In the late 19th century, the German Marxist August Bebel observed that anti-Jewish prejudice was “the socialism of fools.”
Is Jeremy Corbyn demonstrating the accuracy of this phrase yet again? A far-left Labour Party member of parliament in Britain since 1983, Corbyn has just won the leadership of the party following the resignation of Ed Miliband in the wake of last May’s general election.
He beat his more moderate or centrist rivals, fellow MPs Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall, by taking advantage of a rule change that allowed candidates to recruit sympathizers who, for a small fee, could sign up as registered supporters of the Labour Party and gain a vote in the contest. Corbyn won with nearly 59.5 percent of first-preference votes.
Corbyn is a member of the Socialist Campaign Group, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Amnesty International, and the Stop the war Coalition. He writes a weekly column in the Morning Star, the newspaper founded as the Daily Worker by the British Communist Party in 1930.
He represents the constituency of Islington North, the less posh part of Islington, a gentrified area of London known for its trendy restaurants and fashionable inhabitants.
Corbyn began the race as a dark horse but gained ground on the back of a social media campaign and backing from a number of large unions.
Corbyn last month was attacked by the Jewish Chronicle, Britain’s oldest Jewish newspaper, which claims that he has associated with “Holocaust deniers, terrorists and some outright antisemites.”
The newspaper said it was certain it spoke for the vast majority of British Jews in “expressing deep foreboding at the prospect of Mr. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader.”
A Jewish Labour Party politician, Ivan Lewis, a former chief executive of the Manchester Jewish Federation, said the views are cause for “serious concern.”
Should this surprise us? Not really.
At the start of the 20th century, many European politicians, including Benito Mussolini himself, started their political careers as socialists on the left. They were afterwards attracted to fascism because, like the ideologies of the left, it wanted to do away with a corrupt “bourgeois democracy” and usher in a new age.
In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley, a rising star in the Labour Party in the 1920s, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and became an acolyte of Hitler and Mussolini. So this is nothing new.
Corbyn has been alleged to have donated money to Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), a group that publishes open antisemitic pieces and is run by Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. Corbyn has regularly attended its annual conferences.
He has also failed to condemn the antisemitic posters and banners that dominate the annual Al-Quds Day rally in London, sponsored by the Stop the War Coalition, which he chairs.
And he has referred to supporters of both Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” when he hosted them in Parliament. He explained that he extended his invitation to the aforementioned groups, and spoke of them glowingly, because, he contended, all sides need to be involved in the peace process.
Corbyn also wrote to the Church of England authorities to defend Rev. Stephen Sizer, a vicar banned from social media because of his habit of posting antisemitic conspiracy theories, telling them that Sizer was “under attack” because he had “dared to speak out over Zionism.” Sizer is a proponent of the theory that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks.
In response to the Jewish Chronicle editorial, Corbyn released a statement saying he was “proud to represent a multicultural constituency of people from all over the world and to speak at every opportunity of understanding between Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and other faiths.”
Corbyn has promised a “new kind of politics” — but maybe it’s just the return of a discredited older politics. Is this really going to be the face of British Labour?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
