The dogwhistle attacks on Jews for Labour’s historic defeat has already begun. They will only get louder
One thing I have learnt this election: British people are a lot more anti-Semitic than I thought.
It’s been a traumatic learning curve for someone who grew up here and for whom anti-Semitism had never intruded into daily life – or not outside the context of being a journalist reporting on Israel-Palestine. That milieu meant familiarity with the kind of far-left extremists who appropriated the Labour party in 2015, when Jeremy Corbyn became leader.
I knew them well from reporting on parliamentary meetings and the usual round of academic and activist lectures: box-ticking radicals for whom the Palestinian struggle was more an ideological cipher than a real and messy conflict.
The lunatics took over the asylum and unleashed an epidemic: on social media, at least, where most of this filth was spread and amplified.
There’s something peculiarly freeing about social media’s immediacy and anonymity. For ordinary, mild-mannered Brits, it offers the chance to give full rein to instincts and prejudices usually kept safely restrained and repressed. And the engine of accusations against “enemy centrists” and Jews was constantly fuelled by agitprop from a wild pro-Corbyn disinformation sphere.
If you don’t support Labour, you hate the NHS. If you oppose Corbyn, you hate disabled people. If you’re Jewish as well, then you’re part of an organised smear campaign to malign Corbyn, the world’s bravest campaigner for Palestinian rights. And probably rich and greedy, too.
All the greats were rolled out to show the Jews that other Jews were telling them they were wrong, they were victims of false consciousness, right-wing shills and undeclared agents of the Israeli state – Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein and Haaretz’s own Gideon Levy, who in his bitter dotage has squandered the legitimacy he once had.
The Jewish conspiracy was alive and well and living in the mind of otherwise woke and well-meaning progressives.
Speak Your Mind