Those who see the need to eliminate anti-Semitism should involve themselves in the struggle for a classless and nationless world. The current media circus about Parliamentary factions is totally removed from the necessary struggle to root out anti-Semitism through the struggle to destroy capitalism.
With a Conservative Party in disarray over Brexit and the British state clearly incapable of solving a whole host of social and economic problems there remains a serious possibility that “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”, aka the Labour Party, forms the next government. As we have written many times1 Labour under Corbyn represents no threat to the system and no hope for the working class. This fact does not stop capitalists fretting that their profits will be hit by even a minor redistribution of income. Cue the latest attempt by the establishment media to discredit Corbyn’s Labour in a campaign which actually detracts from the real issue of anti-semitism.
On 28 March 2018 the “Daily Mail” carried a front page objecting to “the stench of anti-Semitism” in the Labour Party. This is the same “Daily Mail” who, in the 1930s trumpeted “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, the British Union of Fascists whose favoured chant was “The Yids, the Yids, we’ve got to get rid of the Yids”. The same paper in 1938 also published a denunciation of “German Jews Pouring into this country” which the paper argued had to be stopped. A fine display of how the ruling class’s propaganda machine has demoted the real poison of anti-Semitism into a ploy to manoeuvre for or against political parties and factions.
In early April, the degree of farce escalated when Jeremy Corbyn attended a Passover event hosted by Jewdas, an organisation of Jews in the pro-Corbyn camp in the left of the capitalist political spectrum. In response, anti-Corbyn elements tried to use this as evidence of anti-Semitism because Corbyn mixed with Jews with whom they had political differences.
Behind the ruling class hypocritical cant lies the reality of violence and oppression flowing from the anti-semitic sewer. On March 23 Mireille Knoll an 86 year Parisian who had managed to escape the Holocaust was repeatedly stabbed to death in her flat. It was one incident amongst many in France. Last year it was 65 Sarah Halimi’s murder that brought about demonstrations against anti-Semitism.
In Hungary, in 2017 the government erected many billboards with a large picture of George Soros, an international financier who was born in Hungary and is Jewish. The posters’ slogan was “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh”. The “dog whistle” message was clear – Reuters reported that, “Some Soros billboards have been defaced with the words ‘stinking Jew’ in magic marker”. In Poland, about 60,000 took part in a nationalist and xenophobic demonstration in Warsaw in November, 2017.2 The Guardian reported on 12th November
Demonstrators with faces covered chanted “Pure Poland, white Poland!” and “Refugees get out!”. Unsurprisingly, in a country where there is a significant historic strand of anti-Semitism the same paper reported “A demonstrator interviewed by state television TVP said he was on the march to ‘remove Jewry from power’.
In Britain there is a bleak reality hidden under the media focus on the political infighting. The Community Security Trust that monitors anti-Semitic “hate crimes” reports the highest number of incidents since they started recording. In 2017 they reported 1,382 incidents, a rise of 3% from 2016 which had also been the highest on record. Violent anti-Semitic assaults increased by more than a third (34 per cent), from 108 in 2016 to 145 in 2017.
For many months, factions in the Labour Party have tried to outdo each other in appearing as the true opponents of anti-Semitism. These party political spats only disguise the real depth of anti-Semitism embedded in late capitalism. Specifically they spread the lie that anti-Semitism can be eliminated by “progressive” elements in and around the parties that jostle for position on the Parliamentary gravy train.
The British state’s acceptance of anti-Semitism in the emerging Imperialist order is clearly illustrated in their first efforts to control the migration of workers and dispossessed. The first appearance of specific controls was in 1905 when the Aliens Act was introduced, undoubtedly aimed to limit the flow of Jewish migrants who were predominantly fleeing repression and state supported violence in the Tsarist Russian Empire.
Rooting out exploitation and oppressions
As we have already written: The ruling class is … able to rely on various ideologies and a whole network of traditional relations of domination. These forms of oppression already existed in previous class societies, but under capitalism have taken on a modified shape corresponding to the interests of the system. Framing and maintaining the divisions within the working class into local and foreign, men and women, hetero- and homosexual, etc., is central to the security of the ruling class. The stirring up of prejudice and bigotry has always been an important ideological weapon of the bourgeoisie. It is all the more important for communists to resolutely stand up against all forms of oppression and the manifold ideological mystification of class domination. (For Communism, Section 3, The Struggle for Class Autonomy).
Anti-Semitism is firmly within that category of oppressions which existed long before the emergence of capitalism but was zealously adopted by bourgeois forces.
