Once again, Jeremy Corbyn—the leader of the UK Labor party—has found himself caught up in a scandal involving his indifference to, or sympathy with, anti-Semitism. In question is a mural painted in London in 2012 that combines grotesque anti-Semitic images with other conspiratorial tropes. Local politicians wanted the mural removed, but Jeremy Corbyn, as has recently come to light, was among those who rushed to defend it. On Sunday, the Board of Deputies—the country’s leading Jewish communal institution—jettisoned its usual reluctance to weigh in on political questions to condemn Corbyn. Yesterday a protest against the Labor leader in London was met by a counter-protest. Dave Rich comments:
[A]nti-Semitism has been around in the Labor party for a lot longer than Jeremy Corbyn. . . . In 1900, the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution arguing the Second Boer War was being fought “to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews, most of whom had no patriotism and no country.” . . . And when a Labor government took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, the idea that this was the result of Zionist string-pulling in Washington and London became commonplace across the left.
The Labor party has treated cases of anti-Semitism among its members as random anomalies, as if they involve people who have wandered into the wrong party by mistake or used an unfortunate choice of words. This misses the point: the left has always had its own forms of anti-Semitism, well before Israel existed, and which appeal to people of a progressive mindset. Conspiratorial depictions of Zionism and obsessive hatred of Israel provide fertile soil for this current variant. It is part of a worldview that has usually been confined to the margins of the left, but tends to erupt into the mainstream at times of political unrest and uncertainty of the sort Western politics is currently experiencing.
The question now is whether Jeremy Corbyn and the Labor party even grasp that this anti-Semitic political culture is active and growing within its ranks. If Corbyn genuinely didn’t understand that caricatures of big-nosed Jewish bankers in a conspiracy-theory setting are anti-Semitic, his generic claims always to oppose anti-Semitism are worthless. How can he oppose something that he doesn’t understand and can’t recognize?
The alternative [is] that Corbyn did recognize it as anti-Semitic but supported it anyway; . . . this is exactly what a lot of people in the Jewish community are now thinking. The time is running out for Corbyn and the Labor party to prove them wrong.
Read more on New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/03/labour-party-s-history-reminds-us-there-have-always-been-left-wing-anti-semites