By Barry Shaw
NETANYA, Israel — Britain’s Jewish leadership met with Jeremy Corbyn, the man who is leading a Labour Party that is drenched in unbridled anti-Semitism, on April 24th and came away “disappointed,” calling the two hour meeting a “missed opportunity.”
Their requests were straightforward. They wanted a fixed timetable to deal with the numerous anti-Semitism cases within the party. They particularly wanted to see affirmative action against Ken Livingstone and the suspended party activist, Jackie Walker. They demanded that no Member of Parliament should share a platform with somebody expelled or suspended for anti-Semitism. For the Labour Party to adopt in full the accepted International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of Anti-Semitism. Transparency in their oversight of the disciplinary process, and the appointment of an independent ombudsman. All their requests were refused by Corbyn.
Jonathan Goldstein, the chairman of the Jewish Leadership Council, complained on BBC Radio 4’s Today program that the Labour leader refuses to take any of the necessary steps in solving the problem. “When you ask him to do something, he has the habit of staring or just shrugging.”
Jonathan Arkush, the President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, expected Corbyn to take the internal anti-Semitism problems as a personal policy and lead his party on this important issue, but he didn’t step up to do it.
Corbyn has a block when it comes to Israel. During the meeting, Jonathan Arkush asked Jeremy Corbyn why is it that he has nothing good to say about Israel’s flourishing and rare democracy in the Middle East, its trades unions, the lack of discrimination against women, gays, and minorities. The only response he received was a stare.
Arkush told Corbyn about his son, a doctor at the Shaare Tzedek Hospital in Jerusalem, who works alongside Palestinian doctors and nurses treating patients of all faiths and cultures. His comment was met by disinterest.
Although the representatives of British Jews met the press after their meeting, a detached Corbyn did not appear to speak to the press. Instead, he got one of his spokespeople to make a statement.
So what is it that causes the Corbyn disconnect to the complaint of anti-Semitism? David Aaronovitch is a reformed Euro-Communist, He knows a thing or two having made the documentaries “No Excuses for Terror” on how the far-left and the far-right have permeated the mainstream media and political discourse, and “Blaming the Jews,” that evaluates anti-Semitism in Arab media and culture. He writes that Corbyn thinks “good Jews” are those who comply with the ideology of this aging revolutionary. And the base for that is a totalitarian rejection of Zionism and Israel. As Aaronovitch wrote in an April 20th article in London’s Jewish Chronicle, that Corbyn’s Jews are the ones who reject both Israel and the notion that there is anti-Semitism within the British Labour Party.
He quotes Leah Levane, a member of Jewish Voices for Labour, who complains whenever British Jews talk about the invidious creep of anti-Semitism within her party. In a convoluted rant, covered in Aaronovitch’s article, Levane babbled, “it was terrible that you can treat antisemitism and make that accusation every time you criticize behavior of the state of Israel towards the Palestinian people.”
Make sense of that, if you can. However, it was praised by Jackie Walker, a far-left Socialist activist, who tweeted, “Great contribution from Leah Levane – Jewish human rights activist and my comrade. Our voice at last being heard.”
For her pains, Miss Walker got suspended from the Labour Party when she referred to Jews as the chief financiers of the slave trade.” Notice this race and culture sensitive person had nothing to say about the Arab slave trade that has continued from the Middle Ages until today. This did not stop her from posting a nasty tweet against the two thousand Jews and others who gathered in Parliament Square to protest against the Jew-hatred in Corbyn’s party claiming they were “absolute enemies of Muslims, enemies of people of color.”
This is the sort of friend and ally that Jews such as Leah Levane hold dear.
Go figure, and, while you are doing that, be aware that Leah Levane intends to be a local Labour candidate for the constituency of Hastings and Rye. Hence, the future of Corbyn’s Labour Party, and one of his adopted Jews.
Agreeing with me is Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who wrote on April 17, that Jeremy Corbyn is using the classic Soviet tactics in his dealings with the UK British community by attempting to divide and rule.
Just as the Soviet Union exploited Western Socialist organizations and leading individuals, including many far-left Jews, as their stooges, or “useful idiots,” to promulgate the spread of Communism, Corbyn adopts the Leah Levanes, the Jewda Jewish fringe group with whom he spent a faux Passover Seder slandering Israel and the British Royal Family, and other disenfranchised Jews as a front against the allegations of anti-Semitism.
A typical example is Jenny Manson, of the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour group, who claimed on the BBC Today radio program, that “none of us in my group has ever experienced any antisemitism within the Labour Party,” and anyway, “it’s much worse on the right.”
She obviously missed the impassioned speeches in the House of Commons by Labour Party parliamentarians, Luciana Berger and Ruth Smeeth, who both spoke of their personal victimhood at the hands of Labour Party anti-Semites.
It is impossible for Jenny Manson not to have heard about the complaint from John Mann, MP, who revealed the torment suffered by his family at the hands of “far-left extremists,” as described by his daughter, who threatened to rape his daughters and wife over his complaint about the deep Jew-hatred that has grown within his party since the rise of Corbyn. Heather Mann, a long-time campaigner against antisemitism, confirmed that since her father exposed the threat against them to the parliamentary Labour Party nobody from the national committee had bothered to contact them. John Mann, chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group against Antisemitism.
In fact, Jenny Manson is deviously disingenuous. Her JVL group was set up, as she herself admitted, “to tackle the myth of antisemitism in the Labour Party.”
For people like Manson, Levane, Corbyn, and others, there is a deliberate attempt to disconnect Jews from support for Zionism. They know that once you prize Judaism from Zionism you remove the heart and soul from the Zionist enterprise, thereby killing the raison d’etre of the fundamental basis of Israel, the Jewish state, Fortunately, the vast majority of mainstream British Jewry stand firmly with Israel.
To paraphrase David Aaronovitch, Jeremy Corbyn abides only the “good Jews,” those that affiliate themselves with his far-left ideology. An essential part of that belonging is to disown Israel.
He can’t help himself. This Socialist is stuck in the mantra that not only are Hamas and Hezbollah his friends but also supporting the terrorists responsible for the bombing in 1994 of the Israeli Embassy in London and Balfour House, the building that housed the UJIA, one of the largest Jewish charities in the UK, in which twenty-six people were injured.
Corbyn, the bombers’ friend, spent more than a decade campaigning for their release.
Corbyn can’t help himself. That is the way he is, and it is highly unlikely that the JLC or the BoD can help him either, although I applaud them for giving it their best shot.
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Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies. He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’