Op-ed: Labour’s view of Jews is an antisemitic caricature worthy of the USSR
By Richard Mather
The UK Labour Party is no longer in the business of winning elections. The party’s reticence stems from a more radical political desire, which is to “address the Jewish question” (to quote one of its activists) and to deZionize the party.
Even something as innocuous as a Jewish holiday message is subject to Labour’s obsessive scrutiny, with claims circulating that Labour’s communications director Seamus Milne apparently tried to ban the use of Hebrew in a Passover message because he felt it implied support for Zionism.
Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour is the British political party that is most hostile to Jews. Given that most Jews in Britain are Zionists and that most Zionists are Jews, Labour’s disdain for the vast majority of Anglo-Jewry is incontestable. To paraphrase British PM Theresa May, Labour is the “nasty party” par excellence.
This nastiness is deliberate. Like the Soviets, Labour antizionism is a crafted propaganda doctrine that aims to rob Jewry of their security and to oust them from political discourse. The main thrust of Labour’s antizionist message is this: Zionism is a form of racism, Zionists are similar to Nazis, and Israel is a tool used by Jews to foment imperialism and militant chauvinism. This is the politics of anti-Jewish contempt.
It’s true that antisemitism in Labour is not new. It was evident in the foreign policy decisions of the post-WW2 Labour government. But there has always been (at least until now) a significant and sizeable pro-Israel, pro-Jewish contingent within the party: advocacy groups such as Labour Friends of Israel, and important individuals such as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who stood alongside the Jewish state and spoke out against antisemitic prejudice and bigotry.
Corbyn’s rise to power has done more than just embolden the minority of antisemitic cranks already within the party; he has enthused a new generation of antisemites who have joined Labour in droves. Labour Zionists are now marginalised, and Jewish Labour MPs are routinely abused and bullied by militant Corbynistas. As a result, financial donations from Jewish donors have all but dried up and Jews are abandoning the party.
But anti-Jewish hostility is not just a problem for Jewish members inside Labour. It is an issue of concern for Jews in the UK more generally.
The ascendancy of Corbyn and the militancy of Labour’s recently-formed Momentum group are reminders that left-wing extremism did not die out in the 1980s but remains an ongoing threat to the well-being and security of Anglo-Jewry. The rise in antisemitic attacks in the UK suggests that Labour and the rest of the British Left, in allegiance with Islamist radicals, now pose an existential threat to British Jews.
The ‘idea’ of the Jew
Corbynistas are a lot like the antizionist Soviet propagandists who studied Zionism in order to uncover its secrets. In Soviet lore, Zionism was/is the politics of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie which had closely allied itself with monopoly elites in the USA and the UK.
Like the Soviets before them, the Corbynistas are convinced that Israel is home to several million racists, and that Zionists around the world serve as “the front squad of colonialism and neo-colonialism,” to quote the third edition of the thirty-volume Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Even when there isn’t a flesh-and-blood Jew in sight, Labour antizionists are still tormented by the idea of ‘the Jew.’ Lacking political depth and therefore unable to distinguish between the real and the imaginary, it is the idea of the Zionist Jew– albeit a false idea – that keeps their hatred alive.
It was the same with the Brownshirts and the Stalinists, the Lutherans and the medieval Catholic Church. The thought or image of the nefarious Jew is enough to engender a pogrom, a Stalinist show trial, an inquisition, a boycott.
It is no wonder that the Corbynistas are irrational and abusive. They imagine themselves living in a world controlled by Jew-Zionists. And this is why Labour’s focus is not on winning seats at the next general election but on cleansing the party (and the country) of undesirable Zionist Jews.
More than that, party members are well aware that they do not need to be in government in order to do this.
They already have the power and the resources to perpetuate their dirty war against Jews, not only through the media, but also by means of organized protests, marches and demonstrations, by the boycotting of Jewish businesses and individuals, and by aiding and abetting Islamist extremists.
Labour and the Far Right
Another recurring theme in Soviet antisemitism was the allegation that the Zionists and the Nazis collaborated against the Jewish people because Zionist leaders viewed ‘Palestine’ as the only legitimate place for Jewish immigration.
This view formed the basis of Mahmoud Abbas’ PhD dissertation. It is also the view of Labour’s Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London, nicknamed Red Ken.
If the Soviets learned a great deal from the Nazis about how to slander Jews, so the contemporary Far Right is taking lessons from the Labour Party. Earlier this year, Nick Griffin, former leader of the extreme right-wing racist British National Party, took to Twitter to defend Ken Livingstone’s repugnant suggestion that Adolf Hitler was a Zionist:
“Hitler started war wanting to send all Jews to own homeland outside Europe & armed Zionist terrorists to fight Brits in Palestine. #RedKen,” wrote Nick Griffin, who then tweeted a message reading, “One day the world will know that #RedKen was right.”
Consider, too, the Far Right website deLiberation, which recently hailed Corbyn as the “antidote to the Blairite virus and Zionist snake-bite”:
“Many certainly can see Corbyn as Prime Minister – a very different and totally new style of PM, to be sure […] he’s a man to look up to and identify with […] a man who is not tempted by the Israeli shekel. If any of his opponents lands the leadership Labour will remain under the yoke of Zionist ambitions and enslave by the gangster regime in Tel Aviv.”
The end?
The Far Right’s fascination with the Labour Party is what happens when a once-major political party is taken over by lunatics who transform their irrational fixation with Jews into party policy.
The trouble is, even if Corbyn and his cronies are overthrown by sensible Labourites on September 24 (the date of the leadership conference), there’s not much evidence that the party is in a fit state to govern, even at a local or regional level. The rot may be too wide and too deep.
So is the Labour Party finished? The party is, on average, eleven points behind the Conservative Party. As things stand, there is no chance of Labour doing well in the next general election because the anticipation of election victory in 2020 is absent.
The only thing that matters to the Corbynistas is the cleansing of the party of Zionists and other political foes.
Yes, the Labour Party exists – but only just. Under its current leader, it has been reduced to a social media/student union protest body that proffers a seemingly endless proliferation of callow opinion from the naïve, foolish, the extreme and the dangerous.
Thanks to Corbyn and his communist apparatchiks, Labour is limping through a catastrophic collapse of meaning and intellectual malaise, propped up only by its Sovietesque obsession with Jews and Zionism.