It is not accidental that the very word "Anti-Semitism" became commonly used at the dawn of the Imperialist epoch. It was first used around 1860 and was “popularised” by the German writer Wilhelm Marr in pamphlets published in 1879 and 1880. In 1879 he published a pamphlet "Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nichtconfessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet" (The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective). A further pamphlet was produced the following year when Marr founded the Antisemitenliga (League of Antisemites).
As some left liberal opponents of anti-Semitism have commented,
When Marr and his movement designed this term, to degrade a whole people, they couldn't care less that they were using it inaccurately by designating it for Jews specifically. (The Past Didn’t Go Away, 2007).
'Jewish Capitalism' and 'Jewish Communism' – Inventions of anti-Semitism
At the start of the 20th century the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police, produced and distributed a document which became totemic for all subsequent anti-Semitism. The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (referred to simply as Protocols in further references) purported to describe meetings of Jewish leaders in which they planned to dominate the world and destroy the existing “civilised order”. One of the key levers that was to establish this control of the world was the invented idea of Jewish control of finance and the banks.
That pillar of the forgery developed an anti-Semitic strand that has its origins in medieval Europe. Because of religious restrictions the nobility chose to take out loans from Jewish merchants. Often, these were loans that they were never able to, or never chose to, repay. A convenient way of avoiding payments was the physical removal of the money lenders. In England, for example, mass murder could take place such as at Clifford’s Tower in York in 1190. This was followed 100 years later by the expulsion of all Jews from England.
For anti-Semites in the Imperialist epoch, the Protocols helped crystallise the modern version of attacking supposed Jewish control of finance as a way of validating and encouraging acts of violence and oppression. Relying on the fact that a small fraction of Jews had become prominent in banking, the Rothschild family being the most quoted example, the anti-Semites built up the myth of Jewish finance both controlling and corrupting the world. Supposedly this banking/finance mechanism stands in “parasitic” contrast to the “productive”, “natural”, healthy development of “national” capitalist systems. That calumny is palpable nonsense in that the reality is that finance capital and industrial capital are intrinsically intertwined and mutually dependent. However, truth is no problem for the myth-peddlers. Inevitably, they can select historic examples where elements of the bourgeoisie, other than themselves, have depended on finance capital to better exploit the working class. Find someone identifiably Jewish involved in the dealing and “hey presto” the reality of exploitative capitalist development is portrayed as an alien Jewish conspiracy.
The protocols also developed an anti-Semitic aspect to the Okhranist authors’ natural opposition to Communism. Communism, the project to destroy capitalism and lay the basis for a moneyless future was portrayed as part of the Jewish conspiracy. Now, readers may puzzle about this Jewish conspiracy where finance capital and Communism are its two main pillars. Again, no problem to our sophisticated Mr/Ms anti-Semite. Why, these cunning Jews, if they can’t destroy civilisation one way then they’ll do it another way. Why expect spokespeople for irrational divisions to trouble themselves with anything approaching a defensible argument!
Nonsense it may have been and remains but the myth of “Jewish Communism” was prominent in the propaganda of both the Russian counter-revolutionaries and the German Nazis. The rational kernel that they were able to point to and misrepresent is that around the end of the 19th and early 20th century many Jews had rallied to revolutionary socialism as a route to ending oppression. This was partly linked to the development of a Jewish proletariat after the emancipatory initiatives of the bourgeois revolutions had dismantled the older forms of discrimination. In the first decades of the 20th Century, Jews had formed their own mass membership Socialist Party, the Bund, within the Tsarist Empire. Many secular Jews also joined the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary fractions in Russia and elsewhere. That process continued after the start of the Revolutionary wave in 1917 when Third Internationalist parties were formed in many parts of the world.
For the anti-Semites the participation of people of Jewish background in revolutionary socialist organisations was “proof” of a conspiracy. For Internationalists it is simply evidence of the Marxist revolutionary vision as a “pole of attraction” to those whose exploitation and oppression will continue as long as the capitalist order continues.
Anti-Zionism – the great confusion
If slurs and distortions about Jewish Communism and Jewish Capitalism have served the anti-Semites well there is also a third aspect which has developed since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948.
The Zionist movement was created in 1897 with the aim of creating a “national home” for Jewish people in Palestine, an area under the control of the Turkish Sultanate until the end of the First World War. In the carve-up of the former Turkish Empire, Britain was granted the “Mandate” (political, military and economic domination) of areas including Palestine west of the River Jordan. Zionism had degrees of support from some leading British politicians, including David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister who negotiated the mandate. On the other hand, in Britain and across the world, Zionism was a minority political belief amongst working class and petit bourgeois Jews. More significant layers were committed to the politics of the Second International and of the Third, both during its revolutionary phase and during its degeneration into a cheerleader for the state capitalist Soviet Union.
The Zionist project advanced massively in the 1930s and 1940s. Until the end of the Second World War many millions of Jews were slaughtered or displaced because of the systematic adoption of the most prolonged and barbaric anti-Semitic atrocities carried out by the fascist German state and its allies. Jews seeking to escape to democracies such as Britain or USA were refused admittance. As repression in Germany became more evident and brutal a conference was held at Evian les Bains in France to discuss admitting Jewish refugees. The attending 32 states included USA, Great Britain and the main British “Dominions” and European democracies such as Netherlands, France and Switzerland. The participants – with the exception of the Dominican Republic and, subsequently Costa Rica – refused to agree any, even partial, “open door” policy.
After the end of the war in Europe, Jews attempting to return to their former homes were often thwarted in the new de-Nazified states. Some of the worst examples were in the areas which had become part of the Empire controlled by Moscow. One of the most notorious was the pogrom carried out in 1946 in Kielce, Poland where more than 40 returning Jews were murdered.
While the British retained control of Palestine, ships carrying Jewish refugees from Europe were still refused permission to unload their “human cargo” in Palestine. The end of the Mandate arrangement allowed the Imperialist order to minimise the likelihood of displaced Jews disrupting the process of capitalist reconstruction throughout Europe. Britain was as unwelcoming to Jewish immigration in 1945 as it had been in 1938. The creation of Israel provided an ideal solution whereby displaced Jewry would be welcomed to a new state which the “big powers” hoped would be a long-term ally. Both the USA and the Soviet Union recognised the new state in the days immediately following its Declaration of Independence. In the process some 700,000 of the non-Jewish residents of Palestine were permanently driven from their homes. They became part of the horrific wave of ethnic cleansing which swept across Europe and the Indian sub-continent during the post-war Imperialist settlement.
The fact that the new state could only originate and survive as an agent for bigger powers fully matches the understanding of communist internationalists who have developed the positions explained by Rosa Luxemburg and others that there is now a complete separation between proletarian revolution and national liberationism. The reactionary nature of support for national states in the late Imperialist epoch is fully illustrated by the antics of those who argue in support of either Israel or Palestine. It is that background which has brought in the great fog around “anti-Zionism” and anti-Semitism.
Many of those who support Palestinian nationalism have developed an anti-Zionist discourse which includes undeniably anti-Semitic aspects. That includes extensive use of the tripe about Jewish conspiracies now sometimes re-entitled Zionist conspiracies. It also overlaps with the re-publishing and dissemination of the Protocols as a validatory document for their ideology.
On the other hand, the supporters of Israel, both Jewish and non-Jewish argue that opposition to the Israeli state, or even challenging its specific actions, is intrinsically and unavoidably anti-Semitic.
The reality of the competing nationalist ideologies is that both the supporters of the Israeli state and the supporters of a stronger Palestinian state both conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism for their own ends.
The path to cutting through this tangle does not lie in the disputes in the Labour Party or any other parts of the ruling class political machine. The real alternative is the Internationalist rejection of support for any capitalist states in this epoch. Neither support for the Israeli nor Palestinian states is compatible with the call for international working-class unity across all national boundaries. Internationalists reject all the variations around one or two state solutions. Instead we argue for working-class unity and struggle that can point the way towards socialism – a stateless future that will transcend national antagonisms.
Destroy Capitalism to Destroy Oppressions
The rejection of national solutions is anathema to those who are committed to the advocates of a “peaceful and progressive” capitalist order.
However, it is only through the destruction of antagonisms, unavoidable and essential within capitalism, that national conflicts will be removed. Most pertinently the host of ideologies which spread divisive poison about real or imagined national, racial or ethnic differences would have their material basis destroyed by the proletarian revolution. The capitalist class who breed and nurture ideas of superiority/inferiority would lose their power to continue their miseducation.
The perpetuation of anti-Semitism is “hand in glove” with the continuation of capitalist social relations. The sweeping away of capitalism is not on the immediate agenda. The necessary extensions of proletarian class consciousness and organisation have yet to be achieved. Those who see the need to eliminate anti-Semitism should involve themselves in the struggle for a classless and nationless world. The current media circus about Parliamentary factions is totally removed from the necessary struggle to root out anti-Semitism through the struggle to destroy capitalism.
