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Our New Newsletter is out! 

‘Wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men’s minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity, you may be sure that a hooked-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbances.’ editorial in The Labour Leader in 1891.
 
Alan Johnson, a professor, a self-avowed leftie, gave an excellent speech in 2015 about the Left and the prevalence of Anti-Semitism within this particular ideological school of thought. Regrettably this fine discourse didn’t get the attention it deserved at the time. But today, as events over the past week attest to in London, it deserves another airing.
 
The Labour Party, in case you missed it, is once again in the papers, deeply embroiled in accusations of Anti-Semitism. Generally speaking, in as much as one can generalise on this issue, the left of the political spectrum is more fertile territory for anti-Semitism and in particular anti-Zionism (certainly this is our experience when dealing with various political groups within the European Parliament). Ok, it’s obvious that whenever you move from the centre to either side of the spectrum, politics tends to become more polarised, but this phenomenon of Jew baiting and Israel bashing seems especially settled and commonplace in left and far left circles. So for this news letter we are asking a simple question, how come?
 
For this let’s call on the learned professor again. He contends that: “left-wing antisemitism never went away. It became the ‘anti-imperialism of idiots’ in the last third of the 20th century, when vicious, well-funded and long-running anti-Zionist campaigns were conducted by the Stalinist states, in alliance with the authoritarian Arab states and parts of the Western New Left. Those campaigns laid the ground for the form taken by left-wing antisemitism today — I call it anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.
“Anti-Semitic anti-Zionism bends the meaning of Israel and Zionism out of shape until both become fit receptacles for the tropes, images and ideas of classical antisemitism. In short, that which the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now isuniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on.”
It’s this latter part that is the root cause of Mr Corbyn’s current political woes. Because he indulges the latter trope. Let us be clear here: There’s nothing wrong with criticising the government of any country. It’s democracy. But caricaturing an entire nation is a different kettle of fish altogether. The problem is that the left seeks to intellectualise these tropes as somehow being reflective of a world view acquired by rational and cool political evidence.  And the problem is that this “world view” is found as the professor notes again “in the murky borderlands where a modern anti-Zionism of a particularly excessive and obsessive kind co-mingles easily with classical anti-Semitic tropes, images and ideas.”
 
Right now, as in the past, the left’s insistence on constantly refusing the right to national self-determination of just one people, the Jewish people, puts it firmly in the anti-Semitic camp, never mind how clever, intellectual and polite the arguments and language may be.
Thanks as always for your support. Until next time.
 
In the meantime, thank you for your support and make sure you check out our events and hot topics to stay up to speed on everything affecting Jewish Europe at www.ejassociation.eu

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