Aside from the thankfully lifeless British National Party, there is little evidence of anti-Semitism on the British Right today. Contrast that state of affairs with the miserable condition of the British Left. Since its hijacking by Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes in the fall of 2015, the Labour Party has been engulfed in a series of anti-Semitism scandals. Ken Livingstone’s sick fixation on claiming Adolf Hitler was a Zionist (the ulterior motive of which is to slander Israel as the reincarnation of Nazi Germany) would be comical were the former London Mayor not such a popular figure within his party. Indeed, so voluminous have Labour’s anti-Semitic eruptions been that they led both the party and parliament’s Home Affairs committee to launch separate inquiries. The latter of these determined that “The failure of the Labour Party consistently and effectively to deal with anti-Semitic incidents in recent years risks lending force to allegations that elements of the Labour movement are institutionally anti-Semitic.” As for Labour’s internal probe, it was a travesty, capped when Corbyn rewarded its author, the shameless Shami Chakrabarti, a peerage just two months after she produced a whitewash.
In advance of Thursday’s general election, Corbyn’s Labour is doing surprisingly well, shrinking a 15 percent Conservative Party lead to just 5 percent over the course of two weeks. Prime Minister Theresa May had called the snap election in hopes of securing what nearly everyone assumed would be a massive Tory majority, thus giving her a stronger position with respect to the European Union in negotiating Britain’s departure from the bloc. With the election framed as something of a quasi-second referendum on Brexit, the extremism of Corbyn and his supporters has been obscured.
The overripe anti-Semitic rot within Labour Party smells worse than ever thanks to Corbyn, who, in addition to being a sympathizer of the Irish Republican Army and practically every anti-Western political tendency, spent more than thirty years on the backbenches consorting with a wide variety of Jew-haters. There was his well-known reference to Hamas and Hezbollah as “friends”; his sharing a stage with Dyab Abou Jajah, the Lebanese man who called 9/11 “sweet revenge” and said Europe had made “the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion”; his inviting the Palestinian hate preacher Raed Salah to Parliament; and his donating money to the anti-Israel organization operated by a Holocaust denier. Just recently, too, it emerged that, less than a year before assuming the party leadership, Corbyn attended a ceremony in Tunisia where he laid a wreath on the grave of a PLO terrorist involved in the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli athletes. It was only natural that once this man became leader of one of the UK’s two major political parties, the anti-Semitic dregs with which he had associated himself for decades would rise to the surface.
Leftwing anti-Semitism is hardly limited to the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats have long had to put up with Baronness Jenny Tonge, whose accusations of Israeli organ harvesting would make Julius Streicher blush, and David Ward, the now ex-MP with a predilection for accusing Jews of behaving like Nazis. Institutionally, British academics play a disproportionate role in the global boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the National Union of Students is a hot-bed of anti-Semitic incitement, and the Guardian remains the most anti-Israel newspaper in the English-speaking world, home to cartoonist Steve Bell, who once drew Benjamin Netanyahu as a puppet master and has lately taken to defending Livingstone’s “Israel is Hitler” obsession. And no discussion of leftwing anti-Semitism in contemporary Britain would be complete without mention of George Galloway, the Ayatollah of Bradford West.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/06/02/labours-jewish-problem/
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