Trial by Jewry: Asa Winstanley on Weaponizing Anti-Semitism

Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn
ASA WINSTANLEY
OR Books, 2023

The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.
Polish proverb

Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of Britain’s Labour Party prior to the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, taking over in 2015 remaining leader until Labour’s comprehensive defeat in 2019. Despite losing the snap General Election in 2017, Labour exceeded expectations electorally, and Corbyn remained at the helm until 2019, when Boris Johnson’s Tories (in name, at least) won a resounding mandate. Corbyn’s tenure as leader was particularly tempestuous as he was fighting not just the old enemy in the form of the Conservative Party, but another, more shadowy foe:

The most successful attack vector against Corbyn would prove to be the narrative of a ‘crisis’ of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party.

The quote is from Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, a book by British journalist, Asa Winstanley. Anti-Semitism, along with racism, homophobia, Islamophobia et al, is one of the new occupational hazards, a reboot of the Seven Deadly Sins for the workplace. An accusation of any one of them can lose someone their job, and politicians must tread particularly carefully. But whereas racism and transphobia bring hordes out onto the streets waving ill-written signs, the Jews are not much given to placardism. Anti-Semitism is a charge more clinically applied, but equally deadly. Corbyn’s political demise, according to Winstanley, was “death by a thousand investigations into anti-Semitism”.

The book represents seven-years’ research into Labour’s relationship with (and attack by) the Jewish lobby by Winstanley and colleagues at his website, Electronic Intifada. A long-time Labour member himself before leaving the party in disgust, Winstanley and his site represent a rare voice, one critical of Jewish presence and influence in British politics. This book shines an unwelcome light into the shadows, as when the site’s investigations revealed that “the Israeli state is arming Ukraine’s Azov Battalion—one of the world’s most dangerous Nazi armed groups.”

As soon as Corbyn took the reins of the Labour Party from the utterly hopeless Ed Miliband, there were stirrings within the British establishment the cause of which is the subject of Winstanley’s work here. Corbyn was correctly seen as a creature of the hard Left, and his reception was a frigid one. Media coverage and interviews were hostile and provocative, an ex-British Army General said that there would be mass resignations should Corbyn become Prime Minister, and both MI5 and MI6 invited the new Labour leader to “let’s get acquainted” meetings which gave him the sense there was an éminence grise working behind the scenes.

The media were cautious about Corbyn’s accession to the Labour leadership, although impressed by the party’s showing in the 2017 election. Already, though, the expected chorus warning of anti-Jew enmity had begun to build:

Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard had to face up to the reality of Corbyn’s achievements, admitting that ‘Like most pundits, I called the election completely wrongly.’ But he went on to write that the 12.8 million people who had voted for Labour ‘scare me’, implying that they were all anti-Semitic, or at least willing to tolerate Jew-hatred.

But the opposition to Corbyn, and the complex and determined campaign to depose him, had as its center of gravity the Labour leader’s lack of vocal support for Israel. It is not sufficient in British politics to pay lip-service to Israel. You must support Zionism, at least tacitly. And so Corbyn was painted into a corner before he had even begun his run at the premiership:

No matter how much Corbyn tried to pander, the Israel lobby always refused to take yes for an answer.

The ultimate aim of the Israeli lobby was to keep a genuinely Socialist Prime Minister out of 10 Downing Street, and Corbyn alarmed them: “probably more than anything else, Corbyn was known among activists for his involvement in the Palestine solidarity movement.” In fact, Winstanley’s tenacious research shows that the lobby did not suddenly turn their fire on the Labour leader once he had won the leadership contest:

Israel’s security services had set their sights on the MP at least five years before he became Labour leader and long before anti-Semitism in Labour became a newsworthy issue.

Anti-Semitism was not something that British newspapers such as The Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News suddenly discovered in the Labour Party, but rather something they at best exaggerated and at worst confected.

Much of the war over perceived racism of any kind is waged on the battlefield of language, and now that social media has amplified political commentary, use of language, vocabulary, and rhetoric is forensically examined by those who wish to use it to serve their political purposes. Winstanley is in no doubt in his choice of equivalence:

‘Do you agree that’ a certain quote, social media posting, or unfortunate turn of phrase ‘is anti-Semitic?’ became the new ‘Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’.

The term “trope” is always in play for the Jewish lobby. Their Islamic and Black counterparts tend not to use it, Muslims perhaps because its provenance is Ancient Greek (and thus a relic from the jahiliyya, the time before Islam), Blacks because they can’t find it in their slim, one-volume dictionary of Ebonics. Thus, when Al Jazeera’s media arm produced a revealing series called The Lobby, which involved undercover reporting and recording, the response of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) was typical:

LFI [called] Al Jazeera’s series ‘a combination of lies, insinuations, and distortions’ that ‘attempted to construct a vast conspiracy involving hidden power, money and improper influence — typical anti-Semitic tropes’.

Well, sure. All Jew-critical observers understand that “hidden power, money and improper influence” are the reasons they are Jew-critical observers in the first place. It’s a little like saying that poisonous snakes possess deadly agility, sharp, canalised teeth, and lethal venom, and that these are “typical, anti-snake tropes”. If a “trope” is simply a feature, it loses its sinister overtones. It too must be weaponized. One prominent member of LFI related with pride that her son had recently got a very good job by virtue of having worked for the Labour faction. When a journalist implied that LFI might have access to some serious funding from the Jewish lobby, “She instantly lashed out: ‘It’s anti-Semitic. It is. It’s a trope. It’s about conspiracy theorists!’.”

It’s also interesting to note the name of LFI’s savior in the Labour Party when they fell on hard times:

The decline of LFI’s membership led its director, in an internal report, to write that 1992 ‘came near to seeing the end of LFI as an active body.’ Its fortunes were revived when Tony Blair took over in 1994. Blair called it ‘one of the most important organizations within the Labour movement’.

The Jewish lobby’s concerted and ultimately successful attempt to bring down Corbyn was no mere whispering campaign among Zionists. “Israeli officials often described their campaign against ‘delegitimisation’ using military language”, Winstanley writes:

According to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, there was even a ‘war room’ at the Israeli embassy in London. Describing a map of Britain hanging on the wall, … Ravid wrote that it was like something from ‘a brigade on the Lebanese border.’ The map showed ‘the front’ (Britain’s universities) as well as ‘the deployment of pro-Israel activists and the location of ‘enemy forces’. The aim was to sabotage and divide the left in order to promote Zionist ideology, and to block the rise of democratic socialist governments overseas that would be more likely to loosen ties with Israel.

Corbyn was not the only Labour Party member to be targeted and ultimately defenestrated by the Jewish lobby, nor even the most high-profile. When Corbyn won the leadership contest, no one outside the Westminster bubble had even heard of him. Ken Livingstone, on the other hand, was a household name. The two-term London Mayor affectionately known as “Red Ken” was effectively brought down by forces using anti-Semitism as their field artillery, and two names which are never far from the Jewish lobby’s lexicon: Hitler and the Holocaust.

In an interview, Livingstone mentioned the fact that Hitler, in the early 1930s, announced his plan for Germany’s Jews, which did not involve gas chambers, but instead mass deportation to Israel. Even Reinhard Heydrich, known as the “architect of the Holocaust”, approved of Zionism (although Livingstone was not so foolish as to mention that). The interview was a classic stitch-up:

In the days, months and years to follow, Livingstone would be incessantly berated with the allegation that he had brought the Nazis into the conversation out the blue, even of being ‘obsessed’ by Hitler. But examination of the transcript shows that, in fact, it had been [the interviewer] who had raised the issue of the Nazis.

The interview was followed a familiar maneuver by the Jewish lobby: Get the interviewee onto Hitler territory and then watch closely for any slip-up. When Corbyn tried to defend Livingstone’s comments, the Jewish media pounced with trademark hyperbole. Former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks accused Corbyn of “the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech”. Powell, of course, never mentioned any “Rivers of blood” but rather, as a classics expert, was making an allusion to Virgil. This regular misquotation has passed into the currency both of the Left and the Jewish lobby. It has become, as our Jewish friends might say, a trope. Concerning Corbyn’s apparent defense of Livingstone, Jewish journalist Simon Heffer announced on live radio that Corbyn “wanted to re-open Auschwitz”. This is a willful and absurd misinterpretation of the situation, but it helped to put Corbyn on the defensive. Once a prominent personality is forced to start saying things like, “I’m not a racist” or, “I don’t have an anti-Semitic bone in my body”, the struggle is already slipping away from them.

Winstanley and his research team were also affected by Labour’s desperate purge of anything that even remotely resembled anti-Semitism:

At the Electronic Intifada, we saw signs of this early on, as Labour Party bureaucrats implemented what was in effect a stealth ban on party members sharing our stories.

Published in 2023, Winstanley’s book almost bring us up to the present day (in which it is possible for the staunchest Tory to feel nostalgic about Corbyn) and extends to Starmer’s accession as Party leader, as well as the clarity of his attitude towards Israel and its ever-busy lobbyists:

[Starmer’s] first act as ‘Labour’ leader was not to address the material conditions of the working classes or (with the looming threat of millions of newly unemployed) lay out his plans to combat COVID-19. Rather his top priority was assuring the Israel lobby that they were back in the driver’s seat.

The return of Israeli influence was confirmed with the first of Starmer’s minor scandals: Inviting an Israeli spy to take over as head of “social listening”, a euphemism for the surveillance of citizens on social media. “Israel and its lobby no longer needed to infiltrate the Labour Party”, writes Winstanley. “Starmer had invited them into headquarters”.

Starmer now has to serve two masters, the Jewish lobby and the Muslim Council of Britain. It seems at first glance that the mass importation of Muslims into Europe represents what people have taken to calling an “existential threat” to Europe’s Jews. An alternative view is that it is the Israel lobby which is orchestrating this invasion, and a few hospitalized Jews and damaged synagogues are collateral damage. It is even whispered that the Jewish Board of Deputies is an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood. But that is a tale for another day.

Winstanley’s book is both highly competent, responsible journalism, and a reminder that, for the Israeli lobby, the only thing worse than anti-Semitism is no anti-Semitism, nothing with which to gain political purchase and leverage. “Israel and its lobby”, Winstanley writes, “have always used anti-Semitism as a political weapon.”

We hear much, at least from our own quarter, about the influence of Jews at a global level and too little about the small maneuvers—the grassroots plots and plans, the targeting of individuals. The strategy used by the Jewish lobby is simple but, as the case of Jeremy Corbyn shows, devastatingly effective. One leading Jewish lobbyist explains the methods used to control both the narrative and even an entire political party:

[We] built a robust political discourse, rooted in the politics of the left, and deployed it in their own backyard.