ANTISEMITIC ENABLERS

Dear Abigail and Joe:

I want to share with you an exchange I just had with a group of students studying at Oxford University. Their query introduces us to two additional categories of antisemitism. In one, expressions of antisemitism do not stem from deep ideological commitment but serve a utilitarian purpose, as a means to a political end. In the other, antisemitism is rooted in an ideology that itself has nothing to do with Jews but that sweeps Jews up into it. Both enable this hatred to enter the mainstream.

Yours,

DEL

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

We write to you from Oxford. We are a diverse group of students: British and American, black and white, Jew and non-Jew, wealthy and of limited means. We’ve been sitting here in a pub discussing the nature of antisemitism, a topic that has become quite newsworthy in the U.K. in recent months, and debating whether it is more likely to come from the Right or the Left. Divisions quickly emerged, but not between the Jews and non-Jews. It was far more political. Those on the left insist that the Left has a proud tradition of fighting against prejudice and has always been at the forefront of movements for inclusion, whether it pertains to feminism, ethnic and religious minorities, or the LGBT community. They contend that, while antisemitism has always found a fertile field on the right, their liberal ideology is by definition averse to it. They believe that a genuinely progressive person could not be an antisemite. Those on the right guffawed at that and insisted that antisemitism has a long history on the left—they reminded us that the USSR persecuted its Jews—and is today securely and structurally embedded there.

The conversation became more heated when the debate turned to President Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party here in the U.K. Some of the progressives contended that Trump is a prime example of an antisemite. The conservatives insisted that we did not have to look across the pond for an example of an antisemitic political leader. Corbyn fits that bill. During the conversation, your work was repeatedly cited by people on both sides of the political divide. Those on the right and those on the left claimed that you were on their side. And so we decided that you should settle our argument. We thank you in advance and look forward to hearing from you.

Yours,

Students in an Oxford pub

Dear Oxford Students:

Thanks for writing. The questions you raise about Trump and Corbyn are important and it is on them that I will focus. But first let me note that I was amused and rather pleased that people at both ends of the political spectrum cited me as a compatriot. Rather than claim allegiance to one group or the other, I hope that I will, in my answers to you, challenge everyone in your group to think more critically about their political allegiances. Most important, I hope that those on both the right and left are a bit discomforted by what I say. More about that later.

I don’t know if either of these men is an antisemite, which is to say that he harbors personal contempt for Jews. While neither of them may be, both have facilitated the spread of antisemitism. They claim to be deeply perplexed when they are accused of doing so. But their denials notwithstanding, they are directly responsible for the legitimization of explicit hostility toward Jews. One of these men acts out of purely political motives. The other seems to be motivated by a combination of political and ideological motives.

Let’s start with Donald Trump. During the presidential campaign Trump used classic antisemitic stereotyping in a speech he delivered to the Republican Jewish Coalition. He left his audience reeling when he asked, “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t renegotiate deals? Probably ninety-nine percent of you [do renegotiate]. Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken in. . . . I’m a negotiator, like you folks.” And then: “But you’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. . . . You want to control your own politicians.” In those few sentences, Trump hit almost every millennial-old antisemitic stereotype: Jews have an unnatural desire for money, power, control, and haggling, and an innate deviousness (renegotiating a deal after it is made).1 I am not suggesting that Trump has contempt for Jews. If asked, he would probably say that he admires what he considers the Jewish quality of being cunning in business dealings.2 But the fact that he could be so tone-deaf to antisemitic stereotypes left many people baffled. It reminded me of Franklin Foer’s observation that philosemites are antisemites who like Jews.3

Far more significant than this kind of stereotyping was Trump’s refusal to seriously address the antisemitic behavior of his supporters. For example, after Julia Ioffe’s article on Melania Trump appeared in GQ, Trump supporters went after her with a vengeance. Almost immediately, the leaders of the violently antisemitic website InfoStormer called on its followers to let Ioffe “know what you think of her dirty kike trickery.” The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist and antisemitic website, instructed its followers to “make sure to identify her as a Jew working against White interests.” Followers of these sites were encouraged to conduct “a trolling effort against the evil Jewish bitch.” And that is precisely what happened. Ioffe was subjected to an outpouring of antisemitic venom and threats, some so vile that they left her concerned for her physical well-being. She was threatened with rape. Her picture was Photoshopped onto that of an emaciated concentration camp victim whose body was on top of a pile of other victims. Another troller Photoshopped her face onto the body of a kneeling Jew with a Nazi guard holding a gun to her head.

