Albanese needs to show some spine

Corbyn’s British Labour is virulently anti-Semitic; the ALP must cut ties.

A Twitter picture posted on March 19, 2019 of British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and ALP leader Anthony Albanese in Westminster.

Anti-Semitism is generally not considered a progressive value. In the years leading up to Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power, the German Social Democratic Party led the way in condemning Nazi Jew-hatred. It was one such German Social Democrat, August Bebel, who rightly termed anti-Semitism “the socialism of fools”. Many of its members paid the ultimate price for standing up for what was right.

One of the most profoundly disturbing and perplexing phenomena in the Western world today has been the rise of left-wing anti-Semitism. Nowhere is this societal cancer more visible than in the British Labour Party, which was taken over by the hard-left Jeremy Corbyn four years ago.

Since then, hardly a week has gone by in which some sort anti-Semitic outrage has not ensnared the party. Traditionally the home of British Jewry, Labour is now viewed, in the words of highly respected former British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks, as an “existential threat” to Jewish life. A poll last year found 40 per cent of British Jews would consider leaving the country were Corbyn to become prime minister.

The examples of anti-Semitism emanating from Corbyn and his crew are legion, but just a few examples should suffice. He once defended a blatantly anti-Semitic mural depicting hook-nosed bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor. He suggested renaming Holocaust Memorial Day “Genocide Memorial Day”. He placed a wreath on the grave of Black September terrorists. Last month, the BBC aired an explosive documentary detailing Labour’s abject failure to deal with anti-Semitism within its ranks.

The revelations led 67 Labour members of the House of Lords to write an open letter declaring: “The Labour Party welcomes everyone* irrespective of race, creed, age, gender identity, or sexual orientation. (*except, it seems, Jews). This is your legacy Mr Corbyn.” Labour member Trevor Phillips, Britain’s former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, laments that his party “presents like a textbook case of institutional racism”.

Nine Labour parliamentarians have quit in disgust, citing Corbynista anti-Semitism among the reasons. Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows, and none has been stranger than the endorsements Corbyn has earned from the likes of Nick Griffin, the former leader of the fascist British National Party, and David Duke, ex-leader of the Ku Klux Klan and perhaps America’s most infamous racist. We can also add, unfortun­ately, Australian Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese to the list.

According to this newspaper, Albanese has met Corbyn at least three times in less than two years, posing for friendly selfies with the hard-left British Labour leader. “Talking politics and progress — and a bit of cricket,” Albanese captioned one of the photos. He should take a cue from some of his fellow social democrats abroad and distance his party from its British cousin, pronto.

Last year, Israeli Labor suspended all official relations with its British counterpart. In a sternly worded letter to Corbyn, then-leader Avi Gabbay acknowledged the “long history of friendship” that had existed between the two parties stretching back to prime minister Harold Wilson. But “the hostility that you have shown to the Jewish community and the anti-Semitic statements and actions you have allowed as leader of the Labour Party UK” along with “your very public hatred of the policies of the government of the state of Israel” led him to the conclusion that “we cannot retain relations with you … while you fail to adequately address the anti-Semitism” within Labour ranks.

When she travelled to Britain this year, Democrats leader and US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi met several former Labour MPs to hear about “the importance of standing unequivocally against anti-Semitism wherever it is found”. At the same time, Pelosi was unable to get her caucus to explicitly censure one of its own members, Ilhan Omar, for a series of anti-Semitic statements.

Anti-Semitism isn’t the only moral stain Corbyn and crew have attached to the Labour brand. A long-time contributor to the communist Morning Star newspaper, Corbyn once hosted a show on the Iranian regime-sponsored Press TV (for which he was paid tens of thousands of pounds) and has blamed “NATO belligerence” for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

Throughout his four decades in politics, there is seemingly not a single anti-Western thug or autocrat he has not invited to tea or for whom he has not expressed admiration. He has called Hamas and Hezbollah — genocidal terrorist organisations constitutionally committed to the murder of Jews worldwide — his “friends”, and consorted with characters far more objectionable than Pauline Hanson or Fraser Anning, figures no Australian Labor Party leader would be caught dead with.

In 2014, after a Russian-supplied missile brought down MH17 over the skies of Ukraine — killing all 298 people on board, including 38 Australian citizens and residents — Corbyn, then a backbencher, appeared on Russia’s global propaganda network, RT, to voice his opposition to sanctions on Moscow. Four years later, when Russian agents deployed a nerve agent on British soil in the bucolic village of Salisbury, Corbyn initially hesitated to accept the findings of intelligence agencies that Moscow was responsible.

Corbyn and his acolytes have perverted a once proud party into something racist, toxic and nasty. It was the postwar British Labour Party of Clement Attlee that helped create NATO, built Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and strengthened the trans-Atlantic alliance with the US against a predatory Soviet Union then swallowing up half of Europe. Were he to somehow make it into Downing Street — a proposition that grows increasingly likely as Britain descends into Brexit-­induced chaos — Corbyn would undermine all of these crucial elements of the West’s global security architecture, from which Australia has benefited greatly. His election would put Britain and the free world at risk.

As a veteran of the Labor Left, Albanese may share Corbyn’s views on nationalisation, tax rates, government spending and a whole host of other issues. This is to be expected and is all within the bounds of legitimate, respectable democratic politics. What’s not respectable is sharing selfies with a man who leads an institutionally racist political party. It is up to social democrats around the world to declare that they will have nothing to do with a UK Labour Party led by a terrorist-sympathising, America-hating, Vladimir Putin-defending anti-Semite.

It’s past time the Australian Labor Party leads the way.

James Kirchick is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and author of The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age. He will address the Sydney Institute on Tuesday evening.