Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour party, is a man of principle. Unfortunately, all his principles are noxious. He is an anti-Semite, a useful idiot in a Lenin cap, and an unreconstructed, impenitent Trotskyite-Maoist of the vintage that enlivened the student unions of the 1970s, tried and failed to take over Labour in the 1980s, and then tried again and succeeded in the aftermath of the crash of 2008. He remains convinced of the rectitude of his principles even when they secure the endorsement of David Duke, the demented ex-grand wizard of the KKK, and Nick Griffin, the thuggish ex-leader of the neofascist British National party.
“You’re a f—ing anti-Semite and a racist,” the ex-minister Dame Margaret Hodge suggested to Corbyn in the House of Commons in mid-July. “You have proved you don’t want people like me in the party.” Hodge is Jewish and members of her family were killed in the Holocaust. A Labour moderate, she has routed the British National party in her Barking, Essex, constituency. The Labour leadership, which has proven serially incapable of taking action regarding dozens of cases of anti-Semitism in its ranks, immediately announced an inquiry into Hodge and Ian Austin, a second MP who had protested.
Hodge was infuriated by the refusal of Labour’s national executive committee to endorse the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. The IHRA’s legal definition has been endorsed by the Conservative government, the Crown Prosecution Service, the College of Policing, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly, and 124 local councils, many of them Labour-ruled, as well as dozens of international bodies. Labour leaders, however, proposed to rewrite or water down 4 of the 11 clauses, and thus to broaden the field of what would be tolerated within party fora. For reasons that Labour’s leadership have not satisfactorily explained, they wish to preserve for their members two of the anti-Zionist’s sordid pleasures, the assertion that the founding of the Israeli state was racist and that Israel is “like” Nazi Germany.
Corbyn has led Labour as it has mutated into Europe’s most successful anti-Semitic party, while continually insisting that none of its anti-Semitism is in his name. His cultish supporters, sharing in the folly of his principles and slavering at the prospect of power, believe in the purity of his intentions. Not everyone in Labour has fallen in line: The foremost dissenters are Jewish Labourites and the Blairite centrists who are being purged as enemies of the people.
That Labour has to define anti-Semitism at all indicates the extent of what earlier and more candid socialists would have called its Jewish Problem. In 2016, Corbyn tried to shut down the issue with an internal inquiry, led by the human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti. After absolving Labour of all charges, Chakrabarti received Corbyn’s nomination to the House of Lords and is now a minister in Labour’s shadow cabinet. Since then, evidence of endemic anti-Semitism has continued to accumulate. The events of the last two weeks confirm that the rot runs from the head of the party to the bottom. We shall start with Labour’s purulent bottom and then examine its cracked head.
Like all racists, anti-Semites fantasize that their enemy is monolithic. A chilling fact of political power is that it can homogenize its enemies into a single group. The old saying goes that if you ask two Jews, you’ll get three opinions. Not in Corbyn’s Britain you don’t. On July 16, 68 rabbis from across the Jewish spectrum signed a letter protesting the “severe and widespread” anti-Semitism within Labour and objecting to the “most insulting and arrogant way” in which Corbyn and the Labour leadership have denied the existence of a mountain of evidence. Then, on July 25, the three leading Anglo-Jewish newspapers, in an unprecedented display of consensus, published the same editorial on their front pages.
“We do so because of the existential threat to Jewish life in this country that would be posed by a Jeremy Corbyn-led government,” they wrote. Labour’s refusal to adopt, and its leadership’s insistence on diluting and rewriting, the IHRA definition was “sinister,” a new low in “Corbynite contempt” for Jews and Israel.
“Under its adapted guidelines,” the editorial explained, “a Labour Party member is free to claim Israel’s existence is a racist endeavour and compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany, unless ‘intent’—whatever that means—can be proved. ‘Dirty Jew’ is wrong, ‘Zionist bitch’ fair game?”
Corbyn would be among them. A few days later, footage emerged of Corbyn, on the Iranian propaganda channel Press TV, detecting “the hand of Israel” in an ISIS attack on Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai. In the same interview, Corbyn described a Hamas terrorist, convicted of the murder of seven Israeli civilians in a café bombing, as his “brother.”