When the attacks on Ioffe became public, reporters asked candidate Trump if he had a message for those who were threatening her. Trump shook his head, indicating that he had none. When pressed, he said, “I don’t have a message to the fans. A woman wrote an article that’s inaccurate.”4 He wouldn’t say that what was being done to Ioffe was unacceptable.

Trump adopted a similar stance in response to former Ku Klux Klan leader and Holocaust denier David Duke’s endorsement of his candidacy. Trump insisted he could not condemn Duke because he knew nothing about either Duke or the Klan. He said this despite the fact that ten years earlier he had labeled Duke “a bigot, a racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.”5 It may have been coincidental, but in the weeks following his refusal to condemn the KKK, there was a significant rise in antisemitic incidents.6

Trump and those around him did more than signal to these white supremacists that their comments were acceptable. They amplified their sites. In January 2016, then candidate Trump retweeted a message from an anonymous Nazi sympathizer and white supremacist who uses the twitter handle @WhiteGenocideTM. His profile contained a link to a pro–Adolf Hitler documentary and his site featured a photograph with red lettering proclaiming “Get the F— Out of My Country” with the location of “Jewmerica.”* Many of @WhiteGenocideTM’s tweets concerned violence allegedly committed by African Americans as well as anti-Arab posts. In February 2016 Trump again retweeted something from @WhiteGenocideTM. Two days later he retweeted a message from a user whose Twitter header image included the term “white genocide.” None of these retweets were antisemitic. They generally were contemptuous of his Republican opponents. But the fact that Trump was drawing from these sites and relying on their contents generated great enthusiasm among white supremacists. Consider the response of @TheNordicNation. “You can say #WhiteGenocide now, Trump has brought it into the mainstream.”7

[* White supremacists claim that “whites” face a looming genocide. They, not the minority groups they attack, are the true victims.

In the summer of 2016, candidate Trump retweeted an image of Hillary Clinton in front of piles of money and alongside a six-pointed star on which were emblazoned the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever.” The message seemed relatively unambiguous: Clinton had close connections with crooked Jews. When they were criticized for posting this image, the Trump campaign quickly changed the star to a circle, even as they contended that the star was actually a sheriff’s star (which can variously appear with either five or six points).8 More telling than the image itself was the fact that it originated with a group that has a long history of posting racist, antisemitic messages. Left unexplained by the campaign was what it was doing uncritically republishing such accounts.

As president, Trump continued to publicize these dubious sources. In July 2017, he retweeted a doctored video that showed him body slamming and overpowering a man with a large CNN logo superimposed on his face. (The original video had been of Trump body slamming the head of the World Wrestling Entertainment company.) While there was nothing antisemitic about the video, it emerged that the person who had altered it had also posted a photo board of all the CNN executives and journalists who he assumed were Jewish. In the corner of each photo was a Star of David. Lest his message not be clear, he wrote: “Something strange about CNN . . . can’t quite put my finger on it.”9

Equally disturbing were Trump’s remarks at a rally shortly before the election. He proclaimed that his campaign was a message for “those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests.” This was a “global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.” According to Trump, those behind this cabal were “international banks [that] plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers.” The thematic elements upon which Trump relied played on traditional antisemitic stereotypes of the “international Jew” who dominates global financial institutions.10 He reinforced this notion a few days later in his campaign’s final television ad. The ad featured Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and three Jews: financier George Soros, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. As their images flashed onto the screen, Trump’s voice could be heard thundering: “The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election for those who control the levers of power in Washington and for the global special interests. They partner with these people who don’t have your good in mind.” The word “Jew” did not have to appear in the ad for the insinuation that Clinton was an ally of a cabal of greedy global Jewish capitalists to register with white supremacists and nationalists. These tropes and stereotypes about Jews’ control of the levers of power remind us of the unique nature of antisemitic prejudice: It is focused equally on the personal attributes of members of the group and on their ability to wreak havoc with the well-being of multitudes of people.11

Irrespective of how Trump intended it, his white supremacist and antisemitic supporters heard all this as a ringing endorsement. The editor of the Daily Stormer informed his readers that

Our Glorious Leader and ULTIMATE SAVIOR has gone full wink-wink-wink to his most aggressive supporters. After having been attacked for retweeting a White Genocide account a few days ago, Trump went on to retweet two more White Genocide accounts, back to back.

Where as [sic] the odd White genocide tweet could be a random occurrence, it isn’t statistically possible that two of them back to back could be a random occurrence. It could only be deliberate.

There is no way that this could be anything other than both a wink-wink-wink and a call for more publicity on his campaign. . . . If it gets brought up in an interview he’ll just say . . . “we retweet a lot of people, a lot of people feel strongly about my campaign and want to make America great again, everybody likes me.” Today in America the air is cold, and it tastes like victory.12

In a September 2016 interview with the BBC, Richard Spencer praised Trump for having “brought nationalism into the campaign.” At a time when white Americans were in danger of becoming “a hated minority,” Trump had, according to Spencer, moved the arrow, so it was now “pointed in our [white supremacists’] direction.”13 William Regnery, the wealthy founder of Spencer’s National Policy Institute, a white nationalist/supremacist think tank, believes that candidate Trump and now President Trump has helped his cause. “I think Trump was a legitimizer,” he has said. “White nationalism went from being a conversation you could hold in a bathroom to a front parlor.”14

Even though there is no evidence of a direct relationship between Trump and these extremist groups, Fortune magazine assessed the impact of the interactions between them. Using social media analytics software, it tracked the campaign’s connections to white supremacists. Locating the white supremacists who were considered social media “influencers,” Fortune discovered that a significant number of Trump campaign workers followed the leading #WhiteGenocide influencers. The study concluded that “the data shows . . . that Donald Trump and his campaign have used social media to court support within the white supremacist community, whether intentionally or unintentionally.”15 Not only did Trump’s campaign workers regularly follow influential white supremacists on social media, they were also spreading their hate-filled messages to the millions of people who followed Donald Trump on social media. This is the normalization or mainstreaming of white supremacy and its panoply of attendant prejudices.

Trump’s ambiguous relationship to antisemitism extended beyond his social media activities. At a press conference following his meeting with Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, President Trump was asked about the rise in antisemitic threats against Jewish institutions. It was a relatively straightforward and benign question:

Mr. President, since your election campaign and even after your victory, we’ve seen a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents across the United States. And I wonder what you say to those among the Jewish community in the States, and in Israel, and maybe around the world who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones.

Had Trump issued a ringing condemnation of antisemites and the reprehensible things they do, he could have hit this softball question out of the park. Instead, and most peculiarly, he began by referencing the size of his electoral victory, and then promised to end crime and “long-simmering racism and every other thing that’s going on.” He went on to mention that he has a Jewish daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren. And he concluded by declaring that “a lot of good things are happening, and you’re going to see a lot of love.” The rambling, slightly incoherent nature of the answer aside, he never expressed any contempt for these antisemites and racists.

His response in the summer of 2017 to the terrible events in Charlottesville, Virginia, was more troubling. A few hours after the demonstrations Trump condemned the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides.” Many sides? His equation of the neo-Nazi, KKK, and white supremacist marchers with those who had come to protest against them left even Trump’s political allies distressed. Only one side carried Confederate flags and flags with Nazi-like and swastika-inspired symbols. Only one side shouted racist and antisemitic insults. The only fatality was caused by a self-proclaimed white supremacist. Why was Trump suggesting that there was a moral equivalency between racists and the counterdemonstrators? Two days later, in an apparent effort to walk back his absurd statement, Trump, uncharacteristically relying on a teleprompter, read a statement declaring that “racism is evil” and condemning those who came to Charlottesville to cause violence, “including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups.” He declared them “repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”16 But he was apparently unable to leave it at that. The next day, at a news conference, he brought up Charlottesville again and reverted to an evenhanded approach. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.” He then added that there were “very fine people” marching with the white supremacist protesters.17 A few days later, while events at Charlottesville were still in the headlines, Trump retweeted a message from Jack Posobiec, a Trump supporter known for spreading malicious conspiracy theories about Democratic political figures, including the utterly false and reprehensible claims that high-ranking officials in the Democratic Party were trafficking in children and that Seth Rich, a twenty-seven-year-old employee of the Democratic National Committee and the victim of an unsolved murder on July 10, 2016, was in some way responsible for the leaked DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks a few weeks later. The tweet asked why there was so much attention being paid to Charlottesville when that same weekend there had been shootings in Chicago and “there was no national media outrage.” Once again, the question must be asked: Why was Trump following and giving a much-desired retweet to a man who in the aftermath of Charlottesville had already described it as “massive propaganda” and argued that the mainstream media was “fanning the flames of this violence”?18

To add fuel to the fire, Trump ridiculed Kenneth C. Frazier, CEO of the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. and an African American, for resigning from the American Manufacturing Council, a White House–sponsored group, to protest Trump’s comments. A few weeks later, Trump again insisted that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville protest.19

The simple fact is that Donald Trump was, and still seems to be, unwilling to castigate, much less mildly criticize, actions by the white supremacists, racists, and antisemites who voted for him and who continue to support him. Rather than be outraged by what they say and do, he enables and emboldens them because it serves his political purposes. While Trump is probably not an antisemite, enabling antisemites is itself an antisemitic act that causes as much damage as something that comes from an ideological antisemite. When challenged, antisemitic enablers will often cite their personal relations with Jews. But the rationalization that “some of my best friends/relatives are Jewish/black/gay so therefore the antisemitic/racist/homophobic things that I say cannot possibly be antisemitic/racist/homophobic” is both ridiculous and deplorable.

On some level, I find the utilitarian antisemite—the pot-stirrer who enables haters—to be more reprehensible than the ideologue who openly acknowledges his antisemitism. Because he is not affiliated with any extremist group, the utilitarian stands a better chance of both plausibly denying his antisemitism and influencing an audience that would never listen to an extremist. The unapologetic hater is, at least, honest about his feelings. With him, we know what we are up against.

Trump has not created these white supremacist extremist groups or the sentiments to which they adhere. But he has let these reprehensible genies out of the bottle. They are convinced that they have his imprimatur. And he has not disabused them of that notion. Once they are out, it will be very difficult to get them back in. In my next letter I will deal with Jeremy Corbyn, the British Member of Parliament and head of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom.

Yours,

DEL

Dear Oxford Students:

Jeremy Corbyn’s record in politics is not only far more extensive than Trump’s, it’s also more deeply rooted in firmly held ideological beliefs. As the Brits among you well know, Corbyn has been part of Britain’s labor and trade-union movement since the beginning of his political career. In the 1970s he worked as a trade-union organizer and was active in the antiapartheid movement in South Africa. During the years of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, he showed great sympathy for the Irish Republican Army, which was waging active opposition—many called it terrorism—against the British presence in Northern Ireland. Consistently on the far-left end of the Labour Party, Corbyn became the unexpected head of the party, due in some measure to an internal political and electoral surprise, in 2015.

Fundamental to Corbyn’s political weltanschauung is an automatic—critics might call it knee-jerk—sympathy for anyone who is or appears to be oppressed or an underdog. Those who fight with rocks are always preferred to those who use tanks. Coupled with that is a class- and race-based view of the world. Anyone white, wealthy, or associated with a group that seems to be privileged cannot be a victim. Anyone who is or claims to be victimized by those who are white, wealthy, and/or privileged deserves unequivocal support. It is doubtful that Corbyn deliberately seeks out antisemites to associate with and to support. But it seems that when he encounters them, their Jew-hatred is irrelevant as long as their other positions—on class, race, capitalism, the role of the state, and Israel/Palestine—are to his liking.

Longtime Labour MP and a member of the more moderate wing of the party Alan Johnson aptly described Corbyn as someone who does not “indulge in antisemitism himself. It is that he indulges the antisemitism of others.” The only type of antisemite Corbyn seems to have no trouble noticing and condemning is the neo-Nazi or right-wing extremist.20 James Bloodworth, writing in the Independent, observes that although Corbyn might not be an antisemite, “he does have a proclivity for sharing platforms with individuals who do.” His problem is compounded by the fact that, as Bloodworth put it, “his excuses for doing so do not stand up.”21

In August 2015, Corbyn defended Stephen Sizer, a former Church of England vicar who has publicized an avowedly antisemitic website, The Ugly Truth, which contends that Jews were responsible for 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the daily murder of Palestinian children for sport, harvesting organs from Gentiles at gunpoint, domination of the media, and the complete corruption of a myriad of political offices. The Ugly Truth declared that in this world there were “God’s people,” who are “all those who do His will, who are righteous, who are compassionate and who do not submit themselves to the false gods of voracity, vengeance, vulgarity, and viciousness, which pretty much leaves the Jews out.”22 In a post on his church’s website, Sizer asserted that “Zionism seeks exclusive Jewish sovereignty over much of the Middle East.”23 Despite all this, Corbyn remained a Sizer supporter, even after Sizer attended a conference in Iran in 2014 that, according to Iranian Press TV reports, included sessions on the “Mossad’s role in the 9/11 coup d’états” and “9/11 and the Holocaust as pro-Zionist ‘Public myths.’ ”24 Corbyn did more than defend Sizer. He attacked Sizer’s critics by claiming that the vicar was under attack only because he “dare[d] to speak out against Zionism.” When the Church of England banned Sizer for six months because, it concluded, he used his Internet accounts for “clearly antisemitic” purposes, Corbyn seemed to suggest that Church authorities were part of a pro-Israel smear campaign.25

Corbyn has come to the defense of other questionable personalities. One month after 9/11, Raed Salah, a Palestinian Islamist preacher, contended that American Jews working in cahoots with Israel planned and carried out the attacks as a means of “divert[ing] the attention of the media” away from Israeli wrongs and directing sympathy “towards the American continent.” Salah asserted that four thousand Jews had been warned not to come to work and were saved as a result.26 In 2007, Salah revived the pernicious accusation that Jews used the blood of gentile children in making matzah.27 When the British Home Office announced that it was denying Salah permission to enter the United Kingdom, Corbyn protested, declaring him an “honored citizen.” Corbyn publicly invited Salah to Parliament, where he promised not only to introduce him to his colleagues but also to serve him tea on the terrace, because he “deserves it.”28 While some people were not surprised that Corbyn was willing to keep company with a person who had such radical views about Jews, they were a bit perplexed that he would welcome a man who had declared homosexuality to be “not only a crime, but a great crime . . . [that] brings [Allah’s] wrath and is liable to cause the worst things to happen.”29

Even though the European Union and the United States have classified Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, Corbyn has described them as “friends,” attacked the notion that they were “terrorists,” and invited them to meet with him at the Parliament. (Corbyn eventually backed down from his “friends” description, but only after repeatedly refusing to do so.)30 Corbyn also worked with Dyab Abou Jahjah, an Arab political activist who, two months after 9/11, described his sense of “sweet revenge” as he watched the attack on the buildings.31 In 2006 Jahjah described the “cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping” as Europe’s “alternative religion.”32 Corbyn subsequently invited him to speak at a London antiwar rally. During the political campaign leading up to the 2015 general election in the United Kingdom, Jahjah praised Corbyn’s “common belief in dialogue, justice and equality of all,” which made their “collaboration” possible. When questioned about this by reporters, Corbyn again claimed ignorance and said he could not remember ever having worked with Jahjah. Reporters quickly produced pictures of the two of them together, prompting Corbyn to withdraw his claim.33

In 2010, he hosted a call-in show on Iranian Press TV—the Islamic Republic’s only legal television station. Corbyn responded to a caller who described Israel as a “disease” that Arabs must “throw out” and “get rid” of from the Middle East with, “Okay. Thank you for your call.” Another caller described the BBC as “Zionist liars.” Corbyn responded by noting that the caller had “a good point” and should complain to the BBC. That same year on Holocaust Remembrance Day he hosted an “Auschwitz to Gaza” event in Parliament at which repeated comparisons were made among Jews, Israelis, and Nazis. (In 2018, as party leader, he apparently thought better of having done so and apologized for his participation in this event.) In 2011, he proposed that Holocaust Remembrance Day be renamed Genocide Remembrance Day because “every life is of value.” Of course every life is of value. Of course every genocide is deplorable and must be unequivocally condemned. But his determination to erase the specific Jewish connection to this day was striking. (Again in 2018, he issued a public statement on the day, one that bemoaned the loss of “victims of evil,” but did not mention Jews or antisemitism. After an avalanche of criticism, he amended the statement.)34

In 2012, an American artist named Kalen Ockerman (who goes by the name Mear One) painted, on the side of a privately owned building in the Brick Lane neighborhood in London’s East End, a mural that he titled Freedom for Humanity. It depicted elderly, formally dressed men (described by the artist himself as an “elite banker cartel”) playing Monopoly on a table that rested on the backs of naked, darker-skinned men. The hook-nosed, repulsive-looking characters at the table could have come straight out of the notoriously antisemitic Nazi publication Der Stürmer—a point that was made by local media. The city’s mayor stated that the “images of the bankers perpetuate antisemitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial institutions,” and the local council ordered the mural removed. Ockerman himself acknowledged these were Jews with his comment “Some of the older white Jewish folk in the local community had an issue with me portraying their beloved #Rothschild or #Warburg etc., as the demons they are.” When Corbyn learned that the mural was about to be removed, he praised the artist and defended his artwork in a Facebook post: “Why [remove it]? You are in such good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it included a picture of Lenin.” (In 1934, the Rockefeller family ordered a mural that it had commissioned for Rockefeller Center by the artist Diego Rivera chiseled off because it included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin.)

Corbyn’s comments resurfaced in March 2018, when screenshots of his Facebook post appeared in the media. When Labour MP Luciana Berger asked Corbyn’s staff about the post, they replied, “In 2012 Jeremy was responding to concerns about the removal of public art on the grounds of freedom of speech. However, the mural was offensive and used antisemitic imagery, which has no place in our society, and it is right that it was removed.” Shortly thereafter, possibly recognizing the insufficiency of the initial statement, Corbyn’s office released a second statement, contending that his post was “a general comment about the removal of public art on grounds of freedom of speech,” and that the Diego Rivera mural was “in no way comparable” with Ockerman’s. “I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on,” the statement continued, “the contents of which are deeply disturbing and antisemitic. The defence of free speech cannot be used as justification for the promotion of antisemitism in any form. That is a view I’ve always had.”35

But this isn’t only about Jeremy Corbyn. Were he to retreat into the political wilderness, this problem would not disappear. It’s far too entrenched within the current Labour Party leadership and the not-insubstantial Corbyn wing of the party. Shortly before Corbyn became head of the party in 2015, Scottish columnist Stephen Daisley, who does not think Corbyn is an antisemite, observed, “How much easier it would make things” if he were. One could then simply attribute political developments in the Labour Party to the prejudices of one man. But, he continued, “this isn’t about Jeremy Corbyn; he’s just a symptom and a symbol. The Left, and not just the fringes, has an antisemitism problem.”36 Events at the 2017 Labour Party conference confirmed that this was indeed the case. Some party members called for the expulsion of Jewish groups. Others refused to condemn Holocaust denial and questioned whether someone who harbored antisemitic attitudes should necessarily be barred from the party. At a Labour Party antisemitism training session in September 2016, Jackie Walker, a far-left Labour Party activist, was recorded saying, “I still haven’t heard a definition of antisemitism that I can work with.”37

Film director Ken Loach, a longtime party member and leading Corbyn supporter, dismissed the charges of antisemitism as “mood music” designed to create hostility toward Corbyn and told the BBC that he could not condemn Holocaust denial because “history is for us all to discuss.” He then segued into a condemnation of Israel and the original sin of its founding.

Loach and other party leaders (those closest to Corbyn) refuse to acknowledge the existence of antisemitism within the party, despite the fact that the official who had been charged with investigating the matter insisted that the comments he received from Labour Party members on this topic made his “hair stand up” and were “redolent of the 1930s.”38

This attitude has spread to the campus. In February 2016, Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of the Oxford Union Labour Club (OULC), resigned when the club decided to endorse Israel Apartheid Week on campus. “The attitudes of certain members of the club towards certain disadvantaged groups was becoming poisonous,” he said in a Facebook post. “Whether it be members of the Executive throwing around the term ‘Zio’ (a term for Jews usually confined to websites run by the Ku Klux Klan) with casual abandon, senior members of the club expressing their ‘solidarity’ with Hamas and explicitly defending their tactics of indiscriminately murdering civilians, or a former co-chair claiming that ‘most accusations of anti-Semitism are just the Zionists crying wolf,’ a large proportion of both OULC and the student left in Oxford more generally have some kind of problem with Jews.”39

Labour faced new criticism in April 2018 when it was revealed that Sameh Habeeb, founder and editor of the Palestine Telegraph, a journal that had published 9/11 conspiracy theories, antisemitic cartoons, and Holocaust-denial stories, was put forward as a Labour council candidate in Northwood, a community in northwest London. An article in the Palestine Telegraph contended that World War I and World War II “were planned in advance for the sake of a group following the dictates of Zionism.” The journal’s website posted a video of David Duke asserting that Israel was a terrorist threat to America.40

The spread of this tolerance for antisemitic sentiment was further revealed when reporters discovered that more than a dozen senior staffers who worked for Corbyn and the Labour Party’s shadow chancellor were members of social media sites that contained antisemitic and violent messages, including posts that called Hitler a great man and threatened to kill Prime Minister Theresa May. More than twenty Facebook pages associated with Corbyn and Labour contain Holocaust denial, antisemitic, misogynist, and violent messages. These sites have more than four hundred thousand members. One of them, a Facebook group called Jeremy Corbyn Leads Us to Victory, contains an Israeli flag on which the Star of David had been replaced with a swastika. The flag had been posted by a former Labour candidate for office. A former Labour Party candidate posted a picture of New York Times journalists with their faces obscured by Jewish symbols. Another site carried a post stating that “six million is a fallacy.” Yet another contended that “the holocaust was a big lie.” Some of the posts were so laced with expressions of violent extremism that a former Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation suggested that they be investigated by the police.41

When confronted with evidence that proves their assertions wrong, Corbyn and his associates routinely fall back on a number of familiar explanations, which include claims that the comments and articles in question are not antisemitic but merely anti-Israel, or that they had simply not seen the offensive posts. Another one of his close allies dismissed the allegations of antisemitism as coming from Jewish “Trump” supporters who were “making [it] up.” When it was first reported that he said this, he denied having done so and argued that he had been misquoted. Then the tape surfaced. The fact that he made these comments in response to a letter signed by sixty-eight U.K. rabbis from across the religious spectrum only made matters worse. Recently, Labour was faced with the need to do another about-face. Though Corbyn’s office has insisted that he does not support blanket boycotts and sanctions on Israel, but only on items produced in West Bank settlements, footage emerged from 2015 of his participation in a panel in Ireland in which he called for a blanket boycott of Israel “to be part and parcel of the legal process and for sanctions against Israel.” This array of self-contradictory stances, convoluted corrections, and reversals leave many people, including some of Corbyn’s closest allies, unsettled.42

In March 2018, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Jewish Leadership Council decided that they’d had enough and sent an open letter to the Labour Party in which they stated, “Again and again, Jeremy Corbyn has sided with anti-Semites rather than Jews. At best, this derives from the far left’s obsessive hatred of Zionism, Zionists and Israel. At worst, it suggests a conspiratorial worldview in which mainstream Jewish communities are believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy.”

Corbyn’s response to the rabbis’ letter was conciliatory. “I recognize that anti-Semitism has surfaced within the Labour Party,” he said in an open letter of his own, “and has too often been dismissed as simply a matter of a few bad apples.” But others in the party were not as conciliatory. That same month, Diane Abbott, the Labor Party’s shadow home secretary, retweeted a Twitter message that claimed that “more and more people are joining the Labour Party because they are so disgusted by the constant smearing of Jeremy Corbyn.” In an appearance in May 2016 on a BBC television program, Abbott had said that it was a “smear against ordinary party members” to suggest “that the Labour Party has a problem with antisemitism.”43 Rank-and-file Labour Party members weighed in as well, in an open letter posted on the “We Support Jeremy Corbyn” Facebook group that referred to the Board of Deputies of British Jews and Jewish Leadership Council as “a very powerful special interest group mobilizing its apparent, immense strength against you [Corbyn]. It is clear this group can employ the full might of the BBC to make sure its voice is heard very loudly and clearly. It is a shame not every special interest group can get the same coverage.”44

The summer of 2018 saw the Labour Party enmeshed in new controversies. One was over Corbyn’s attendance as an observer at a conference in Tunis in September 2014 called the International Conference on Monitoring the Palestinian Political and Legal Situation in the Light of Israeli Aggression. During the conference, Corbyn joined a delegation paying respects at a memorial to PLO members who died in 1985 when Israeli jets bombed the organization’s headquarters in Tunis. He was photographed standing in the background as wreaths were being laid. But in August 2018, the Daily Mail published photographs of Corbyn participating in another wreath-laying ceremony at the same event, this one held a few miles away, to honor members of the Black September faction of the PLO who were the architects of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Initially commenting, “I was present at that wreath-laying [of the 1985 victims], I don’t think I was actually involved in it,” Corbyn had to acknowledge his participation in the second ceremony when he was shown the photographs and reminded of a column he wrote in the Morning Star in 2014 on his return to the United Kingdom from the conference, in which he referred to “wreaths laid at the graves of those who died on that day [in 1985] and on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991.” Never mind that he got the facts wrong (three of the four men buried at the second site were killed by a rival Palestinian faction in Tunis; the fourth was reportedly killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1992), what infuriated people was Corbyn’s refusal, in retrospect, to apologize for honoring the memory of men universally regarded as terrorists. This firestorm did not appear to threaten his followers’ faith in his innocence and his attackers’ guilt. They dismissed it as an attempt to “smear” him.45

Then, at the end of August, the Daily Mail reported that in 2013 Corbyn gave a speech at a conference by an organization called the Palestinian Return Centre in which he declared that British Zionists “clearly have two problems. One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony.”46 Corbyn may have said “Zionists” and not “Jews,” but listening to the speech, the two seemed interchangeable. This was a cut to the quick. For what is it but a sense of history and irony that has gotten Jews through the vicissitudes of their collective experience? It was this statement by Corbyn, more than anything else, that left many Jews utterly convinced that this was a man whose contempt for them runs deep.

The difficulty Corbyn and his associates have in recognizing and acknowledging antisemitism on the left seems to be rooted in their foundational claim that because being a progressive means being opposed to any form of racism, oppression, or group hate—including antisemitism—therefore, by definition, a true progressive cannot be an antisemite. Their claim runs into trouble when they are confronted by progressive compatriots who include blanket statements about Jews in their excoriation of wealthy capitalists who oppress and exploit the poor, who imply that Jews exert undue influence on the media, who deny that Jews can be the victims of race-based hatred in the same way that people of color are, and who include offensive, hate-filled Jewish stereotyping in their criticism of Israeli government policies regarding the Palestinians.

So, to return to your original question: Is Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite? My response would be that that’s the wrong question. The right questions to ask are: Has he facilitated and amplified expressions of antisemitism? Has he been consistently reluctant to acknowledge expressions of antisemitism unless they come from white supremacists and neo-Nazis? Will his actions facilitate the institutionalization of antisemitism among other progressives? Sadly, my answer to all of this is an unequivocal yes. Like Trump, Corbyn has emboldened and enabled antisemites, but from the other end of the political spectrum. Trump’s antisemitic followers believe that his dog whistles give them free rein to openly acknowledge their contempt for racial minorities, Muslims, homosexuals, and Jews. They are convinced, not without reason, that they have had a direct impact on government policy and on various politicians’ stance on a range of issues. Their access and potential influence has never been greater. Corbyn’s followers believe that his support of them legitimizes their trafficking in the worst antisemitic stereotypes while at the same time vigorously denying that they are antisemitic.

I’ll close by referring to a comment I made at the outset of this exchange, when I expressed the hope that my answers would leave both those on the right and the left discomforted. That discomfort should be caused by an acknowledgment on everyone’s part that extremism and antisemitism are found not only among people on the other side of the political spectrum. As long as we are blind to it in our midst, our fight against it will be futile.

Yours,

DEL