[rad-green] Why anyone who is Jewish and on the Left should have no problem voting for Jeremy Corbyn

*https://mondoweiss.net/2019/11/why-anyone-who-is-jewish-and-on-the-left-should-have-no-problem-voting-for-jeremy-
<https://mondoweiss.net/2019/11/why-anyone-who-is-jewish-and-on-the-left-should-have-no-problem-voting-for-jeremy->*
*corbyn/*


*Mondoweiss          November 13, 2019*



*Why anyone who is Jewish and on the Left should have no problem voting for
Jeremy CorbynBy Tony Greenstein *

[image: image.png]
*Jonathan Freedland, from the Guardian.*

*A Response to Jonathan Freedland’s latest Anti-Corbyn tirade
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/09/jews-brexit-boris-johnson-jeremy-corbyn>
in
The Guardian. *

Twelve years ago the late Georgina Henry, who had begun the Guardian’s
blog, *Comment is Free,* the year before suggested that I write for it. We
met at the founding meeting of Independent Jewish Voices at Hampstead Town
Hall in February 2007 and as a result of that discussion, my first article, The
Seamy Side of Solidarity
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/19/greenstein>,
appeared two weeks later. I wrote it because of the growing support for a
genuine anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, which existed within the Palestine
solidarity movement.

Since that time, and especially since Matt Seaton took over, *Guardian
Comment *has moved away from the original concept of a forum for genuine
debate, certainly on Palestine. Zionist groups set up *CIF Watch *to wage a
war against any such debate on *CIF. * I was one of the first casualties. *CIF
Watch *later changed their name <https://ukmediawatch.org/about/> to *UK
Media Watch *because they had achieved their original aims.

Following my original article,
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/19/greenstein> we waged
a five-year battle against those who argued that being Jewish and Zionist
were synonymous or that Israel was a racist state because it was a Jewish
state. We argued that Israel was a settler colonial state and its treatment
of the Palestinians was no different to how ‘Christian’ South Africa had
treated its indigenous population.

At the 2012 Conference of Palestine Solidarity Campaign
<https://www.palestinecampaign.org/>, a holocaust denier and supporter of
Atzmon was expelled
<https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2012/01/psc-agm-crushing-defeat-for-gilad.html>
from
PSC. Following this Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada and over 20
Palestinian activists, academics and leaders of BDS issued a statement
“Granting
No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of
Gilad Atzmon
<https://uspcn.org/2012/03/13/granting-no-quarter-a-call-for-the-disavowal-of-the-racism-and-antisemitism-of-gilad-atzmon/>
.”

From that time on the anti-Semitic element in the Palestine solidarity
movement has been minuscule compared to the number of anti-Semites and
White Supremacists who support the Zionist movement. Not once has
*Guardian* columnist
Jonathan Freedland condemned the growing collaboration between supporters
of Tommy Robinson <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_(activist)>,
a self-declared Zionist and large numbers of Zionist activists, including
Paul Besser of Britain First.  At the Al Quds demonstration in June these
activists later joined up with the Board of Deputies main demonstration in
Trafalgar Square.

In my article
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/19/greenstein> I issued
a warning. “Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of ‘anti-semitism’ has
been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that
people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article.”  This is
precisely what has happened.

With Freedland’s latest broadside against Corbyn titled, “Many Jews want
Boris Johnson out. But how can we vote for Jeremy Corbyn?” he has drained
‘anti-Semitism’ of any meaning. Instead of a serious analysis of
anti-Semitism he has substituted a series of guilt-by-association
anecdotes. No serious editorial process could have approved Freedland’s
article, if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a senior Guardian
editor.  He plays fast and loose with facts, deliberately omits context and
rests his arguments on assertion alone.

If Corbyn were anti-Semitic then one would expect the Jewish former Speaker
of the House of Commons, John Bercow, to realise this, yet Bercow stated,
in an interview
<https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/john-bercow-interview> with
Alistair Campbell, that after 22 years knowing Corbyn ‘I’ve never detected
so much as a whiff of anti-Semitism.’

Even stranger are the views of Professor Geoffrey Alderman, a Zionist and
historian of the British Jewish community. Alderman is a longstanding
Jewish Chronicle and now Jewish Telegraph columnist. In the Spectator
<https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/05/is-jeremy-corbyn-really-anti-semitic/>
Alderman
described how Corbyn “has an impressive record of supporting Jewish
communal initiatives”. He gives as an example how in 1987 Corbyn led the
campaign to save the cemetery of the West London Synagogue from the
developers, whom Margaret Hodge’s Islington Council had sanctioned!

