Last week, the ongoing scandal of anti-Semitism within the British Labor party came to a head amid reports that in 2012 the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had defended a grotesque anti-Semitic mural. Corbyn duly sent to British Jewish leaders a letter disavowing anti-Semitism, but many members of his party flocked to his defense; they included one former parliamentarian who claimed on Twitter that the “Jewish leaders ganging up on Corbyn” were concerned not about anti-Semitism but about legitimate “criticism of Israel.” Howard Jacobson comments:

In his brief tweet [this former member of Parliament] managed to pack in accusations of Jewish conspiracy, intimidation, bad faith, duplicity, self-pity, and self-interest, just to draw the line there. The monotonous and insulting libel, that all that drives complaints of anti-Semitism is the desire to silence criticism of Israel, has been the left’s get-out-of-jail-free card for years and explains Corbyn’s apparent disdain whenever the charge of anti-Semitism in his party is leveled. The charge itself, in the reasoning of the left, is crooked.

As for the claim made by Corbyn’s supporters that he doesn’t have an anti-Semitic bone in his body, that is neither here nor there if he doesn’t believe that anti-Semitism, as a recognizable racism, exists. Only witness the difficulty he has always experienced just saying “anti-Semitism.” In the parlance of the left, the assertion “I am not a racist” does not mean “I am not an anti-Semite.” . . .

[T]his latest affair of the mural is another ball game [from those that preceded it]. Here, without the distractions of Zionism, is the old, naked Jew-hating thing. The mural which Corbyn went out of his way to champion in 2012—visiting the artist’s Facebook page and offering his support against the local council’s decision to remove it—shows a conspiracy of financiers, most of them undisguisedly Jewish in the mode once favored by the Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher, playing a pitiless game of Monopoly on a board supported by the naked backs of the world’s oppressed.

On a second look, years later, Corbyn accepts its anti-Semitic intent. But he still reverts to his trusted “inadvertence defense.” He hadn’t “looked closely” at the image. . . . Never mind looking closely: to throw the most perfunctory glance at this mural is to be struck by the familiarity of its caricature of Jews conspiring to defraud and exploit.

Corbyn’s insistence that he didn’t see any of this incriminates him all ways. And in the end there is only one conclusion we can reach: if he saw nothing exceptionally offensive in this mural, it can only be because it mirrored an image of the Jew as bloodsucker he was already carrying in his head.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.