Why Corbynistas have such a problem with Jews

They cannot abide any discussion of Jews alone. They cannot tolerate any focus on anti-Jewish racism. They must always, without fail, raise Muslims. This creepy instinct to distract attention from anti-Jewish hatred, or at least to dilute discussion about it, is perhaps the most revealing and alarming aspect of the new anti-Semitism scarring sections of the British left.

The ‘what about Muslims?’ response to any attempt to analyse the very specific form of racism that is anti-Jewish hatred was on full display this week. Even before the airing of the BBC Panorama programme about the Labour leadership’s interference in cases of anti-Semitism, the ‘What about Islamophobia?’ response to those who have the temerity to talk about Jews was being wheeled out.

In advice apparently sent by a top Labour aide to certain pro-Corbyn social-media activists, the very first tip for countering Panorama’s claims that Labour has failed to get a handle on its anti-Semitism problem was this: ‘Tonight C4 Dispatches are exposing Tory Islamophobia. Amplify. Amplify. Amplify.’ In short, drown out the discussion about anti-Jewish hatred by drawing attention back to anti-Muslim hatred. Do not let the Jews have their moment. Do not let their suffering become a talking point. Talk about Muslims, talk about Muslims, talk about Muslims.

This advice was actually unnecessary, because for months now the tactic of every Corbyn supporter has been to throw the issue of Islamophobia back at anyone who talks about the rise of anti-Semitism. There are so many problems with this approach it’s hard to know where to begin. The first is that no serious comparison can be made between anti-Muslim sentiment in the Tory party and the anti-Semitism crisis in the Labour Party. These are not symmetrical phenomena.

It is undoubtedly the case that members of the Tory party hold and have expressed anti-Muslim sentiments, whether about Muslim migration, alleged Muslim behaviour, or the wisdom of having a Muslim prime minister in the UK. But such individual expression of prejudice cannot be compared to left-wing anti-Semites’ almost systematic targeting of actual Labour members and even Labour MPs whose only crime is to be Jewish – or ‘Zios’, to use the left-racist parlance.

Labour’s anti-Semitism is a different order to the existence of anti-Muslim sentiment among individuals in the Tory party. There has been no racist hounding of Muslim members of the Tory party. Indeed, Sajid Javid did relatively well in the leadership contest and is quite popular among the Tory membership. What has happened in Labour is not simply the expression of anti-Jewish prejudice but the weaponisation of it; the use of it internally against certain members and MPs; the systemised politicisation of it to target MPs who are seen as suspect because of their support for Israel or their entanglement in a presumed Zionist Lobby.

The ‘socialism of fools’ outlook runs so deep in sections of the contemporary radical left that they have been content to weave conspiracy theories and even purges against members and MPs of Labour itself whose only ‘wrongdoing’ is to be Jewish. Or at least a ‘bad Jew’ – the kind who believes the Jews need their own nation state. One Jewish Labour MP, Luciana Berger, resigned from the party after being subjected to relentless anti-Semitic abuse from Labourites and other leftists.

There is individual prejudice in every political party. It would be weird if there was not. But what is happening in Labour is different. It is not simply the expression of prejudicial ideas but the actual organisation of factions and social-media sets and elements of the new membership around prejudicial ideas to the end of cleansing the party of those who are viewed as problematic. Who are predominantly Jewish or sympathisers with Jews. The new left-wing conspiracism, which sees Zionist Lobbies puppeteering British politics and considers the Jewish State to be the source of global instability and of anti-Muslim hatred, has become weaved into sections of Corbyn’s Labour Party, giving rise not merely to individual prejudice but to politicised prejudice, to an institutionalised form of racist speech and action.

But there’s another, even worse problem with the ‘what about Muslims?’ tic – which is that it actually feeds, however unwittingly, the new anti-Semitism.

The key motor of the new forms of anti-Semitism, especially in the way they manifest themselves on the left, is not the old politics of racial superiority, but rather the new politics of identity and victimhood. Identitarianism, the organisation of social and racial groups according to their presumed victim status, provides a great deal of the underpinnings of the new anti-Semitism. How? Because this politics, being always driven by a cult of competitive victimhood, by the bizarre, regressive urge to fashion a hierarchy of ‘victim groups’ and to create a corresponding list of bad ‘privileged groups’, has systematically called into question the history of Jewish suffering.

It has reconsidered the ranking of Jews in the identity sphere and decided that they are part of ‘the privileged’. Actual racists of the hard-right variety will say Jews have ‘Jewish privilege’; so-called anti-racists on the identitarian left say Jews enjoy ‘white privilege’. But the result is the same: Jews find themselves elevated into the category of the wicked, the realm of the hated, into an identity group that it is okay and in fact good to despise and agitate against: the privileged.

As part of this process, there has been a systematic dismantling of the history of Jewish victimhood. The specific nature of historic Jewish suffering is continually called into question. It must be, in order to prove that the Jews are privileged and also to create the space for new victim groups to move up the hierarchy: Muslims, gay people, trans people.