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] Read more

I recently had the opportunity to watch Channel 4’s made-for-TV movie The Uncivil War, which recreates the story of the June 2016 British referendum on withdrawal from the European Union, commonly known as “Brexit.” Personally, I am not a fan of biopics and docudramas covering very recent history. More time needs to pass before we can get the perspective necessary to judge events. In the case of this film, the storytelling is very much distorted by the contemporary manias of the liberal mind. That is instructive in itself.

The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock, Dr. Strange . . .) as Dominic Cummins, the chairman of the official Leave Campaign. Cummins is portrayed as brilliant, irascible, and indeed intellectual (he’s spent all spring reading Thucydides and Tolstoy, we are told with no subtlety). He’s a maverick, who would flourish if only the suits would let him play by his own rules, a typical TV trope. Cummins is too smart, too ahead of the curve for the old-fashioned British politicians to understand. He’ll have to impose his online campaign strategy by hook or by crook. And he did so, with great success. We are never shown Cummins’ motivations in leading the charge for Brexit. He comes across as largely amoral.

As depicted in the film, Cummins’ main strategic decisions are twofold. First, the rejection of any collaboration with Nigel Farage and UKIP. For you and me, Farage may be a funny bloke to watch on TV, but he and UKIP are a pretty thin gruel indeed. Hovever, for the writers of Uncivil War, these folks are already beyond the pale. They are no more than unscrupulous troglodytes. In particular UKIP financier Arron Banks, played by Lee Boardman, is portrayed as gratuitously vicious and petty. Second, a ban on explicit discussion of immigration by the Leave Campaign. Instead, Leave would emphasize the EU’s cost to the UK (allegedly £350 million per week) and potential Turkish membership of the EU. (That’s a good dog whistle, since Turkey is, ridiculously, an official candidate country to join the EU, although is unlikely to join for the foreseeable future.) These two strategic decisions tell you how policed things are in mainstream UK politics. Read more

Jeremy Corbyn has a beard. So has Jonathan Sacks. But this shared philopogony hasn’t brought the two men closer together. Sacks is the former Chief Rabbi of Britain and, to be fair, I think we would be better off if more Jews were like him. He doesn’t seem to hate Whites and the Christian religion in the way so many of his co-ethnics do.

Battle of the Beards

But that doesn’t mean Sacks is a reasonable or objective man where his own race is concerned. He can be ethnocentric and apply double standards with the best of them, as he’s just proved by his comments on his fellow beardie:

Jeremy Corbyn is “an anti-Semite” who has “given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate”, the former chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said. In an exclusive interview with the New Statesman, the peer described Corbyn’s recently reported 2013 remarks on “Zionists” as “the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech”.

Sacks, who was chief rabbi from 1991 until 2013, added: “It was divisive, hateful and like Powell’s speech it undermines the existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting them as essentially alien.”

At a speech made at the Palestinian Return Centre in London in 2013, Corbyn said of a group of British “Zionists”: “They clearly have two problems. One is they don’t want to study history and, secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.” (Corbyn’s “Zionist” remarks were “most offensive” since Enoch Powell, says ex-chief rabbi, The New Statesman, 28th August 2018)

Jonathan Sacks is given an award by the war-criminal Tony Blair

Enoch Powell predicted that mass immigration would lead to race war. Jeremy Corbyn said that some Zionists don’t get “English irony.” Whether or not you agree with Powell, is it reasonable to compare the words of the two men? Are they “hateful” and “divisive” in a similar way? I’d say no, they’re obviously not, and the vast majority of British Whites probably agree with me.

Sacks doesn’t agree with me, and he has the Community with him, according to the Jewish Chronicle: “Reform Rabbi Jonathan Romain of Maidenhead Synagogue said that, while the Enoch Powell analogy may have shocked people, ‘it accurately reflected what most British Jews feel.’” Read more