“I am proud to stand with the good friends and comrades victimised by the purge,’ filmmaker Ken Loach says of his expulsion from the Labor Party over bogus antisemitism allegations. It was predicted that once Jeremy Corbyn was out, the “antisemitism” claims within the UK Labour Party would suddenly vanish. Instead, the purge of Labour’s anti-Zionist left has adapted to the new battlefield.
New research charts a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been widely described as the “gold standard” definition of antisemitism.
The antisemitism controversy in the British Labour Party was orchestrated by rightwingers and Israel supporters. Joshua Leifer of Jewish Currents fails to call out the bigotry of those who attacked Corbyn. Tony Greenstein relates the true history of Corbyn’s downfall.
Jewish Currents article criticizing the British Jewish community for attacking Jeremy Corbyn uses the same misrepresentations as the community it critiques.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.
You wouldn’t know it from reading media reports, but the recent Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on the UK Labour Party found there was no case to be made that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.
The Guardian joined the Labour Party’s center-right wing in seeking to to undermine Jeremy Corbyn.
Jeremy Corbyn, the former left-wing leader of Britain’s Labour party, is once again making headlines over an “antisemitism problem” he supposedly oversaw during his five years at the head of the party. This time, however, the assault on his reputation is being led not by the usual suspects – pro-Israel lobbyists and a billionaire-owned media – but by Keir Starmer, the man who succeeded him.
The only variety of Zionism still on offer is the ethno-nationalist creed of Benjamin Netanyahu and the many politicians in Israel who sit to his right in the Knesset. And with annexation, we are about to begin the final phase of the Palestinian people’s long and tortured dispossession.
Ian Wellens asks Labour’s new leader, who has said, “I support Zionism without qualification,” if there is a place for opposition to a discriminatory state in the Labour Party. “My politics is rooted in values, and chief among these are an opposition to all forms of racism and discrimination, and an insistence on equal rights which I am not prepared to compromise…However, my party now has a leader who has pledged his unqualified support to a country and a system which is utterly at odds with those same values…. Unless and until Israel re-constitutes itself into a single state with equal rights for all its inhabitants, it should not get any support from the Labour Party.”