Is Corbyn Anti-semitic?

                                                    Labour Anti-Semitism

For those not following the day to day shenanigans in UK Labour Party  this blog will only be meaningful if I state that a major row –according to the Tory Press” Labour  Civil War” -has erupted over a series of arguably anti Semitic incidents within or around the party and its leadership. 

While much of the fuss is exaggerated, much is not. The ham fisted handling of the issue by Jeremy Corbyn has led for renewed calls for this overthrow and many Jewish Labour members have resigned or protested in other ways. The sub text is not just that he tolerates anti semites in his inner circle but that he is himself anti-Semitic. This may be a little harsh; he has handled this issue about as competently as he has handled everything else.          

                                                                                                             

The small Jewish population of the UK has been steadfastly Labour since its major immigration 1880-1914 and the formation of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900. Even for the bourgeois lawyers, doctors, academics and business people that succeeded the generations of the Jewish proletariat, voting labour was the default option. Labour provided a hospitable home for the Jews with a direct or folk memory of Tsarist and popular anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

In the mid war and post WW II periods every local party branch in London, Manchester, Leeds or Glasgow had active Jewish members. The Jews were and are about ½ of 1% of the population but in the post war period Labour elected dozens of Jewish MPs. There were several in every post war Labour government and Labour’s disastrous leader at the last election is Jewish—no causality. Labour is not a Jewish party but it is the party of the Jews. That bond is in the process of being shattered. Accusations of anti-semitism is no small matter.

                                                                                                              

                                          

Deadly attacks in Europe and an upturn in anti semitic incidents has not left the UK untouched and of course has unsettled British Jews. They have been particularly concerned by incidents of cultural and academic anti semitism.

Few are fooled by the “we are only anti Zionist’ dog whistle coming from the usual suspects.The banning of Israeli productions at film festivals. The calls for a boycott of Israeli academics or speakers ;and the intense singling out of Israel for condemnation while many much worse regimes are ignored or even lauded. I have googled in vain for the petitions to ban academics from Russia, Kazakhstan, China, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Nothing yet but I’ll keep on trying.

Labour specifically, has had a series of problems reported from University Labour Clubs.  Particularly ugly issues at Oxford led to the resignation of its chairman in protest and have  precipitated a formal party inquiry.

 For King Cyclops the issue is very personal:

• Shortly after WW II, I was born in Whitechapel into an immigrant, Jewish ,democratic  socialist household .

• We lived in state housing, went to state schools and benefitted from free health care.

• All three children went on to receive free higher education .

• Mine was first generation to enjoy the fruits of Labour’s Welfare State. 

• My jobs while at  university ,rolling barrels in Trumans Brewery and the Parcel Post were a short walk from the family flat above Spitalfields Market .Both jobs were unionised .  

• Later, teaching in higher education I became chairman of my union branch.

• As a kid my father took me to meetings of the Jewish Workers Circle—all in Yiddish.

• By seventeen I was a member of the Labour Party. MY Labour party at home in Spitalfields.

• My first official office was as the university delegate to the Manchester City Labour Party.

• After college I was elected a Labour  Councillor in Camden, London.

• I also became Camden’s elected member for the Inner London Education Authority.

• By 1973 I had moved back to Spitalfields and was elected to the local council. That year we had finally won the last three remaining opposition seats –from the Communist Party.

• I had also become the Parliamentary candidate for Hornsey,   North London.

                                       

                                Harold Wilson at a rally in Hornsey ’74..King Cyclops is far left, [in picture!], meeting chairman ,Wilson

                                Mrs. Wilson and renowned feminist Joyce Kilgour

King Cyclops lost both’74 elections. Jeremy Corbyn was the local party agent/organiser—no causality.

• In 1975 I went to graduate school in the USA.I intended to come back; try for selection in the  Spitalfields seat. I dreamed / aspired to be Chancellor of the Exchequer.

• I had spent my early adult life active in the Labour party and the Trade Union movement. I had a life ,but much of it involved Democratic Socialist politics

• I never returned from the US to pursue those dreams. But I stayed in touch.

• I have been a Labour Party member for over 50 years.

• I am part of the demogragraphic most saddened by current   events in my party.

Last Week Anti- Semites Really Hit The Fan.

NAZ   SHAH

An 18 month old facebook post by Bradford MP Ms. Naz[i] Shah included a graphic showing Israel superimposed on a map of the US. The headline read "Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict - Relocate Israel into United States" followed by” problem solved”.    

                                                                                                                             “The transportation costs will be less than 3 years of defence spending”.

