RUTHFULLY YOURS

As someone whose autobiography was called I Knew I Was Right, I’ve never been backward in coming forward when it comes to world-class gloating.

But never on any subject have I wanted so much to be proved wrong as on the obscene level of anti-Semitism – or Jew-hatred, to give it an uglier, more accurate name – infecting the left-wing in this country.

A whopping 13 years ago, I wrote a farewell piece in the Guardian explaining that I was leaving my job on the newspaper – the established voice of the British Left – due to what I saw as its ugly, anti-Jew rhetoric and accompanying Islamophilia (the final straw was when they ran an opinion piece by Osama bin Laden).

In that year, 2003, attacks on Jews had risen by 75% and since 2000 there had been a 400% increase in attacks on synagogues.
And the EU’s racism watchdog had recently suppressed a report on the rise of anti-Semitism because it concluded that Muslims were behind many incidents.

“What sort of world do we live in, when racism is ‘allowed’ to be reported only if it comes from the white and the right?” I wondered at the time. And the statistics are far worse now.

The strange fruit which was allowed to blossom by a Labour Party, smug in its anti-racist credentials, has turned the party into a rotting edifice fatally riddled with the ancient disease of anti-Semitism.

The long, lonely road here started with the perfectly ­reasonable desire to be anti-racist and ended up poisoned by what I call Paint-Chart Politics.

I’ve been reading that a considerable part of today’s young American Jews are alienated from Israel. That the impact of its creation in 1948 has faded, along with the impact of the Holocaust that ended three years earlier. That young American Jews no longer perceive Israel as something miraculous or even special, but rather as some country out there that’s embarrassingly violent and nationalistic, doing bad things to Palestinians.

If that is now the picture of Israel for some young American Jews, it’s indeed different from the mystique Israel had while I was growing up in the U.S. in the 1960s and—though by then it started to dissipate—the 1970s. Not knowing too much about the subject, I thought of Israel as an ideal phenomenon, a land of farmers and warriors who were outnumbered and gritty, yet enlightened and humane. My heart sang with pride and admiration.

That idealized vision had something to do with my growing interest in making aliyah, which I fulfilled in 1984. By that time I’d read a lot more about Israel, and had a more nuanced grasp of it as a complex society displaying the normal human shortcomings. Still, I harbored a hope that the Israel I encountered would somehow live up to those earlier impressions.

So began the dialectic of my first, maybe, half-decade in the country. On the one hand, there were cold bureaucrats; Israelis who said, “You came here from America?”; tensions between Ashkenazim and Sephardim that could get quite nasty. On the other hand, I somehow kept feeling that Israel was the most wonderful place on earth, and that becoming part of it was the most wonderful thing I could experience.

Each of these politicians accused of anti-Semitism was voted into power by an electorate who knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views, they would not have been elected.

“Anti-Semitism isn’t just tolerated in some sections of the British Muslim community; it’s routine and commonplace.” — Mehdi Hasan, British Muslim political journalist.

The consequences of Western politicians’ continued weakness and appeasement are far greater than encouraging anti-Semitism and undermining the State of Israel. It is the fatal and irreversible descent of their own countries.

Battle-hardened British soldiers were moved to tears by the horrors they witnessed at the Nazi charnel house of Bergen-Belsen when they liberated the concentration camp in April 1945. Yet seventy years after thousands of troops fought and died to destroy the regime that murdered six million Jews, the scourge of anti-Semitism is again on the march across Europe.

In just one week, a British student leader, a Labour Party constituency MP, a London council leader, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee and even Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn have all been accused of being mired in Jew-hatred.

It is the tip of the iceberg. Each of these people was voted into power by an electorate that knew exactly what their views were. Had they not held these views they would not have been elected.

All are on the political left, but the problem does not stop there. The cancer of Jew-hatred today spreads from right to left throughout European nations and in all supranational bodies including the European Union and the United Nations. It is led by politicians, human rights groups and the media, whose contorted worldview has contaminated ordinary people on a scale unimaginable possibly even to the arch-propagandist Dr. Josef Goebbels himself.

