where foreign forces tangle with each other while showing contempt for their hosts. Almost every Jew involved in British politics — I struggle to name any exceptions, individual or organised — supports Britain being forced open as wide as possible to the mass importation of ethnically Asian and African people which large majorities of the natives have always opposed. Since any opposition to these policies which named the Jewish role in promoting them would be termed anti-Semitic by all sides, Britain as a whole has been under attack by a broader Semitic front since at least the late 1940s. Chris Williamson, a dimwit in most ways, was right: Labour have been too apologetic. But infinitely more so have been the British people. We owe nobody an apology for anything, least of all those who sanctimoniously accuse us of racism while endorsing the foulest, most hateful crimes against our race. Britain, like Labour, does not have an anti-Semitism problem. Its problems are Semitic.

Footnotes :

1. Labour also compounded its own problems by hiring the subversive, phoney libertarian Shami Chakrabarti in 2016 to examine the claims in obvious bad faith. Later that year, she ‘just happened’ to become Baroness Chakrabarti at Corbyn’s recommendation.
2. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/jeremy-corbyn-hasn-t-got-antisemitism-problem-his-opponents-do/
3. So perverse are the effects of this rhetorical subversion that extreme ‘anti-racists’ (in the leftist sense) like Mark Wadsworth have been forced out of the party in order to placate faux-vulnerable racial supremacists like Ruth Smeeth in.
4. Wikipedia pages on anti-Semitism obey this dictum, as does the British Sky News, though the BBC currently does not.
5. Tom Watson said that Luciana Berger leaving Labour was the worst day in the party’s history, grovelling to someone who in other circumstances would be rightly called a splitter. Arguably the two decades of enthusiastic support Labour gave to the regime of Lenin and Stalin included several worse days.
6.  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/labour-antisemitism-jews-jeremy-corbyn – note the feebleness of the evidence Freedland adduces in support of his claim.
7. Williamson thus endorsed the largely Jewish tradition of assaulting lawful nationalist gatherings that was established at the Jewish-Communist ‘Battle’ of Cable Street (a criminal assault on police) and escalated by the Jewish 43 Group in the 1940s. Most of the 43 Group such as Vidal Sassoon were ardent Zionists who participated in the ethnic cleansing that helped found the State of Israel in 1948, and would have despised Williamson for his views on Israel, though would have been pleased to see him and other ‘anti-fascist’ activists following in their footsteps and forcibly preventing British people from organising to protect their own homeland. The twin causes of ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘anti-racism’ in Britain through the 20th century are better understood as one organised Jewish assault on the ethnic interests of native Britons. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuZQkyGQnpc
8. Expelled activist Jackie Walker astutely said that she had lost her position in Labour owing to an ‘“increasing convergence between Zionists, the right of the Labour Party, the Tories and our right-wing media”, designed to undermine Corbyn and the left so that ‘Israeli propagandists and their fellow travellers’ can ‘get on with their dirty work’. Anti-Semitism is not a big problem in the party, she wrote; a bigger problem is that Zionists and right-wingers can get people like her suspended.’ – Dave Rich, The Left’s Jewish Problem – Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, Updated Edition, (Biteback Publishing, 2016),  p226.
9. Q: How many Tories does it take to change a lightbulb? A: I don’t know. Ask the Board of Deputies.
10. Tobias Langdon notes that the so-called MacPherson principle is ideally suited to ensure full discrimination against Whites : “Another important feature of the campaign has been the way it is founded on a ludicrous but unassailable axiom of anti-racism: that a minority is always in the right and must never be accused of employing dishonest means or pursuing selfish ends. A complementary axiom of anti-racism states the exact opposite of the White majority, namely, that it is always in the wrong and constantly employs dishonest means to pursue selfish ends.” https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/08/10/gas-chamber-blues-revisited-more-on-the-stain-and-shame-of-labour-anti-semitism/ For more on the MacPherson inquiry, see https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/11/08/the-ruling-stones-the-ethnic-activism-of-richard-stone/
11. https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/conservative-party/news/105170/most-tory-members-believe-islam-threat
12. https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/07/28/labours-gas-chamber-blues-pink-berets-vs-fing-anti-semites/
13. https://antisemitism.uk/about/patrons/
14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuZQkyGQnpc