The Labour Party witch hunt: Will the real fomenters of anti-Semitism please stand up?

By Michael Lesher | American Herald Tribune | May 6, 2016

The so-called “anti-Semitism row” embroiling the United Kingdom’s Labour Party under its new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is a fraud – a cynical fraud at that. Despite the best efforts of the notoriously tireless Israel lobby, not to mention an abundance of circling media sharks eager to seize upon the lobby’s every lurid accusation, not one actual anti-Semitic statement from a Labour politician has emerged to date.

Indeed, if the campaign has any effect at all, it will not be to eject anti-Semitism from British politics. On the contrary, it is likely to foment anti-Semitism where, up to now, little or none has existed.

It’s hard to exaggerate how ridiculous the witch hunt around Jeremy Corbyn has become. But you don’t have to take my word for that. If Anshel Pfeffer’s tortuous attempt this week to rationalize the charges of “anti-Semitism” is any indication of the merits of the smear campaign, not even its purveyors actually believe their own accusations.

Pfeffer – who published his piece in Israel’s liberal daily, Ha’aretz on May 1 – is a veteran reporter with a number of genuine stories to his credit. It stands to reason that if there were anything real behind the so-called anti-Semitism scandal, Pfeffer would find it. But not even Pfeffer can locate a single anti-Semitic slur to latch onto.

Instead, he’s reduced to redefining anti-Semitism – redefining it so broadly that it includes all criticism of Israel’s government. Pfeffer’s argument is that condemning crimes committed by Israel’s leadership is, in effect, an accusation against all Israelis, and that, since most Israelis are Jews, this means an implicit attack on Jews everywhere. Pfeffer doesn’t spell out this approach too carefully, and no wonder – if it were true, it would mean that any statement critical of, say, Bashar al-Assad would make the speaker an Islamophobe. But without this bowdlerized definition of anti-Semitism (according to Pfeffer, a critic of Israel’s illegal occupation is simply “someone who only hates Jews living in Israel”), Pfeffer’s whole attack on the Labour left would collapse.

Not even neutering the meaning of anti-Semitism is enough for Pfeffer’s purposes. To demonize critics of Israel he has to coin the peculiar notion of “anti-Jewish theories” as well. That is, to mention the Zionist movement’s early efforts to cooperate with Hitler’s government – as former mayor of London Ken Livingstone did in an off-the-cuff way while defending his colleague Naz Shah – is more or less historically accurate; certainly it isn’t an expression of bigotry. But if Jews don’t like to hear about such facts, that makes the comment an “anti-Jewish theory,” and of course anyone who would espouse an anti-Jewish theory must be an anti-Semite. Pfeffer complains that Corbyn and his supporters “are incapable of comprehending” this logic. I wonder why.

Pfeffer has more to say, but not a word of it is factual – it’s a low-rent right-wing conspiracy theory about how all socialists secretly hate Jews because they’re, well, white. Pfeffer can’t for the life of him imagine any other reason why some politicians might object to mass murder, apartheid or ethnic cleansing of Palestinians – he calls this a “Marxist class-warfare perspective” and the product of “revised history” – but he does get good and sore over the fact that Labour MP John Mann, who had the “decency” (Pfeffer’s word) to smear Livingstone on television as a “Hitler apologist,” actually got a mild reprimand for the slander. Frankly, people with moral priorities like those give me the creeps.

But again, nobody has to take my word for any of this. The facts – which people like Pfeffer studiously ignore – speak for themselves. There is no anti-Semitism scandal in the U.K. A poll conducted by the highly respected Pew Research Center just last year found that only 7% of respondents in that country held an “unfavorable view” of Jews, as compared with 19% – nearly three times as many – who expressed such views about Muslims. And as for Labour, the hysterical rush to suspend Shah and Livingstone on the flimsiest of charges (not to mention Shah’s groveling apologies for some innocuous statements made long before she even ran for office) hardly bespeaks an anti-Jewish bias.

What’s more, for all Pfeffer’s posturing, neither Zionism’s past nor Israel’s present is above critical scrutiny. The Zionist movement, though certainly not allied with Nazism, did agree with Hitler on one important point: namely, that Jews are a nation – not a religious group – and consequently do not really belong in any European country. That’s why much of established British Jewry spoke out sharply against the Balfour Declaration in 1917: they recognized it as a blow to the hopes of British Jews who wanted equal rights in their own country. For Zionists, as for Nazis, such hopes were dangerous.

That’s a matter of history, but Israel’s crimes – including the wanton killing of civilians in Gaza less than two years ago – are urgent contemporary realities. The witch hunt for Labour Party “anti-Semites” is really a crude attempt to silence the critics of those crimes. And let’s not delude ourselves: the targets of that campaign understand this perfectly well.

That’s the ultimate irony about the “anti-Semitism” canard. The witch hunt isn’t uncovering any anti-Semitism. But it may go a long way toward creating it. As the redoubtable scholar Norman Finkelstein recently said, the attacks on left-Labour politicians, supported at every step by Israeli hasbara, are “fanning the embers of hate and creating new discord between Jews and Muslims by going after Naz Shah… [S]he’s being crucified, her career wrecked, her life ruined, her future in tatters, branded an ‘anti-Semite’ and a closet Nazi, and inflicted with these rituals of self-abasement. It’s not hard to imagine what her Muslim constituents must think now about Jews.”