It seems that Enough really doesn’t mean Enough to a lot of people in and around the Labour Party so I’m resorting to an impassioned plea to all the antisemitism deniers and enablers out there.
It is incredibly demoralising and concerning to see so many Jewish people on my timeline in despair because their social media feeds are choc-full of people claiming the ‘Enough is Enough’ demonstration against antisemitism on Monday was a cynical politically motivated “smear” on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party. Every Jew I’ve spoken to is in disarray since the protest as they watch the repsonse to it from pro-Corbyn blogs, and a significant section of his support, grow more and more vitriolic by the hour.
It was an edifying experience to be surrounded by all those Jewish people on Monday taking the unprecedented step of protesting against antisemitism in the Labour Party. I travelled from Manchester to be there. It meant an awful lot and despite the fake news and misrepresentation that new-left media has been churning out about the protest — the vast majority of Jews were there because a) they do care about Labour and b) like me, are absolutely distraught about how they perceive the party and the wider left is becoming increasingly hostile to them.
Jeremy Corbyn himself has now admitted there is a specific problem in the party with antisemitism so to see a great many of his supporters unable to even go as far as Corbyn himself is hugely concerning and is even leading to some Jewish people making comments about how they are starting to feel unwelcome in this country.
How has it come to this?
So many people are taking their cue from appaling articles and tweets by new-left media outlets such as Skwawkbox and The Canary, claiming the demonstrators were Tories and endorsing a tiny group of Jewish people on the fringe of the community, many of whom have been suspended from the party for antisemitism and who staged a counter-demo (to an anti-racist demo — yes, really) on Monday.
People are trying to twist the significance of that group (Jewish Voice for Labour) who outright deny the antisemitism problem but as you can see in the photo below, outside the purple line, mainstream British Jewry has had a very different experience.
Our voices have been drowned out. That’s why we took to the streets.
And most importantly the people staging the counter-demo and those that deny there is a problem are now expressly at odds with Jeremy Corbyn himself.
Listen to him.
This demonstration was not about a mural, it was the final straw in a long line of incidents and fudges. Moreover the protest was about a culture of antisemitism that has been allowed to flourish, in far to many parts of the Labour Party.
Few people understand just how much unrest and upset Labour’s antisemitism issue is causing the Jewish community. For many Jews, Labour is in their blood. So many of our immigrant great-grandparents were trade unionists who fought hard for acceptance in the party a hundred years ago so it desperately saddens us that we have do this again in 2018 and while most people aren’t aware of the scale of the current problem, Jews do see it.
We see examples every week on social media and in the Jewish press of people in the Labour party sharing pseudo-Nazi propaganda, promoting Holocaust denial, revision and debasement. We see antisemitic conspiracy theories about The Rothschilds, blaming terrorist attacks on “the Zionists”, claims that Israel controls ISIS and that Israel and Zionism is not just responsible for the plight of the Palestinians but for everything that is bad in the world. Uncannily echoing classic European antisemitism.
We see the Canary publish articles entitled: ”Why it’s perfectly acceptable to compare Israel to Nazi Germany.” (Clue: it isn’t)
We go on to Labour Forums on Holocaust Memorial Day and see the most painful part of our history thrown back in our faces. We see a Jewish Labour councilor report one of the most notorious antisemites on Twitter, who tweets stuff like “Hitler Was Right” (who does that?) and yet six months later no action had been taken by the party. And all the while he has to go out campaigning alongside that antisemite, for the party he is proud to serve.
Imagine that.
And just last night we see a person in the upper echelons of the party attempting to block the disciplinary proceedings against a Holocaust denier because she claimed the complaints against him were “politically motivated.” In fact two Labour councillors had been trying to get this antisemite removed from the party for the best part of a year but to no avail.
And we see denial and excuses. A sea of people who claim we’re lying about antisemitism and doing so for own malicious purposes at the behest of Israel. Already after the demo on Monday two thousand supporters of Jeremy Corbyn have endorsed a letter saying that the antisemitism protest was the work of a “very powerful special interest group.”
We see Jews referred to as racists and yes, even Nazis, all because 93% of us believe in the existence of a Jewish state — despite the fact that no Jews in the Labour Party support the settlements or the right-wing regime that currently sits in government in Israel. The truth is most of us are simply guilty of nothing more than holding a natural empathy for our people who needed to get out of dodge during the pogroms and the Holocaust and like everyone else we are horrified by child detention and like everyone else we desperately want to see an end to the conflict and a peaceful resolution for both peoples. But for that we are racists, we are fascists, we are Nazis, and we have become targets for some people on the left who believe they are anti-racists.
So if you hear a Jewish person say they are concerned about antisemitism on the left. Listen to them. Talk to them.
Don’t say “what about other forms of racism?” It’s not a competition, we don’t have to take one seriously at the expense of another. We should be in this together.
Unentrench yourselves.
Don’t point to the small band of anti-Zionist Jews in Jewish Voice for Labour who represent a tiny fraction of the Jewish community and say “See, they’re saying there’s not a problem, they haven’t seen any antisemitism in their 274 years in the party so it must be true.” Don’t listen to that one Jew in a hundred. Tune in to the other ninety-nine.
Don’t just wave this away and say “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” because that is not the charge. Doing things like painting the 93% of Jews who identify with Israel as Nazis is not legitimate criticism of Israel. It’s Holocaust inversion: a rhetorical trick that is used to bait, isolate and offend as many Jews as possible and punish them for the actions of the Israeli government.
And it works. It’s why people do it.
Don’t say antisemitism is just a “smear” by Corbyn’s critics. It’s real. Many people are Corbyn’s critics because of antisemitism. I supported him at the very beginning but then antisemitic material began appearing on my Facebook feed, put there by people I knew, after the Livingstone saga. All of them had a picture of Jeremy Corbyn as their profile pic. Kind of puts you off y’know? Not every piece of criticism levelled at Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is unfounded or cynically motivated.
One example of hundreds I’ve seen on Labour forums was a comment denying antisemitism in Labour that finished with the words…. “Will Jews ever stop bleating like spoilt little children?”
Fourteen people LIKED that comment.
Hundreds more saw it and not one person objected. Why? How has a culture developed where that is permissible language?
Please ask yourself those questions rather than reaching for the nearest new-left media outlet or blog that is screaming “smear” or saying it’s confected by the “Israel lobby.”
Of course there is antisemitism everywhere, in other parties, and of course right-wingers will use it as a stick to beat Labour but the antisemitism problem in Labour is very real and is currently affecting Jewish people in a profound way. It should be a priority for anyone who is truly an anti-racist and supports Labour to try and understand it, to fight it and to show solidarity with Jewish people.
There is a horrible, intractable conflict in the Middle East but it does not make this ok in Britain on the left of politics.
Enough is Enough.