Rotten Labour

Published April 27, 2018 7:20am ET



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.

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