Does Britain’s Labour party have an anti-Semitism problem? Yes, its leader Jeremy Corbyn admitted in March, after Jewish community leaders had taken the unprecedented step of protesting outside Parliament, but it’s only a problem in “pockets.” Corbyn should know. A member of Parliament for the right-thinking and left-leaning London seat of Islington, Corbyn has moved between those pockets throughout his backbench career. As a hard-left urban Labour MP, Corbyn, along with ex-London mayor Ken Livingstone, was one of the architects of Labour’s “red-green” alliance, in which the Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyite-Maoist fringe cultivated the vote of Britain’s growing Muslim population.
But Labour does not just have an anti-Semitism problem. It has two anti-Semitism problems, the red and the green. These have been brought to light in a slew of stories in the press examining Corbyn’s long and shameful career as a fellow-traveler with Islamists and terrorists, and the not-unrelated popularity of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories among Labour members and local councilors. There is also what you might call a white problem: Labour’s own 2016 inquiry into anti-Semitism in the party was a whitewash that sought to exculpate the party and convinced no one.
All of these have merged into one big, multicolored problem for Corbyn. Every time he deplores Labour’s bad apples, a light shake of the tree produces a fresh batch of rotten fruit. And the rot runs from the roots to the top branches. In late March, it emerged that Christine Shawcroft, a close Corbyn ally and a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC), had opposed the suspension of Alan Bull, a Labour council candidate in Peterborough, just north of Cambridge.
Bull had posted on his Facebook page a link to an article titled “International Red Cross report confirms the Holocaust of 6m Jews is a hoax.” When the NEC moved to suspend Bull’s candidacy, Shawcroft lobbied her fellow committee members on Bull’s behalf. Bull, she claimed, was being attacked by elements of the local Labour party for “political reasons,” and his Facebook post had been taken “completely out of context.”
Once the newspapers heard, though, Shawcroft claimed that she had defended Bull without looking at the post. “As soon as I saw it, I told the member that he should have anti-Semitism training,” she said. Bull is a member of the hard-left Momentum group, which is taking over Labour at the grassroots and which now, through Corbyn and his allies, controls the party leadership too. Shawcroft was a director of Momentum, at least until the Bull episode hit the papers. When it did, she had to resign. She has been replaced on the NEC by the transvestite stand-up comic Eddie Izzard. No one can say that Labour doesn’t take anti-Semitism seriously.
The Shawcroft-Bull business was knocked off the front pages in early April by the case of Roy Smart, a spectacularly dumb council candidate from Kent. In Facebook postings, Smart claimed that the “Rothschild Jewish mafia” commissioned the 9/11 attacks, and he advised readers to sign up for a “Holocaust deprogramming course.” The link read: “Free yourself from a lifetime of Holo-brainwashing about ‘Six Million’ Jews ‘gassed’ in ‘Gas Chambers Disguised as Shower Rooms.’ ”
Cleverly, Smart portrays himself as an anti-Zionist, rather than a half-witted conspiracist. He doesn’t want people to confuse “ordinary peace-loving jews” with “the war-mongering, child-killing zionists in Israel.” It may be theoretically possible to be an anti-Zionist without being an anti-Semite, but if you pursue either with any commitment, you end up as both. After he had made the newspapers for the first and last time, clever Mr. Smart was suspended, pending a dressing-down by Eddie Izzard and the NEC.
Jeremy Corbyn fancies himself a man of the people, so it is not surprising that he has been mingling in the online sewer with the crackpots. He has been exposed as a member of at least three Facebook groups, all ostensibly pro-Palestinian in purpose but all awash in anti-Semitic comments and links. The material includes cask-strength Holocaust denial and global Jewish conspiracy theories and, for those whose anti-Zionist palates are already jaded, links to the really nutty stuff, like ex-soccer goalkeeper David Icke’s grand synthesis, which combines the Rothschilds, 9/11, the Illuminati, and a secret master race of lizard men in human form.
Yes, we are talking about Labour, the venerable social democratic party that gave Britain the National Health Service. The party, even, of Tony Blair. And the party, now, of hatemongers and sci-fi anti-Semites.
Corbyn was shocked, just shocked to discover that sites he had visited and posted links on contained such stuff. But of course he’s the same man who in 2012 defended an anti-Semitic mural in East London by Kalen Ockerman (aka Mear One). Ockerman had depicted dark-skinned, naked people propping up a table at which were seated six caricature Caucasians, some with hooked noses.
Ockerman subsequently identified two of the six villains in his mural as Jewish bankers (Mayer Rothschild and Paul Warburg) and a third as John D. Rockefeller Sr., who online conspiracists believe was such a cunning Jew that he contrived to have his mother raise him as a Baptist.
Corbyn had opposed the destruction of the mural on grounds of free speech. Under pressure from the Labour MP Luciana Berger, who is Jewish and has been threatened and vilified by the Labour left for years, Corbyn fell back on the same defense as Christine Shawcroft: He hadn’t looked at the mural, but now that you ask, it does seem “deeply disturbing and anti-Semitic.”
By the end of March, the Anglo-Jewish leadership finally acknowledged what almost every non-leadership British Jew has already gathered. Labour, quick to convict others of institutional racism, has become institutionally racist. Hundreds of London’s most law-abiding residents then conducted the most polite protest ever made outside the Houses of Parliament.
Corbyn cannot bring himself to name Labour’s problem, partly because he has played a major role in its creation, partly because he agrees with many of its premises and conclusions, and partly because he is a sanctimonious hypocrite who believes that ends justify means. He certainly sounds like a useful idiot. But what if he isn’t? His most recent moves have been alarmingly deft.
To show he’s not an anti-Semite, Corbyn spent the first night of Passover with some Jewish constituents. They are members of an anti-Zionist anarcho-syndicalist group called Jewdas, whose Twitter account describes the State of Israel as “a steaming pile of sewage that needs to be done away with.” You could call them Jeremy’s kind of Jews.
Of course, the Anglo-Jewish organizations, who are close to the Conservatives, walked into the trap. They protested that Jewdas is entirely unrepresentative of British Jews. They’re right, of course, and yet these objections made the Jewish groups, not Labour, look intolerant. “I learned a lot,” Jeremy said afterwards, though not, perhaps, when one of the celebrants, diverting from the traditional text, shouted, “F— capitalism!”
Next, Corbyn dodged an ambush by staying away when the House of Commons debated anti-Semitism in the Labour party. And then, he pulled off his master stroke. He left Facebook.
Corbyn thus logged three acts of political wisdom in a week. Unfortunately, that’s three more than Prime Minister Theresa May has managed in the last two years. And he has a much firmer grip on his party than she has on hers. If Corbyn keeps it up, and May keeps fumbling, he might yet win the next election for Labour. But will the Zionazis, the Rothschilds, and the lizardmen let him?
