Grotesque Anti-Semitism of the Labour Party

The world’s press has portrayed Brexit as a disaster and the Conservatives as a party in disarray. But the real fiasco is going on in the Labour Party, where Jeremy Corbyn lost a no-confidence vote within his party by 172 to 40, but refuses to resign. Corbyn is a buffoon, a hard left winger who never met a terrorist group for which he didn’t have a sneaking fondness.

Meanwhile, Labour is in the midst of an anti-Semitism crisis. One Labour MP after another has engaged in anti-Jewish slurs, and no fewer than 50 Labourites have been suspended for such conduct.

This has been a major embarrassment, so the party commissioned an investigation and a report on its own anti-Jewish bias by human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti. Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn unveiled the report at a press conference. What did the report say? According to news reports, it concluded that anti-Semitism in the party “has not been taken seriously enough” for years.

But that wasn’t the story that emerged from the press conference. The story was that Corbyn couldn’t change his own stripes, despite the setting, and launched one of the more vicious anti-Semitic tropes in memory:

He said: “Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those of various self-styled Islamic states or organisations.”

Right! British Jews can’t be blamed for the fact that Israel’s government is just like the Islamic State! Presumably this is why, whenever an airport blows up, people immediately think that it may have been the Mossad.

Along with the fact that the analogy is insane, the predominant form of anti-Semitism in the modern world is an obsessive preoccupation with the alleged misdeeds of Israel, an island of sanity in a region that, almost everywhere else, is going up in flames. I don’t know what it is about anti-Semites, but they just can’t help themselves.

Keep all of that in mind as you evaluate press claims that the big story in Great Britain is the disarray of the Conservative Party.

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