Anti-semitism

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice. First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade

It is quite clear what today’s NEC results mean for the Corbynites in the Labour Party: they’ve consolidated their control over the party structures. All the candidates who won were backed by Momentum, apart from Peter Willsman, who had seen the Corbynite grassroots organisation drop its support after a recording emerged of him making anti-Semitic comments. Willsman pushed moderate candidate Eddie Izzard out and will remain on the party’s ruling body. Izzard and ‘independent left-winger Ann Black’ came 10th and 13th respectively. Less clear is the implication for that rather nebulous group of anti-Corbynites generally known as ‘the moderates’. One of the reasons that the implications are less clear is

Why does Jeremy Corbyn show such disdain for the mainstream Jewish community? Why does he prefer to associate with terrorist “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah? And why does the Corbyn clique now in charge of Labour insist on diluting the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism? The fact is that – despite its own boasts about “anti-racism” – the far-left has had a longstanding problem with Jews, and not just with “Zionists.” This problem pre-dates 1844, when Karl Marx published On The Jewish Question; but Marx’s essay is a good place to start. In On the Jewish Question, Marx tied up Jews with capitalism: “What is the worldly religion of the

Imagine if there existed a photograph of Boris Johnson next to a man whose associates subsequently axed to death four imams in a mosque. Just imagine it. Imagine how much discussion there would be about the mainstreaming of Islamophobic fascism. About how Boris was enabling murderous racial hatred. About how the Tory party was falling to an extremist loathing of Muslims. Corbynistas in particular would never stop talking about it. Everything they wrote about Boris, forever, would mention his rubbing of shoulders with a man who was cool with the slaughter of imams. Of course, no such photograph of Boris exists. But a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn in a similar

This  is the English version of a piece of mine that was first published in DIE WELT on 4 August 2018, in which I attempt to explain to German readers why anti-Semitism, of all things, is dominating politics in Britain, of all places. Germans visiting Britain before Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour party in 2015 would have struggled to find anyone who believed anti-Semitism was worth discussing. I and a few others had warned that the collapse of socialism had allowed a strange post-Marxist left to emerge that endorsed ideas previous generations of socialists would have dismissed as fascistic. There appeared to be no reason for the rest

It is August, so perhaps it is inevitable that parts of the left are getting somewhat over-heated. But it can’t just be the weather. Take this segment from the bottom of a story in Sunday’s ‘Observer’ which was about something else (comments by Labour’s Deputy Leader on that party’s Leader): ‘[Tom] Watson’s intervention came as Corbyn was forced to “entirely disassociate” himself from an organisation whose website lists him as a member of its international advisory panel and which openly supported a prominent writer convicted of Holocaust denial. In 1996, the Just World Trust, an international NGO that has been a trenchant critic of Israel, wrote a letter defending the

As I’m writing this, I can’t stop thinking about my sixteen year old self: a naïve, optimistic teenager who had just joined the Labour party, sure that Ed Miliband was going to put the country to rights, and that being one of the party members who would help him do that was an honour and a duty. How times have changed. In the wake of Labour’s anti-Semitism scandal, I’ve now left the party. Here’s why. I should start by saying I’m Jewish. When I was growing up, I thought that that meant that I belonged to the religion of Judaism, and that I couldn’t eat bacon. More recently, I’ve learned

Being a Jew on the Corbyn left is soul- crushing. In the name of the cause, you must excuse racism in all but its extreme forms. The presence of a real Jew in its midst provides the left with cover. But stray from the party line, and you are not a comrade having a legitimate disagreement. You are a Jew and only a Jew, a corrupted and illegitimate voice that has no place in left-wing discussions. The compromises Jewish leftists must swallow can be seen in the faintly pathetic career of Jon Lansman. In theory, there is nothing pathetic about him. The founder of Momentum is the third most powerful

Labour’s anti-Semitism row reached boiling point this week thanks to a leaked recording from a meeting of the party’s National Executive Committee. In it, Corbyn ally Peter Willsman suggests that Jewish ‘Trump fanatics’ are behind ‘duff’ accusations of Labour anti-Semitism and warned that ‘they can falsify social media very easily’. This comes at a particularly bad time for Jeremy Corbyn as Willsman is currently standing for re-election on to the NEC and is one of nine Momentum-backed candidates, known as the #JC9 (see Mr Steerpike’s guide to the candidates here). Moderate Labour MPs – including deputy leader Tom Watson – have been quick to condemn the comments along with a

You don’t have to read too much of the tweets and other comments directed at Margaret Hodge and other Jewish Labour MPs to appreciate that Labour has a very big problem with anti-Semitism. But is the party’s refusal to adopt the full working definition of anti-Semitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance an example of its failings? Absolutely not. Firstly, on a general point, it is never a good idea to allow pressure groups – however worthy their intentions – to lay down the rules on language. The same mistake has been committed with the official definition of ‘poverty’ which, thanks to left-wing campaigning groups, now includes people with