The
smears against Corbyn and the left are part of a concerted effort to
undermine a potential left government and must be opposed
by
Alex Snowdon
Part
1
There is
currently another round of attacks on Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of
the Labour Party on the basis of alleged antisemitism - or failures
to deal with it effectively. This is a long-running saga. The charges
against the Labour leadership have become progressively harsher: we
are now routinely being told that Labour is an ‘institutionally
antisemitic’ party.
While
there have indeed been instances of antisemitism from some Labour
members, the evidence shows overwhelmingly that it is not a
widespread problem in the party, it has increasingly been addressed
in a serious way, and the notion that Corbyn personally is complicit
is absurd.
In the
US, meanwhile, there has been an outpouring of vitriol directed at
Ilhan Omar, a newly-elected congress member, for critical comments of
Israel that have been tendentiously spun as antisemitic. In January,
Omar became one of the first two Muslim women members of the US
Congress in history, alongside Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib.
Together with another new left-wing Congress member Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Tlaib have rapidly developed a high profile
for challenging the conservative status quo in Washington politics.
They have been faced with the inevitable backlash.
In
both cases – Corbyn here, Omar in the US – antisemitism is being
weaponised. It is wrongly treated as a smear tactic, cynically
deployed to attack the left. This is motivated, above all, by the
fear of the kind of politics represented by a new left.
In
the UK there is real anxiety among the political establishment, and
in the British state and ruling class, that a socialist could become
prime minister. In the US the threat is less serious, but the trio of
refreshing new voices in Congress – together with Bernie Sanders’
campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination –
represents a growing rejection of the old order, and a burgeoning
interest in broadly socialist ideas.
These
campaigns around antisemitism are therefore a misuse of a real form
of racism, geared towards political ends: weakening, stigmatising and
dividing the left. They involve ignoring or downplaying the more
serious instances of antisemitism on the far right and, by weakening
the Left, threaten to damage the political forces that can actually
confront the growing far right and its racism. There is also a
massive downplaying of other forms of racism, notably Islamophobia –
which is a form of ‘respectable racism’ firmly in the political
mainstream.
There
was recently a triple whammy of insulting comments by senior Tory
ministers in the space of just 48 hours that illustrated the point.
Amber Rudd referred to shadow home secretary Diane Abbott as
‘coloured’. Andrea Leadsom responded to a request – from a
Muslim Labour MP – for a debate on Islamophobia by saying it was a
Foreign Office matter. Karen Bradley, meanwhile, caused great offence
to Northern Irish Catholics by suggesting that killings by British
security forces in Northern Ireland had not been crimes.
These
‘gaffes’ were swiftly followed by the news of the death of
Shamima Begum’s baby in a refugee camp, exposing the callousness of
Sajid Javid, home secretary, who had made Begum stateless. Yet, in
this context, it is Labour – not the Tory Party - that receives the
lion’s share of media denunciation and whipped-up controversy.
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