Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s left-wing Labour Party, faces a growing crisis over his apparent anti-Semitic affinities.
While Corbyn has long flirted with anti-Semitic terrorists like Hamas and the Lebanese Hezbollah (who he has called “friends”) and enjoys anti-Semitic cartoons, he had hoped to get these realities out of the news.
No chance. The latest scandal arose this week when the Times newspaper reported that Corbyn had hosted an event at the British Parliament on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010 titled, “The Misuse of the Holocaust for Political Purposes.” A Holocaust survivor who spoke at that event titled his speech, “Never Again for Anyone — from Auschwitz to Gaza.”
Corbyn’s sponsorship of an event comparing life in the Gaza Strip to a Nazi death camp was not warmly received by British Jews. Like most of Corbyn’s views, it’s also patently idiotic. After all, where Auschwitz was a literal death factory controlled by Nazis, Hamas leaders control Gaza and are primarily responsible for the plight of their fellow Palestinians. Also, unlike at Auschwitz, tens of thousands of people aren’t being executed in fake Gaza shower rooms each week — they’re just tortured and occasionally thrown off buildings — by Hamas, of course.
Then, at Politics Home on Wednesday, John Johnston reported that Corbyn helped co-sponsor a 2011 parliamentary motion to change the title of Holocaust Memorial Day to “Genocide Memorial Day.” Taken together, the 2010 event and the 2011 motion illustrate Corbyn’s belief that the Holocaust gets too much specific attention. For a politician who assumes the narrative of a moral hero and wants to lead Britain, Corbyn’s efforts to downplay the murder of more than six million Jews is slightly problematic.
That said, it does speak to the British far-left’s underlying hatred for Israel and its never-too-distant belief in traditional anti-Semitic tropes. The notion, for example, that Jews are pulling the strings of global political and economic power against the interests of “the many” absorbs far more Labour Party members than Corbyn alone.
Still, Corbyn isn’t just an anti-Semitic, socialist fanatic, he’s also pathologically anti-American, a useful idiot (perhaps more) for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and a former TV host for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
His current discomfort should make everyone feel happy on the inside.
