The Genius of Jeremy Corbyn

The much-documented anti-Semitism of the British Labor party leader is no accident.

For most of his career, before being unexpectedly elected as leader of the British Labor party in September 2015, Jeremy Corbyn was a backbench politician of hard-left views, an active supporter of anti-Western causes in general, and an outspoken proponent of the anti-Israel cause in particular.

His tenure as Labor leader has been no different. Since his election, he has retained his radical political platform, his deliberately cultivated bad-boy persona, his vow to “rebuild and transform” Britain in the image of Marxist-Leninist socialism—and his flamboyantly announced intention, should he someday become prime minister, to recognize “Palestine” on his first day in office.

No shortage of ink, digital and otherwise, has been spilled on Corbyn, his record, his utterances, and his meteoric rise. In what follows, I mean to explore the central role played by anti-Semitism in abetting and consolidating that rise, the adroitness of Corbyn’s management of the anti-Semitic theme, and the meaning for British politics of his success with it. I begin with some fundamentals.

At the heart of Corbyn’s political coterie sit anti-Israel organizations of both Marxist and Islamist origins. He himself personifies the program of the so-called red-green alliance, which coalesced ideologically around the principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The alliance holds that Israel is the “little Satan,” lesser only to the United States as the focal point of the evils that typify Western civilization as a whole. For the “red” part of the alliance, those evils are capitalism, imperialism, and racism; for the “green” part, domination by infidels.

For both parts, Israel must be defeated.

British organizations faithful to that overarching aim include the Stop the War Coalition and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. The former, with help from the Socialist Workers party and the Muslim Association of Britain, was founded in 2003 to oppose the post-9/11 war on terror; it now focuses on denouncing Israel and promoting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). (Throughout the Syrian civil war, ironically, the ill-named coalition did and said precisely nothing to stop anything while millions of civilians were being displaced and hundreds of thousands murdered, justifying its silence with bleating reminders that its primary goal is to oppose the West.) As for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), which holds the honor of being the first British organization to label Israel an “apartheid state,” it is the main organ of pro-Palestinian activism in the UK. It, too, promotes BDS, and also associates itself closely with Hamas.

Together, these two organizations have sought to popularize the notion that Israel and the Jews are the chief cause of global war and strife. Their influence within the Labor party as a whole may be measured by a meme, courtesy of Mel Gibson, that was recently “shared” on Facebook by the party’s former regional organizer for the West Midlands: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!”

Corbyn has held positions of leadership within both of these organizations, serving as chairman of Stop the War Coalition until his election as party leader and continuing to this day as a patron of PSC. At a 2013 event convened by the so-called Palestine Return Center, he inveighed against Zionist Jews for their alleged ignorance of British life and customs despite “living in the country almost all their lives.” The plain insinuation was that, what with their suspect attachment to the pariah regime in Jerusalem, British Jews are congenitally disaffected from, if not disloyal to, their country and its culture.

Corbyn also associates with terrorists, both secular and Islamist, who actively seek the destruction of the state of Israel. On numerous occasions he shared a platform with Leila Khaled, the convicted plane-hijacker and former mastermind of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). In 2014 he was photographed, alongside the exiled PFLP chief Maher Taher, laying a wreath at a memorial ceremony for the Black September operatives who carried out the murder of eleven Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He has spent time with high-ranking figures from Hamas and Hizballah, including those whom in 2009 he welcomed to the British parliament “as friends.” In a 2010 visit to the Palestinian territories, he met with Hamas officials in Gaza. In 2016, he declared on British television his support for engagement with Islamic State, asserting that the West needed to understand “where [IS’s] strong points are.”


https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/2019/01/the-genius-of-jeremy-corbyn/


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