Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to use fear and suffering to achieve political ends marks him out as a very different calibre politician to those currently seeking to eliminate him and his principles from mainstream British life. While others use Jewish fears for political gain with zeal, Corbyn remains a true friend of Britain’s Jewish community.
In April this year, a leaked report from within the Labour party revealed that senior officials deliberately sabotaged the party’s 2017 general election campaign to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from becoming prime minister and implementing modest socialist reforms in the United Kingdom. That year, Labour won its biggest share of the popular vote since 1997 and were just 2,227 votes short of being able to form a government. The leak also revealed that the same saboteurs deliberately slowed down the party’s investigations of antisemitism complaints made against members to create the impression that Corbyn was indifferent to Jewish suffering. Their duplicity, ignored by the entire mainstream media as an inconvenient truth, directly contradicts years of condemnation of Corbyn for being a deplorable antisemite or, at best, a man tolerant of antisemitism.
The truth is that he is neither, unlike many of his critics in the media and Westminster.
The Facts
There is “no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party” according to a 2016 report by the Home Affairs Select Committee.
Since 2017, according to official Labour party statistics released this year, a total of 2,178 Labour members had been accused of antisemitism. In a party membership of half a million people, this is 0.4 %. Almost all 0.4% were not genuine cases of antisemitism. A total of 56 Labour members had been expelled for alleged antisemitism at the time of the statistics being published, 0.01% of party members.
This 0.01% is what is known as Labour’s antisemitism crisis. As a “crisis,” it does not stand up to scrutiny, and that is why it receives neither any objective scrutiny nor even a factual mention, from mainstream politicians or journalists.
The Danger
These statistics, elaborated elsewhere alongside much objective evidence, help demonstrate that the antisemitism accusation levelled at Corbyn is a hoax designed to stop Labour winning a general election with a socialist leader and stifle any possibility of the UK fully applying international law and taking steps to end the occupation of Palestine by Israel. See the work of Asa Winstanley, Jonathan Cook and Jewish Voice for Labour debunking the hoax.
A danger of the proliferation of the fake news “antisemitism crisis” is that many people in Britain, including in Muslim communities, see it as the ultimate expression of white privilege, Jewish fears being treated with far more seriousness at the highest, most respectable levels of UK society than incidents of racist and Islamophobic violence and hatred. The country has an openly racist, Islamophobic prime minister and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, who vow to “protect people against discriminatory treatment and hold organisations, such as businesses and government, to account for what they do,” investigated antisemitism with Labour’s ranks but refused to investigate rampant Islamophobia in the Conservative party.
Both the country’s major political parties favour Israel’s occupation of Palestine, with its subjugation and humiliation of Muslims and Christians and the longest-running refugee crisis (there are seven million Palestinian refugees) in the world.
It is unfortunate but predictable that such a situation taps into popular conspiracies about Jews controlling politics, the media and financial institutions.
The Reality
The reality is that Britain’s Jewish population do not enjoy privileged treatment, they and their history are being used by right-wing politicians (including Keir Starmer) and the pro-Israel lobby (which is largely made up of anti-Arab Zionists, Christian fundamentalists and others who favour arms sales – death – to peace) to foment hatred against Jeremy Corbyn, the symbol of socialism in Britain today.
Britain’s Jewish people have been the target of an epic fear-mongering campaign by this Faustian coalition. Not content with Labour’s crushing 2019 election defeat, this juggernaut now seeks to eliminate socialism and socialists from mainstream political life in the UK.
With no hard evidence of a Labour antisemitism crisis, the electorate is left confused. A survey revealed that, on average, the public believed that third of Labour party members had been reported for antisemitism, a direct reflection of the rhetoric used by the nation’s media and political elites.
But as with all gaslighters, the accusation they are making is the very thing they are guilty of themselves: indifference to Jewish suffering and a willingness to use it for personal or ideological gain.
Left-Wing Media
Although none of it is mainstream in terms of its reach, there are left-wing media outlets and journalists in the UK. We also have easy access to North American alternative media.
Left-wing Americans have fared better on the issue of Corbyn and antisemitism than their counterparts here. The most prolific and revered left-wing pundits in Britain, Novara Media and Owen Jones, have played along with the hoax, choosing to offer an intricate left-wing perspective, rather than simply debunking it. Their most recent coverage, of Corbyn’s suspension and whip-removal, is incoherent as they work overtime discussing internal Labour procedures to avoid pointing out the most pertinent fact: there never was a “crisis”.
Full-spectrum propaganda only works when the left participates. The logic is that if even Owen Jones, the mainstream’s designated voice of the left, isn’t denying it, it must be true.
In repeating and amplifying the lie, and ignoring the role of the Israel lobby, prominent left-wing journalists in the UK have boxed themselves into a corner. If the crisis was real, then surely the leader of the party has rightly faced disciplinary action. Had there been a real antisemitism crisis on Jeremy Corbyn’s watch, then any right-minded, peace-campaigning, anti-imperialist would want him out. The fact is, there was no crisis. So, the media’s left-wingers are playing both sides, calling for Corbyn’s return to the Labour benches but refusing to explain to their followers that it was all part of a political game. They have retained their status as representatives of the left on Sky and BBC News by abandoning their journalistic duty, to tell the truth at all costs.
Jeremy Corbyn
Some quality journalists on the left have projected their own frustration onto Jeremy Corbyn for his perceived lack of fight against the fanatics who have attacked him using the antisemitism smear. Asa Winstanley, Max Blumenthal and Glenn Greenwald are among them. They argued that Corbyn should have pushed back, and when he failed to do this as strongly as they believed necessary, they lamented him for being weak.
Yet these voices never identify exactly what he could have done. Corbyn probably predicted an unhinged response to any pushback that involved him pointing out that the idea of a “crisis” was absurd. The media would have ignored anything positive or conciliatory he said and pounced upon any hint of him not being adequately yielding. In this, he would have again stood alone against the entirety of the British establishment. More internal Labour divisions and more media focus on fiction instead of the urgent issues of the day were the inevitable result of an assertive push back.
‘So what?’ you might say, things surely couldn’t get much worse anyway, but there were two other factors. The first is 2017 when Labour almost won despite the smear campaign against the leadership. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that policy, over personality, could prove decisive in 2019. This turned out to be true, but it was the Tories, with a more coherent Brexit policy, who had the stronger hand.
The second, and I think most decisive, factor is Corbyn’s relationship with the Jewish people of Britain. Reviewing his career. Peace, justice, unity, and love are the qualities that transcend all politics for him. He is a player in the political game, but there are certain tactics he will not use, the ones that result in pain for others. Unlike those railing against him, Corbyn is sensitive to human frailties and fears. Judging that aggressive pushback would be used by some to further instil existential fear in Britain’s Jews and by others to foment hateful conspiracies, he chose to be guided by his own principles. He did not do or say anything that could have rebounded back on a minority population already being used in the most wretched way by those claiming to speak up for them.
The alternative option, preferred by some prominent left-wingers, was that Corbyn lay out all the facts of the smear campaign, call out the liars and be a warrior for absolute truth. This approach is one that ignores the realities of power in Britain. Exposing the truth has little positive impact unless it happens to match the establishment’s interests.
By choosing not to join in a sordid game, Jeremy Corbyn remains true to his values and his vision of an equitable society lives on. He has done nothing to frighten or endanger a single Jewish, or other minority, person in Britain. The same cannot be said of many other prominent political and media figures.
By Tom Charles @tomhcharles
Thanks to Jennifer Cavanagh for the invaluable suggestions & edits
Urban Dandy London 