It also emerged last week that on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010, Corbyn opened and addressed an event at the House of Commons called “Never Again for Anyone—From Auschwitz to Gaza.” Corbyn, it is alleged, ordered the expulsion of a Holocaust survivor who objected to the comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany. He also found himself apologizing for his presence in the 1990s on the international advisory board of an NGO called the Just World Trust. In 1996, when Corbyn led Just World Trust’s British chapter, Just World defended Roger Garaudy, the French philosopher convicted of Holocaust denial.
After the rabbis’ letter, Peter Willsman, a longtime Corbyn ally and a member of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC), was caught on tape telling an NEC meeting that Labour’s anti-Semitism problem was the invention of Jewish “Trump fanatics.” He then asked if anyone had ever heard anti-Semitic sentiments in the party and pronounced himself “amazed” at the show of hands. Meanwhile at the bottom of the party, a Labour councilor in the seaside town of Bognor Regis, Sussex, got into trouble over some indelicate Facebook postings.
“Talmud Jews are parasites,” said councilor Damien Enticott. “They drink blood and suck baby’s dick.” Jews, Enticott said, they “need executing,” and Hitler had the “cure” for Israel. Endicott at first insisted that someone else had been using his computer: “I don’t share anti-Semitic views at all.” Then, confronted with the evidence, he characterized himself as “anti-Zionist, not anti semantic [sic]” and as a fearless man of principle: “I will continue to speak my mind on subjects that I believe are completely insidious.”
This, crudely, is Corbyn’s attitude. He seeks a just world. He is an anti-Zionist in a world where perceptions are distorted by the insidious power of capital. He is a freedom fighter in a world where the hidden hand of America controls the market and the hidden hand of Israel tips the scales in favor of its American master. For Corbyn, socialism is not a dialectical system for the decoding of capitalism and its conversion into collective ownership. Nor is it a historical tragedy that brought hunger, war, and massacre to every society that it touched. Socialism is a perennially renewable good intention, a library card of the soul, a virtuous spending of a bottomless fund of other people’s money.
These are his principles. As a socialist and a fool, it is to be expected that Corbyn might be susceptible to anti-Semitism, the socialism of fools. The worst of his principles is his cynical refusal to accept the implications of his other principles. Each time his trafficking with Jew-haters is exposed, he apologizes not for a shameful moral failing but for the “hurt” and “pain” that he has inadvertently caused the touchy Jews.
“It’s not what you say, but what you do,” Margaret Hodge is reported as having said, “and by your actions you have shown that you are an anti-Semitic racist.”
Last week, Corbyn finally acknowledged Labour’s Jewish problem in a Guardian op-ed intended to assure Jews that a Labour government would be no threat to Jewish life in Britain. The op-ed ended with criticism of Israel, praise of anti-Zionist Jews, and a veiled warning that as the “far right is on the rise across Europe and America,” British Jews should shut up and stick with Labour.
Corbyn now leads a party as familiar to historians of the 19th century as it is alarming to survivors of the 20th. For the first time in British history, the parliamentary opposition is a socialist party in which the delusions of anti-Semitism and its foreign policy corollary, the delusions of anti-Zionism, are articles of faith and a loyalty test. The difference is that in the 1930s, Oswald Mosley, whose ideas about tariffs, welfare, and the Jews are curiously similar to Corbyn’s, failed to win a seat. Last week, a poll put Labour neck and neck with the Conservatives, with 40 percent support.
On August 6, the party announced that it would be abandoning its investigation of Margaret Hodge; Ian Austin, however, remained under investigation in a process that he described as “Kafkaesque.” The decision not to punish Hodge followed an appeal in Sunday’s Observer by Corbyn’s deputy, Tom Watson, calling for Labour to halt its arguments over anti-Semitism before it disappears “into a vortex of eternal shame and embarrassment.” Watson also called for Labour to adopt the IHRA recommendation without delay. While Corbyn is a useful idiot, it remains to be seen who among his close allies will make the best use of his idiocy in the long run.
