Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has electrified his nation’s election by calling out the Labour Party as anti-Semitic. “A new poison,” he says, “sanctioned from the top, has taken root in the Labour Party.”
Former Labour MP Luciana Berger, who resigned from the party in protest some months ago, says the Labour Party is now “systematically anti-Semitic”.
Christian, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim leaders expressed solidarity with the Chief Rabbi.
At the political level, it is important that Boris Johnson’s Conservatives win this election to give effect to Brexit. To deny Brexit is to deny democracy in the form of the 2016 referendum, which all mainstream parties promised would be binding. And to reverse Brexit would be a humiliating and long-damaging British capitulation to EU bullying.
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But the whole Brexit issue is secondary to the overwhelming consideration of Corbyn’s manifest unfitness for office. He has a long record of praising anti-Semites and praising specific examples of anti-Semitism, and of supporting terrorists and dictators. He is essentially an unreconstructed communist surrounded by unreconstructed communists. He is the most foully unfit person ever to be contemplated for leader of a major Western nation.
The rise of Corbyn is a pointer to the gravely disordered state of political culture in the West.
Before he became leader Corbyn was a figure of the extremist fringe. He undertook numerous paid appearances on Iranian and Russian television. On Iranian TV he denounced the BBC’s pro-Israel bias (yes, the BBC’s pro-Israel bias) evident in its reporting which indicated that Israel had a right to exist. He praised savagely anti-Semitic murals that depicted hook-nosed Jewish capitalists breaking the backs of the poor. He hailed as friends vicious terrorists dedicated to killing Jews.
As leader, Corbyn installed a hard-left cadre of trained and experienced far-left apparatchiks to run the party and its organs. And he attracted hundreds of thousands of young people.
Nothing is a more powerful indictment of the culture of youth activism than that it could fall for an extremist like Corbyn. An ideological attitude within the liberal arts that sees everything in the West as evil, that holds traditional political process in contempt and that acclaims ever greater intensity of outrage against the West’s sins, produces a generation, or at least a slice of a generation, for whom Corbyn is the natural leader.
Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews. It is the most ancient, toxic, malign hatred humanity has come up with. I want to express solidarity with Jews and I don’t want my reflections to be depressing. But there is now in the world a kind of perfect storm of anti-Semitism that is fed from at least four distinct, powerful sources.
These are: left-wing anti-Semitism of the type Corbyn exhibits; Islamist anti-Semitism, which is found all over the Arab and Islamic world; extreme right, white supremacist anti-Semitism of the type that motivated the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre last year; and there is the still lingering effect of traditional Christian anti-Semitism.
The Christian denominations have almost all apologised for their historic anti-Semitism, including fulsomely by Pope John Paul II. The theology of anti-Semitism was exhaustively repudiated in the documents of the second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Anti-Semitism was never uncontested in Christianity and the story is complex, with good and bad actors and episodes. But it is just denying reality to pretend that there is not a long history of Christian prejudice and persecution of Jews, which has conditioned subsequent history.
The far-right terrorists of synagogue shootings and mosque attacks sometimes draw on old Christian anti-Semitic caricatures in a parody of what they grotesquely think is a defence of the West.
These four sources of anti-Semitism frequently commingle and cross-fertilise each other. But the two most vigorous sources of contemporary anti-Semitism are the left and Islamists.
Corbyn’s pitiful attempts to defend himself on TV this week were eerily reminiscent of Prince Andrew’s calamitous TV interview about his friendship with child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Both men took essentially the same line: I am a good person in a morally good institution, therefore it is impossible for me to have done something morally wrong.
Corbyn is an intellectually weak figure but he fully represents the contemporary far-left view of politics and society. This is a mixture of derivative Marxist economics, and neo-Marxist, postmodern cultural and social power analysis.
Corbyn’s world view sees all evil flowing from Western imperialism, racism, economic exploitation, colonialism, neo-colonialism, sexism and a few other recently added evils also emanating structurally from the West.
Because Corbyn sees himself as having devoted his life to opposing all this injustice, it follows logically, at least in his warped world view, that he cannot possibly be guilty of racism or anti-Semitism. That’s why he so often seems puzzled by the accusations Labour is anti-Semitic.
It is perfectly possible to criticise Israel harshly without being anti-Semitic. But leftists and many Islamists use a notional anti-Zionism to shield their true anti-Semitism. Thus many British Labour figures equate Israel with Nazism, an insane, demonising and profoundly offensive formulation. Many criticise Israel using classic anti-Semitic slurs, accusing British Jews of dual loyalty.
Nick Dyrenfurth, an Australian author and think-tanker, who is Jewish, recalls being attacked online as a “f..king Zionist” in response to a piece he wrote on economic policy.
An American friend of Irish extraction recalls visiting a school in Muslim southern Thailand, having a very friendly encounter there that had nothing to do with the Middle East, and being told by students that they enjoyed the visit and had “never met a Zionist before”.
Left-wing and Islamist anti-Semitism cross-fertilise a great deal, especially in the narrative that Jews are never victims. The corrosive, mad mixture of left-wing identity politics and traditional anti-Semitism is brilliantly referenced in Douglas Murray’s masterly The Madness of Crowds. He recounts an Atlantic magazine cover story that asked, in all seriousness, “Are Jews White?” This was so that it could be determined whether Jews were to be presumed guilty of enjoying “white privilege” and therefore always to be rendered as the enemy.
The anti-Semitism Corbyn has licensed in British Labour demonstrates the pathology of the contemporary left. Forever seeking, and often enough inventing, “structural” racism, it cannot see, much less respond to, real racism in front of its face.
Every civilised human being is an enemy of anti-Semitism. This would be one place to start in trying to recover our culture.
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