Poles and Muslims find themselves overwhelmingly under attack, with the brave perpetrators especially targeting Muslim women as they daub buildings with graffiti and subject individuals to verbal and physical assault. After working for years in the country, filling jobs the natives won’t touch, people from Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, Nepal, and Albania – to name just a few – find themselves seized one morning and suddenly deported, their lives thrown into hopeless disarray. And three million European citizens, who came to the United Kingdom legally and overwhelmingly contribute to the nation’s wealth, now face uncertain futures while politicians use them for leverage as Britain bungles its way out of the EU.
The Conservative leadership race placed before us two figures, in Theresa May and Liam Fox, who should have been debarred from politics and perhaps even imprisoned for numerous breaches in their roles as government ministers, May for illicit deportations and Fox for allowing his friend to sit in and scheme during official meetings concerning the national defence. Michael Gove is a Murdoch stooge who in his personal politics conjures the 1890s. And Andrea Leadsom is utterly vacuous, a liar with dubious views on homosexuality and the environment, whose only firm belief holds that unless she has your child until the age of two, they’ll probably grow up to be criminal. In comparison Boris Johnson – who once advised a friend on how to beat up a journalist, and dragged the UK out of the EU apparently against his own wishes – seems positively empathetic.
Don’t let any of this worry you however, for the real crisis facing minority groups and British politics today is that some people somewhere, in some proximity to the Labour Party, might have been a bit nasty about some Jews. Anti-semitism is a form of racism, and its spread across some quarters of the political left deserves to be investigated and condemned. But the attention the issue has received in recent months, the attempt to make anti-semitism appear rife within the Labour Party, and the sustained endeavour to link Jeremy Corbyn to the malicious practise, together seems grossly out of proportion, a diversionary tactic seized upon by the right and pressed to an absurd degree by pro-Israel lobbyists and a fiercely anti-Corbyn, Blairite Labour posse.
In 2009 Corbyn called Hamas ‘a group dedicated to bringing about long term peace and social justice and political justice’, and he described both Hamas and Hezbollah as ‘friends’. The aim might have been to encourage dialogue between all parties involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the language was excessive with regard to two groups who have historically called for the destruction of Israel, even if their policies have modified in recent years, with Hamas winning democratic election in Palestine in 2006.
Then at the launch of a report into anti-semitism in June, Corbyn caused upset when he unmistakably compared Israel to ISIS, his cack-handed attempt at a conciliatory remark concluding ‘Our Jewish friends are no more responsible for the actions of Israel or the Netanyahu government than our Muslim friends are for those various self-styled Islamic states or organisations’.
In both instances he was wrong, and under some duress has since apologised. But there is scant evidence that Corbyn is anti-semitic or has systematically enabled anti-semitism. The support he showed for Deir Yassin Remembered came at a time when the organisation enjoyed wide support among the left, before its links with the Holocaust denier Paul Eisen had been established. Raed Salah remains a contentious figure, an Islamist who has been imprisoned on several occasions in Israel, charged with funding Hamas and engaging in violent protest. Yet many still regard the thrice-elected former mayor of Umm al-Fahm as a legitimate political leader, and his arrest and exclusion from the UK in 2011 was subsequently overturned by an immigration tribunal, which ruled that Theresa May had contravened Salah’s human rights based on ‘irrelevant factors’ and a ‘misapprehension as to the facts’.
Otherwise Corbyn’s purported links to anti-semitism amount to shared platforms during rallies and events which, whatever their tenor, were organised by respected charities and non-profits in the aid of mainstream left-wing causes. He has campaigned resolutely for more than forty years on behalf of social justice, opposing violence at every turn, but we live in a political climate that treats real engagement as a reason for mockery, and which has shifted so far to the right that liberal convictions are quickly scorned as the marks of the dangerous radical.
In the past week the former Labour donor Michael Foster has branded Corbyn and his allies ‘Nazi stormtroopers’, a more hateful slur than anything Corbyn has committed. June’s even-handed report by Shami Chakrabarti – which determined that today’s Labour Party is not overrun by anti-semitism – had been dismissed even before a furor erupted over her peerage. And the smears on Corbyn seem unlikely to cease, as long as they serve to usefully mask the xenophobic and racist rhetoric which is the lifeblood of today’s Conservatism, at least until Corbyn’s demise has been won by the Labour ‘moderates’ who have made this their lifelong resolve.