KT
- 1See leftcom.org for one among many articles.
- 2For our report on this see leftcom.org
Comments
Very welcome just now. Given
Very welcome just now. Given the extent of coverage around this issue in relation to the Labour Party under Corbyn in both the mainstream and Leftist media I was a bit surprised it hasn't come up on libcom before now, although there are a number of other useful earlier discussion threads about the issue of 'Left-wing antisemitism' and it's misuse in terms of 'Zionism'. There was also a better than average ICC text covering some of the same ground when the earlier Ken Livingston arguments emerged here: https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201605/13931/labour-left-and-jewish-problem
There is also the 2014 text from the journal II Lato Cattivo just posted on libcom but I struggled to extract useful nuggets from this rather rambling translation.
This is OK as a historical
This is OK as a historical overview, but I don't think it really does justice to the specificity of either contemporary antisemitism as a product of the red-brown conspiracy theory milieu, or the political significance of the clash between Jewdas and the Board of Deputies - I can expand on either point if people want, but am on my phone rn and it's being a dick so can't type anything too long atm.
Also, does anyone know much about the situation in France with Melenchon and La France Insoumise? I saw this, but dunno how far it reflects genuine antisemitism in La France Insoumise (I mean, there being some reactionary nationalist positions in France Unbowed would hardly be a surprise) and how far it's the media cynically trying to paint anyone to the left of Macron as being basically interchangeable with Le Pen - going by the situation here, I'd guess both factors are probably in play, but would be interested to hear more from anyone who understands the situation better. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-43574313
Has it escaped your notice
Has it escaped your notice that the Muslim Brotherhood advocates the destruction of the state of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Muslim state? This would involve the expulsion of the 5 million Jews living in Israel - not all of whom by any means would be able to find asylum.
This is anti-semitism at its most horrifying.
The BDS campaign calls for Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions against Israel. BDS gives support to the Muslim Brotherhood and allies in their opposition to Israel. Many European parties and politicians give their support to BDS. This includes Labour Party members and Melenchon and his party La France Insoumise.
Support for BDS is support for anti-semitism.
Maclane Horton wrote: BDS
Maclane Horton
Where is this support? Opposition to Israel does not mean explicit support to the Muslim Brotherhood (or Hamas, or Fatah).
Quote: Support for BDS is
Sounds horrifyingly like the apotheosis of Anti-Deutsch
RTotale wrote: This is OK as
RTotale
Yeah I'd be really interested in this. I've had lots of thoughts about the recent blow up over this, partly as I feel it confirmed a lot of my feelings about the prevalence of anti-semitism on the left (not so much even from in Corbyn 'not seeing' the anti-semitism of the mural but in lots of his supporters' reactions).
At the same time, the Board of Deputies, JLC and Labour right have been absolutely craven in their use of this for their own politicking. As someone who doesn't really give a shit about the Labour Party, my main concern has been the degree to which British Jews take these groups' 'concerns' over anti-semitism seriously (rather than it being the convenient political football of the moment).
This recent comment by the
This recent comment by the Israel Labor Party reveals what is really driving the anti-Corbyn anti-semitism smears
Gabbay, who is likely to be the centre-left alliance’s candidate for prime minister at the next election, has signalled a shift to the right in recent months, backing Israeli soldiers’ actions over the shooting of protesters in Gaza and suggesting Israeli settlers should not be forced out of their homes in the event of a peace deal.
Maclane Horton wrote: The
Maclane Horton
Does it surprise anyone that alleged "leftists" are joing into campaigns with Palestinian bosses and proxy organizations of the islamo-fascists? As always national "liberation" instead of class war. Embarrasing.
Ed wrote: Yeah I'd be really
Ed
I thought this Seymour piece was good on that: https://www.patreon.com/posts/three-points-and-17775436
The number of active antisemites is probably quite small, the bigger problem in many cases is probably a kind of automatic defensiveness where people just see an attack on "their team" and react to that.
Plus there's the whole problem of "structural antisemitism", if I'm using that concept right - if you have the kind of worldview where, say, the CIA directly mastermind any expression of working-class struggle that happens in a country whose government doesn't get on with the US, and also bought that Venezuelan truck company as a present for libcom, then you basically imagine the world as looking like a MearOne mural anyway, so the question of whether you blame the Rothschilds, the Bilderberg group or just the illuminati lizards, or even claim to be a Marxist, is kind of secondary.
