In an opinion piece at Haaretz, Daniella Peled predicts that rather than becoming introspective in the wake of the party’s historic loss last week, Labour stalwarts will instead blame Jews who opposed Jeremy Corbyn.
There’s something peculiarly freeing about social media’s immediacy and anonymity. For ordinary, mild-mannered Brits, it offers the chance to give full rein to instincts and prejudices usually kept safely restrained and repressed. And the engine of accusations against “enemy centrists” and Jews was constantly fuelled by agitprop from a wild pro-Corbyn disinformation sphere.
If you don’t support Labour, you hate the NHS. If you oppose Corbyn, you hate disabled people. If you’re Jewish as well, then you’re part of an organised smear campaign to malign Corbyn, the world’s bravest campaigner for Palestinian rights. And probably rich and greedy, too…
For the regressive Corbynist hard left, who deluded themselves into believing they were in touching distance of Downing Street, any introspection is calamitous for their whole edifice. So even before the civil war within Labour officially begins, they’ll be blaming the Jews, their media tools and their Israeli puppet masters for betraying Britain’s would-be redeemer.
This blame game has already begun, albeit outside the Labour Party itself. A far-left French politician named Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Corbyn’s big mistake was apologizing for the party’s anti-Semitism:
In a blog, he said: ”(Corbyn) had to endure, unaided, churlish anti-Semitism claims from England’s chief rabbi and various influence networks linked to Likoud (the hard Right party of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu”…
The French government condemned Mr Mélenchon’s comments, with education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer branding them “foul” and liable to “fuel anti-Semitism”.
In the UK, a former MP named Jenny Tonge this on social media in reaction to Corbyn’s loss: “The Chief Rabbi must be dancing in the street. The pro-Israel lobby won our General Election by lying about Jeremy Corbyn.”
A group of 88 members of the House of Lords wrote a letter to the Telegraph today calling on Tonge to apologize. “Her language is both shameful and in clear contravention of the United Kingdom’s adoption of IHRA’s definition of anti-Semitism. Baroness Tonge has brought Parliament into disrepute and we demand that she withdraws her remarks and issues a full and unqualified apology without delay,” the letter said. Tonge responded by claiming here statement was “a lighthearted remark, not intended to offend.” As the Evening Standard points out, this wasn’t Tonge’s first brush with anti-Semitism:
She was suspended from the party in 2016 after hosting an event where an audience member suggested that Jewish people were responsible for the Holocaust.
A year later, she apologised for sharing an offensive cartoon which appeared to compare the Israeli treatment of Palestinians to the Holocaust.
Last year, police were said to be investigating 45 anti-Semitic incidents involving Labour party members. This year, the Equality and Human Rights Commission is currently investigating the party. Over the summer, eight former Labour officials said their efforts to rid the party of anti-Semitism were interfered with by party bosses. Four of those officials broke their non-disclosure agreements to speak about the problem on camera:
Labour has a problem but it’s not limited to Jeremy Corbyn. He’s just the highest ranking anti-Semite in a party that appears to have quite a few of them. He’s also representative of a strain of far-left politics that, unfortunately, exists here in the US as well.
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