In the immediate afternath of this revelation of innovative foreign policy,Corbyn did not want to suspend her and his spin masters assured “We’re not suggesting she’s anti-Semitic”. “W e’re saying she’s made remarks that she doesn’t agree with.” Parse that sentence! 
  

Cue: UPROAR.

Followed a day later by this statement :

“Jeremy Corbyn and Naz Shah have mutually agreed that she is administratively suspended from the Labour Party by the general secretary.” .… suspended by the General Secretary not by The Leader?

     oops! this better?                                                                SORRY  

Ms .Shah spoke in the House of Commons saying she “wholeheartedly apologises”. Any way the posting was before she became an MP. A full nine months before. Well that’s alright then.

What an end [surely!] to such a bright career. She was elected just shy of one year ago. The election was a Labour disaster but her colleagues were at least buoyed by her defeat of Georg Galloway, the despised, narcissisti ,traitor and reality TV buffoon. But oddly, a friend of Jezza lo these 40 years.        
                                                                                                                            


She was taken  under the wing of Ken Livingstone Labour elder[ly] statesman and another 40+ year friend of the leader Corbyn .She had already become the parliamentary aid to the shadow chancellor John McDonnell. She had to resign but could her apology to parliament and a period of contemplation, resurrect this trusted friend of the inner circle?   

HERE COMES KEN

 Avanti Ken!  Twenty four hours after her apology, mentor Livingstone to the rescue. Ken [“I’d take a bullet for Jeremy”] is probably Jezza’s closest personal friend and his mentor .Batman to Jeremy’s Robin.  Dubbed, by Neil Kinnock “a founding father of the loonie left”. He has been an MP and Mayor of London. He has been at the centre of Labour politics in London for 50 years .He is a member of the party’s National Executive. He is not some junior putz.

He initiated a tour of radio and TV studios. He gave four interviews in the day. You can read the transcripts here.

The first, on BBC London sparked the controversy. He said, inter alia, “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel. He was supporting Zionism” .Nothing offensive there. Please listen to that first interview for yourself.   

In a second interview aired at noon he claimed he was not racist because “a real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbours in Golders Green or Stoke Newington, it’s a physical loathing.” Just the ones in Israel – well that’s alright then.  He went on “I’m not making any link between the current Israeli policy and Hitler” no of course not.

CUE MORE UPROAR

                                          “Nazi apologist' and 'f****** disgrace”

                       
                                   MP John Mann screams at Livingstone

                                                                

                                   This is shot of Ken not apologizing.
                                       
                                  
                                                               

That night on TV he refused to apologise and kept digging. “I’ve not said that Hitler was a Zionist, what I said was his policy in ‘32 was to deport Germany’s Jews to Israel.”  Let’s not quibble that Israel did not exist or that Hitler may not have an independent Jewish homeland in mind or that plan A was somewhat different.

At a far left meeting that evening he was quoted “‘it’s absurd to call me an anti-Semite, as two of my ex-girlfriends are Jewish"  “it would have been absurd for them to be lying in bed with someone who was an anti-semite“.  The man is a cad. The MEDJA will now hunt down these two poor ladies and get quotes from their mothers and daughters. Still it’s good to know some of his best friends are Jewish.

CORBYN “ACTS”

The reaction by Corbyn was to dither. Nothing unusual about that.Anyway he and Ken have been in the trenches together for a very long time. Fighting the good fight against every labour leadership and government since they left puberty. They have appeared on many platforms together defending Jeremy’s “good friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah, justifying the terrorism of the Provisional IRA or defending that nice Mr.Putin from Western provocations and media slurs.

                            

            

Finally faced with uproar from MPs ,the broader party and threats of resignations from his Shadow Cabinet, THE LEADER  suspended him  and he will face  a “formal  party disciplinary sub-committee”. This time the press release noted the leader did the suspending, not the General Secretary as was the case with Naz Shah 48 hours earlier. He also announced a full enquiry into anti Semitism within the party.  His acolytes have now suggested that the problem may reside with the party rules which do not explicitly proscribe anti-semitism. We need a rule for that?

Abbott et al.

On the Sunday morning talk shows Diane Abbott petulantly claimed it is a "smear against ordinary party members" to suggest "that the Labour Party has a problem with anti-semitism”.  Sliding over the fact that Livingstone and Naz Shah are hardly “ordinary” members. 

In fact. it is ordinary members who are enraged by what they are seeing and hearing; and by the in ability of the leadership to control the situation.