Absolutely, and one of the important things about that original Jewdas statement was that it openly made a class argument about the different class interests of the bourgeois Jews on the BoD etc and the majority of working-class Jews - this absolutely explodes the standard liberal multicultural frame the media rely on, where white anglo-saxons get to have a white working class and everyone else has "communities" who are represented by their "community leaders", so it's no wonder the media were so blindsided by how to respond to them, and the head of the BoD ended up making those totally outrageous claims.
R Totale wrote: Ed
R Totale
For people that never want to read Richard Seymour, there's also Werner Bonefeld: https://libcom.org/library/antisemitism-modern-critique-capitalism
Postone: https://libcom.org/library/anti-semitism-national-socialism-moishe-postone
And an old one by our own Joseph Kay: https://libcom.org/blog/anti-semitism-left-05012009
Hah, fair enough - what I
Hah, fair enough - what I specifically thought was insightful about the Seymour piece was noting the left culture where militancy/radicalism is equated with a kind of performative toughness, and how that can feed into dismissiveness when problems arise - "your response to external criticism is to stop and assess your behaviour? Bloody soft liberal!", or something to that effect. On a kind of related note, I wonder how far the current treatment of Corbynism gives a small-scale glimpse into the kind of processes that shaped the mentality of diehard Stalinists during the Cold War - when you're bombarded with obviously stupid nonsense stories about Corbyn not bowing deeply enough at the cenotaph, being a Czech spy, being a monster who hates this country because he doesn't get an instant hardon at the thought of nuclear annihilation and thinks maybe the cops shouldn't be allowed to shoot people for looking a bit funny, etc etc, it's easy to see how people could just reflexively dismiss this as more of the same, so I guess I can imagine how that would scale up with anti-Soviet propaganda, maybe.
Also, this is an entirely useless observation, but the similarity in the names keeps on making me imagine a graffiti artist called Post One, who would paint controversial murals depicting the value form or something.
For those of you wishing to
For those of you wishing to follow the arguments still going on within the Labour Party and the wider Left I see that Tony Greenstein gives blast at Seymour's piece here:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1199/both-sides-of-the-fence/
The spgb's ajj also contributes to a current discussion of this on their Forum here:
www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/anti-zionism-not-anti-semitic
where the consistent anti Labour Party spgb displays some unusual sympathy for the plight of Corbyn's Labour leftists in the current media coverage.
Still an ongoing issue for
Still an ongoing issue for the UK Labour Party with Ken Livingstone now resigning from the Party to avoid the embarrassment of being expelled at the behest of the organised right-wing Jewish/Zionist lobby.
A useful informative piece
A useful informative piece relevant to the current Zionism/antisemitism debates about the Labour Party and the history of Social Democracy with a cross reference to another version of 'identity politics' here:
www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2018/no-1366-june-2018/was-jewish-bund-anti-semitic
This longer text is
This longer text is particularly useful in relating the historical relationship between Social Democracy, the Bund, Zionism, anti-semitism and nationalism prior to, and up to, the creation of the state of Israel and the conflicting interpretations of different Marxist tendencies. See here;
https://intransigence.org/2018/07/09/zionism-and-marxism
This row in the UK Labour
This row in the UK Labour Party is hotting up again with Dame Margaret Hodge openly calling Corbyn, her party leader, antisemitic and racist and likely to face internal party discipline of some kind as a result.
And I'm no political friend of Stan Keable but getting dismissed from his job with the local Labour run Council for some off hand comments at a demonstration about Corbyn and 'antisemitism' shows just how absurd and dangerous this internal row in and around the Labour Party has become.
R Totale wrote: Also, does
R Totale
The murders of Mireille Knoll and Sarah Halimi are both used as dog whistles against islamisation/islamofascism etc. Sarah Halimi was murdered by a guy who was having some kind of psychotic religious episode and was not his original target. Mireille Knoll was robbed, also one of the killers was her neighbour and had gone to prison for sexually assaulting her healthcare worker's 12 year-old daughter, which is where he met the other. While they were blaming each other for the murder one of them said the other killed her for anti-semitic reasons, he later withdrew that. In the case of Halimi I think she was just unlucky, in the case of Knoll I don't know, but they have been used multiple times as examples of "cover-ups" carried out by "collaborators" (in the WW2 sense). Edti: The photo in the article is interesting, it says "Rest in Peace Mireille Knoll. Victim of anti-semitism, war-mongering, colonialism."
