Don’t let the smears that sank Corbyn tank Bernie Sanders

by Asa Winstanley

Part 2 - Smeared from the start

When it became clear in 2015 that a veteran Palestine solidarity activist would lead Britain’s main opposition party, the campaign began to falsely paint the movement that swept Corbyn into the leadership as anti-Semitic.

People are not stupid and usually know when they are being lied to. But propaganda sustained for long enough works. In this election, the lie began to cut through to the electorate.

Several Labour activists told me anti-Semitism came up on the doorstep and in conversations as reasons people could not vote Labour.

These views were held in a shallow, but wide fashion. When challenged, they crumbled.

But the problem was they were so rarely challenged as mainstream media repeated the claims about the party’s anti-Semitism as a given, with no need for evidence.

Indeed, Labour activists were even punished for challenging the smears.

A national poll commissioned by the Jewish News – a consistently anti-Palestinian publication – found that 55 percent of those surveyed earlier this year agreed with the claim that Corbyn’s “failure to tackle anti-Semitism within his own party shows he is unfit to be Prime Minister.”

The poll found that half of British adults agreed that Labour “has a serious anti-Semitism problem,” up from just a third less than a year earlier.

Four and a half years of relentless smearing of Jeremy Corbyn took its toll.

Source, links:

https://electronicintifada.net/content/dont-let-smears-sank-corbyn-tank-bernie-sanders/29141

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