                                      This second image is innapropriate                      I could not resist,                                                                       

                                                 

Abbott, an ex Corbyn lover, was promoted to the shadow cabinet and is part of the inner circle. I knew Livingstone was a Lenin wannabe but had no idea that Jezza was going to emulate Nicolas Sarkozy.

Livingstone far from apologising has claimed that the whole issue has been blown up by Blairites looking for an excuse to overthrow Jeremy. Others mutter that it’s all ‘a cynical attempt by people   to manipulate anti-Semitism for political aims ’. An unidentified shadow front bencher has briefed ‘There are people who want to use this to smash and bash the Corbyn project”. It is not clear who these ”people” are but let’s hope they do not mean those who control the media and the banks.  

CORBYN  ANTI-SEMITIC?

 I knew Jeremy well in the mid 1970s. It was the era of Vietnam and Watergate and the Heath government. He had simplistic ,sloganised ,anti capitalist, anti US, pro Soviet world view. Very much like now in fact.

We agreed on very little politically. I was the Hornsey candidate ,he was the party organizer. In personality,I was direct and occasionally confrontational. He was passive aggressive. We were not friend, we worked together and tolerated each other. His disapproval of me and my views was just that. It was not anti semitic or racist in any way.

 I never got elected to parliament. He did in 1983. He remained on the back benches for 30+ years, opposing the policies and actions of every Labour government and prime minister. Nobody much cared.

He courted most controversy for an insistence in inviting terrorists for tea in a parliament. He regularly refers to Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends and appears at their rallies.They are both listed by the USA,UK and the EU as terrorist groups and kept at arms lengths by most Arab and Muslim governments.  They are both anti-semitic ,no dog whistle distinctions between Jews and Zionism for them-“kill jews wherever you find them”. They are also homophobic and keep women subservient. He has appeared on platforms with extreme Muslim clerics who have adopted the Jewish blood libel and denied the holocaust.
                       
                                   And now he is accused of consorting with holocaust deniers.
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3187428/Jeremy-Corbyn-s-links-notorious-Holocaust-denier-revealed.htm

                 Does this make Corbyn anti-semitic , just a fellow traveler or a “useful fool”?

Clearly some do believe him anti-semitic. Others say “He is not anti-Semitic but his leadership has been crucial in the deteriorating situation within Labour”.  Generally, there is great reluctance to make this accusation against the leader of the Labour Party. The judgement is subjective and there is no agreed definition.

King Cyclops follows the heralded Anglo Jewish philosopher Dr. Chaim Oyzer ben Lazar Rosenberg. This great sage graduated in 1960 from London”s Yeshiva etz Chayim, Thrawl Street, Whitechapel . After  much post graduate study and many years of introspection; and drawing on the inspiration of his Yeshiva Malamud  Reb Yossel Yoselovitz of Stamford Hill, he refined a robust working definition of Anti Semitism. One he deemed particularly apposite for the empirical philosophical tradition of the Anglo Saxon Cannon.

Anti -Semitism is the despising, blaming, criticizing ,or denigrating of Jews more than is necessary.

Even by this definition, some of Corbyn’s  closest and oldest friends are anti-semitic—Ken Livingstone, George Galloway et al. Other members of his inner circle,Seamus Milne, are also long time Hamas apologists or long time acolytes of Ken Livingstone. 

                  

Does this sound like “guilt by association”? Sure but there is a reason we are judged by the company we keep, by the friends we choose and the advisers we selec  
               
“Show me who a man's friends are and I will tell you who he is"                                                                               

--Ralph Waldo Emerson
         
                         
                                          

But is the Corbyn Cabal anti-semitic or merely disdainful of this irritating,erudite,over educated, pushy, opinionated ,subversive clan of  rootless Cosmopolitans?

  
 If they look like ducks ……

  Corbyn himself?

I was going to plead the fifth .Whatever I conclude I will offend friends of many years. If one more Labour friend tells me  “You may be too sensitive to this because you are Jewish” I will take my Uzi out of storage. Same goes for those who remind me “that you never did think Jeremy should be leader”. Nor will, I condemn him for the sake of some kind of obligation to Jewish Solidarity.

Friends/Chaverim/Comrades ….If Jeremy was the leader of any other party, we would all be on the streets together. Led by the Labour Party.  By their deeds shall ye know them.  Ken, George and Jeremy: we know it when  we see it. You almost destroyed my party a generation ago. We will stop you this time too.

        
 All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing

                                    
                 zey zoln nit forn    --  they shall not pass

         

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