Video appeared on British news websites yesterday of the Labor-party leader Jeremy Corbyn speaking at an event that seems to have been organized in conjunction with Hamas, where he was joined by various anti-Israel conspiracy theorists, supporters of terrorism, and radical Islamists; in his remarks, Corbyn seems to criticize British Zionists for being insufficiently English. To James Bloodworth, this sort of behavior—which by this point should come as no surprise—is not a personal quirk or a strange blind spot regarding anti-Semitism, but part and parcel of the political philosophy of the Corbynite left.
The enemy, [in the minds of Corbyn and his ilk], is not so much capitalism as a system but a shadowy, malfeasant group of undesirables who pull the strings behind the scenes. As always, the vocabulary is the giveaway. The enemy is defined as “the elite” and “the establishment” in language sometimes indistinguishable from that of the alt-right. This conspiratorial worldview inevitably lends itself to centuries-old tropes about Jewish power; anti-Semitism is the ultimate conspiracy theory.
A mural that was removed from East London in 2012 encapsulated this outlook. It depicted hook-nosed Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of the poor below the “eye of providence,” the symbol of the Illuminati, a long-defunct Bavarian secret society that is a favorite of conspiracy theorists. Corbyn, a back-bench member of parliament at the time, backed the artist responsible for the piece, writing an encouraging comment on his Facebook page. . . .
Corbyn himself indulged in those old, pernicious tropes in 2012, when he speculated on Iranian state television—without a shred of evidence—that “the hand of Israel” might be behind an Islamist terror attack in Egypt. . . . Yet Corbyn also emerged from a political climate in which other forms of casual anti-Semitism were routinely tolerated. Large parts of the far left in Britain have long tolerated anti-Semitic tropes and foaming vitriol under the guise of anti-Zionism. A few left-wing groups have been warning about this for years, but most of the movement turned a blind eye to anti-Semitism among comrades from the developing world because—in a demonstration of the racism of low expectations—they were said not to know any better. . . .
The conspiratorial beliefs of the new cranks have combined with an older form of anti-Semitism emanating from the most unreconstructed reaches of the old left. . . . Israel is viewed through the old Soviet lens. Zionism equals racism, my enemy’s enemy is my friend, and indiscriminate violence by an oppressed nation should be supported, because the ends justify the means. . . . During the 1970s, Soviet authorities, steeped in old-fashioned Russian anti-Semitism, published “anti-Zionist” books that promoted the claims of a “Zionist-controlled” media and described Zionism as a variant of fascism, arguments still popular among some of Corbyn’s supporters today.
Read more on Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/21/labours-new-anti-semitism-has-disturbingly-old-roots/