Since the hard-left parliamentarian Jeremy Corbyn became its leader in 2015, the UK’s Labor party has seen near-continuous anti-Semitic outbursts by its members and revelations of Corbyn’s own association with vicious Israel-haters, coupled with several ostensible attempts to set things right which proved to be shams. Most recently, the party has disciplined two MPs for complaining about anti-Semitism. Tamara Berens concludes that this is far more than a passing problem:
Many focus on the question of whether Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite himself. He may or may not be. However, his deliberate actions to reject the Jewish community’s concerns, silence his moderate Labor detractors, and pedal anti-Zionism as central to his political image show that he is more than happy to utilize anti-Semitism for political purposes.
Anti-Zionism—and by extension, giving credence to anti-Semites—is fundamental to the worldview Corbyn has cultivated on his journey to political stardom. For most of his political career, Corbyn was a fringe socialist politician and supporter of the USSR, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the Iranian ayatollahs, and the Venezuela of Nicolas Maduro [and Hugo Chavez]. After becoming Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn toned down some of this support for radical anti-Western groups. Nonetheless, he has consistently maintained his support for anti-Zionist causes. What’s undoubtable is that throughout his career, his ultimate goal has remained the same: rejecting Western values and embracing the alliance between radical socialists and Islamists in a strategic bid to normalize and implement socialism in the UK.
Politically, Corbyn’s strategy is working: according to a recent YouGov poll, 61 percent of the party believes Corbyn is handling accusations of anti-Semitism well. And 80 percent of the party deems him a good leader overall. The events of the past few weeks indicate that the Labor leadership has been able to build on their apparent success to . . . distance themselves from the overwhelmingly Zionist British-Jewish community. This perhaps became most apparent last Friday, when Jeremy Corbyn published another article in the Guardian disregarding his part in normalizing anti-Semitism in the party. The piece came out at 5:00pm, when the majority of Jews in the country were busy preparing for the Sabbath.
The reality is that support from the Jewish community is no longer an indispensable part of the Labor party. In fact, Corbyn’s foreign policy—a large aspect of his political differences with [Tony] Blair’s [moderate, pro-American wing of] Labor—rests on weakening UK-Israel relations. Corbyn has constructed a successful strategy for claiming the Labor party as his own socialist vehicle for disruption of the Western liberal order. Labeling recent events a “scandal” greatly underestimates the strategic nature of his leadership.
Read more on Weekly Standard: https://www.weeklystandard.com/tamara-berens/its-worse-than-a-scandal-its-a-strategy