Antisemitism claims have one goal: To stop Jeremy Corbyn winning power

The Jewish community’s alienation from Labour has been years in the making - but it is Johnson's Conservatives who have embraced hostility to minorities

Jonathan Cook

Part 1

A supposed antisemitism crisis in Britain’s Labour party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader has erupted back into the headlines.

This time barely any effort has been made to conceal the fact that the accusations relate to the "danger” that Corbyn could soon win power, with Britain gearing up for a general election in less than a month.

This week Britain’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, added his voice to argue in the Times newspaper that the opposition leader was “unfit for high office” - the first time a chief rabbi has ever sought to interfere in the outcome of a general election. Calling Corbyn “mendacious” and warning that the election result would serve as a measure of Britain’s “moral compass”, he urged the public to “vote with their conscience”. 

His intervention followed a letter to the Guardian signed by a handful of public figures - many of whom are not Jewish - including John Le Carre, Fay Weldon, Simon Callow and Joanna Lumley, pressing voters to reject Labour on 12 December. They wrote: “The coming election is momentous for every voter, but for British Jews it contains a particular anguish: the prospect of a prime minister steeped in association with antisemitism.” 

Calling on voters to listen to the Jewish community’s concerns, and prioritise them over the likelihood that it would give the Conservatives the chance to continue their austerity policies and push ahead with a hard Brexit, they added: “Which other community’s concerns are disposable in this way? Who would be next?”

Their remarks echoed those of Jonathan Romain, a senior rabbi in Maidenhead, the constituency of the recently departed Conservative leader Theresa May. In the pages of the Daily Mail this month, Romain pleaded with Jewish voters to choose any candidate but Labour’s because Corbyn "poses such a threat to Britain's Jews". 

Like many others making this accusation, Romain left it for his readers to infer what precisely the supposed “threat” consisted of. But to aid them, he repeatedly referenced the fight against Hitler and the Nazis, as well as the Kindertransport that saved many thousands of Jewish children from extermination camps by bringing them to Britain. 

Meanwhile, the Jewish Chronicle’s editor, Stephen Pollard, who has spent most of his career working for right-wing tabloid newspapers, used his paper’s front page to warn readers - once again - of the Corbyn menace. He cited a poll last month that found 87 per cent of British Jews believed Corbyn was an antisemite. Some 47 per cent claimed they would “seriously consider” emigrating were he elected prime minister.

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