There has been a very strong, long-running strand of stories in the media about how anti-semitism is rising and it is being ignored. It is hard to find clear evidence. I found this timeline, which lists 18 incidents in over 30 years, a few sources cite 9 attacks on cynagogues in Paris in 2014, but I can only find evidence for 2. Newspapers always manage to find somone for a quote saying how dangerous it is and that everyone is leaving for Israel. Immigration stats, show that there was a peak in 2014 and it is still about 5-6000 a year which is 1-2% of the population. Of those quite a lot return to France, 5% in the first year, with up to a third returning in the next few years (stats get shaky here). I can't find the stats for immigration from Israel but it was running at about 60-70% of immigration to Israel when I last looked (probably 2013 stats, before immigration doubled from about 3300 to 7000). There is definitely a narrative in the media that the jewish population is under attack, in the French language documents this is being pushed by a few outlets but I don't know how popular they are, nor how they represent how people actually feel. I have a lot of jewish students but most don't wear jewish clothing, but I don't know why, they could be progressive, or simply not practising. Apparently the jewish population is declining due to non-observance and marrying out in the younger generations, but I don't really know. There are legal restrictions on collecting personal data on religion, ethnicity, union membership, sexuality so government statistics are not always available. For example it is hard to prove racism in the civil service because "all french citizens are equal" so we never get to see statistics on whether that is actually true
It is very hard to find stories and stats on this that aren't based on anti-muslim sentiment, which makes it very easy to dismiss anti-semitism, but it definitely exists, it is just difficult to know to what extent. There is a cynagogue near where I live, with a mosque not far away, I see fewer jews on the street, but I don't know if proportionally they are less likely to be on the streets but it seems that way. There is also a general demographic displacement of jews over time, so historically jewish areas are changing. I haven't seen any harassment on the street, but that doesn't mean too much and people don't seem scared to be on the street, but then the ones on the street would be ones who aren't scared.
In short I think the answer to the question is both. There is anti-semitism and it needs to be addressed, the problem is the mainstream expression of anti-semitism is actually anti--muslim sentiments. So anti-semitism is being cynically exploited to attack muslims, and those people often tend to have a nasty anti-semitic streak too.
The French Left in general, I think, has been doing quite a lot to prove that it isn't anti-semitic, but you do still get the focus on Israel quite a lot which is often connected to /brings out anti-semitism. In terms of Mélenchon, when I saw the poster for La France Insoumise for the first time it had someone else's photo and I assumed it was some kind of National Front split1 I think that France Insoumise has been trying to avoid anti-semitism, Mélenchon was at a 'non-political' march for Knoll, along with Le Pen (both had been asked to stay away, he left after being confronted byu the French JDL) and most other mainstream figures.
I have had a look for anti-semitic stuff, firstly he was accused by Harlem Désir of being anti-semitic for calling the finance minister "a bastard...speaking the language of international finance..." which could be a reference to jewish control of money, or a simple reference to austerity, I would go for the latter. The problem is between sites defending him and sites attacking him it is pretty hard to work out what he actually did and said. He has supported BDS in the past and seems to do so still, which is the main charge levelled at him, especially by the CRIF 2 , but they have avoided calling him an anti-semite, possibly because he won a defamation case against three politicians in 2012 for calling him one, they have said that he and Le Pen share the "discourse of hatred".
I can't see too much of substance in what an hour searching can find, but that is obviously limited. He certainly hasn't said anything openly anti-semitic that has been reported.
On the recently broadcast BBC
On the recently broadcast BBC Panorama:
Jonathan Cook:
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2019-07-11/panorama-hatchet-job-labour-antisemitism-bbc/
The Northite Trots:
https://bit.ly/30vKtvB
Tony Greenstein:
https://bit.ly/2XJtucn
Labour Against the Witchhunt (Stan Keable):
https://bit.ly/2NUurtz
Jonathan Cook (pre-BBC Panorama):
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2019-07-08/guilt-of-anti-semitism-now-needs-no-evidence/
What do you think about the
What do you think about the content of those links, or those sources in general?
Jonathan Cook here clearly
Jonathan Cook here clearly presents Corbyn's rise within the LP as a threat to establishment power more in hope than reality, but still provides a very useful counterbalance to the mostly Uk media narratives playing out behind different sectional state interests over Israel and claims of antisemitism.
And I just noticed this
And I just noticed this update on the London Labour Council's previous dismissal of their worker Stan Keeble which they are still trying to justify and pursue against even the limited legal rights afforded to workers by the capitalist state:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1265/reputational-self-harm/