Freedland gives three examples of Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’. They have more
holes than a colander.

i.                   Corbyn’s support for the artist who did a mural
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/28/antisemitism-open-your-eyes-jeremy-corbyn-labour>
of
supposed “Jewish bankers”.  Contrary to Freedland’s assertion just two out
the six bankers were Jewish. None of them had hook noses. Even neo-liberal
Harry’s Place’s Lucy Lips admitted
<http://hurryupharry.org/2012/10/05/i-was-wrong-about-the-mural/>  that *‘*I’ve
seen more obvious stereotypes of Jews deployed in antisemitic art.’ Back in
2012 it passed unnoticed.  Corbyn was defending freedom of speech not
anti-Semitic art.

ii.                  The incident concerning “English irony” is even less
convincing. Two Zionists intent on disrupting a Palestinian speaker were
told by Corbyn that *unlike*  someone who wasn’t even born in Britain, they
didn’t understand English irony. What has that to do with anti-Semitism?

iii.                The third example alleges that Corbyn kept company with
Raed Salah, an Israeli Palestinian whom Theresa May was trying to deport.
Freedland alleges that Salah was “found by a British
<https://hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Salah-ruling.pdf>
tribunal
<https://hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Salah-ruling.pdf> to
have peddled the medieval and lethal myth of Jews feasting on the blood of
gentile children”. This is simply untrue.  Freedland ‘forgot’ to mention
that the Upper Immigration Tribunal overturned May’s deportation order
precisely because it found that there was no basis to the allegation of
racism. What the Tribunal did find
<https://hurryupharry.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Salah-ruling.pdf> was
that

‘there is no reliable evidence of the appellant using words carrying a
reference to the blood libel save in the single passage in a sermon
delivered five years ago.’

Even in this disputed passage no reference was made to Jews (paragraph 78).
In a passage cut out of a subsequent article
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/britain-duty-to-palestinian-people>
for
the Guardian, Salah explained
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/britain-duty-to-palestinian-people#comment-15720063>
 that

I don’t believe in the “blood libel” against Jews and I reject it in its
entirety. What I was really referring to in my sermon was the killing of
innocents in the name of religion, including children, from the time of the
Inquisition to as recently as Bosnia and elsewhere in Europe whose
governments support Israel’s action.

Freedland completely omits the context, which is that Raed Salah has been
the recipient of horrific violence and racism by the Israeli state. He has
been gaoled on a trumped-up charge five years after the alleged incident,
when not one Israeli has been gaoled for anti-Arab racism.

Freedland refers to last summer’s Panorama programme *Is Labour
Anti-Semitic? *which has been the subject of a record number of complaints.
Presented by John Ware, someone who considers Islamaphobia a rational
response to terrorism
<https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/why-the-i-word-has-closed-down-debate-on-extremism-1.47153>,
it presented seven victims of Labour “anti-Semitism”.  It provided no names
or background information about the alleged victims, all of whom were
officers of the Jewish Labour Movement, a Zionist organisation which is
affiliated to the World Zionist Organisation. The WZO, according to
Ha’aretz,
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/wzos-land-theft-division-1.5465930>
has
a ‘Land Theft Division’.

You wouldn’t hang a cat on Freedland’s ‘evidence’ against Corbyn. It is a
melange of the trite and trivial.  Guilt by gossip. If this is the best
Freedland can come up with after 4 years of non-stop Corbyn-bashing then it
shows just how thin the gruel is.

Freedland’s last sideswipe is at Labour politician Chris Williamson’s
“penchant for egregious Jew-baiting”*. *Chris Williamson is a working class
MP who has physically swapped blows with neo-Nazis on a building site. I
dare say Freedland has never fought for anything other than a decent seat
in a restaurant.

There was a time when “Jew baiter” was reserved, not for anti-Zionists but
for anti-Semites who went beyond the call of duty. It wasn’t even used
about Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts. It was used to describe
pathological anti-Semites like Arthur Leese
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Leese> of the Imperial Fascist League
and Julius Streicher <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Streicher>,
editor of *Der Sturmer*. By using this term about a genuine anti-racist,
Freedland once again devalues the currency.

Freedland rests his case on a dubious poll
<https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/election-poll-2019-survation-jn/>
according
to which 87% of Jews believe that Corbyn is anti-Semitic. Even were this
poll accurate is that the end of the matter?  Surely the first question to
ask is why 87% of Jews believe this? Does it have anything to do with the
5,497 articles about Labour ‘anti-Semitism’ that have appeared in 8
national newspapers from 15 June 2015 to 31 March 2019 according to Bad
News for Labour <https://www.plutobooks.com/events/bad-news-for-labour/>?
Or the fact that the broadcast media operates under the assumption that
there is an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour Party? But Freedland isn’t
interested in the ‘why’.  What this poll is really measuring is the
effectiveness of the mass media’s propaganda.

In my article
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/feb/19/greenstein> I quoted
Israeli poet and novelist A B Yehoshua saying,

“Anti-Zionism is not the product of the non-Jews. On the contrary, the
Gentiles have always encouraged Zionism, hoping that it would help to rid
them of the Jews in their midst. Even today, in a perverse way, a real
anti-Semite must be a Zionist.” (Jewish Chronicle 22.1.82.)

The people who are cheering Jonathan Freedland on are the genuine
anti-Semites: the Daily Mail and the baiters of George Soros. Historically
friends of Zionism such as Arthur Balfour have also been the enemies of
Jews. What Freedland is doing is making ‘anti-Semitism’ into a form of
cheap political abuse.  As Brian Klug observed
<https://www.thenation.com/article/myth-new-anti-semitism/>, “when
anti-Semitism is everywhere, it is nowhere. And when every anti-Zionist is
an anti-Semite, we no longer know how to recognize the real thing–the
concept of anti-Semitism loses its significance.”

No greater service could be performed on behalf of those for whom
anti-Semitism is not opposition to Zionism but opposition to Jews as Jews.

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