Haaretz: The British Left can’t tackle anti-Semitism if it doesn’t want to understand it

* Tom Gross: There has been a great amount of coverage in the British media in recent days concerning the furious row that is engulfing Britain’s main opposition Labour party about anti-Semitism within its ranks. The vast majority of readers of this list live outside the UK, so for those interested, I attach seven articles below. (By coincidence, the authors of these articles are all subscribers to this list: four are left-wingers; three are on the right.)

* Niall Ferguson (London Sunday Times): Former London mayor Ken Livingstone’s claim that “when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel” is nonsense and based on the claim of the [self-hating Jewish] American Trotskyist Lenni Brenner, who at an anti-Israel meeting in Connecticut, said that Jews were as “crooked as a dog’s hind leg”. As early as April 1920 Hitler called for Jews “to be exterminated”. In Mein Kampf he wrote: “If at the beginning of the [First World] war and during the war 12 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas . . . the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.” Germans who voted National Socialist in 1932 and 1933 were therefore not voting for a Zionist resettlement programme. At a torchlit parade on February 6, 1933, in Hamburg 20,000 brownshirts chanted: “Death to the Jews,” and – according to one eyewitness – “sang of the blood of the Jews which would squirt from their knives”.

* Leading British historian Andrew Roberts: The sole reason Ken Livingstone brought up the Fuhrer in his interview was to be as vicious and loathsome as he possibly could to any Jews listening.

* Leading British World War Two historian Antony Beevor: For Livingstone to describe Hitler as a Zionist is “grotesque”. * Liam Hoare (Haaretz) : Anti-Semitism is indeed anti-Jewish racism – but it is also a unique form of prejudice, at once a virus and pathology. Anti-Semitism is a condition where Jews are the eternal antithesis. The hatred against them survives by constantly mutating. Christian anti-Judaism flowed into race-and-blood anti-Semitism. The accusation that Israelis murder Palestinian children and harvest their organs is the freshest incarnation of the old blood libel. Jews have been held responsible for both capitalism and communism, modernity and backwardness, powerfulness and powerlessness, sexual prowess and sexual inadequacy, extreme wealth and extreme poverty.

* Charles Moore (Daily Telegraph) : Jeremy Corbyn has refused to share a platform with David Cameron over the EU referendum, although they both advocate a Remain vote. [But Corbyn happily] shared a platform with Sheikh Raed Saleh, who (elsewhere) called Jews “bacteria”; with representatives of the British Muslim Initiative, which plays the anti-Semitic card of comparing Jews with Nazis with its “Stop the Holocaust in Gaza” placards; with what he calls his “friends” from Hamas, whose charter calls upon Moslems to kill Jews. And Corbyn has shared platforms with others who claim that “the Jews” that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

* Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian): “So this is my plea to the left. Treat us the same way you’d treat any other minority. No better and no worse. If opposition to racism means anything, it surely means that.” * Jonathan Freedland: Israel was deemed a “disease” by a caller to a 2010 show on Press TV, the Iranian state broadcaster, without objection from the host, Jeremy Corbyn.

* Tom Gross: The Guardian itself (though not Jonathan Freedland), along with the BBC, has been contributing to British anti-Semitism for decades now, as I have documented on countless occasions, for example here in my time showing the Guardian editor parts of Israel and the West Bank and here. I have also many times in the past, documented the anti-Semitism of Mayor Livingstone on this list, for example, here.

* David Hirsh: Last month Livingstone said that in his 45 years in the Labour Party he had never once seen any anti-Semitism. On that occasion he was jumping to the defence of Gerry Downing, a Labour Party member who wanted to “re-open the Jewish Question” and Vicki Kirby, a Labour member who tweeted that the Brits “invented Israel when saving them [the Jews] from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher”. He was also trying to douse the scandal in Oxford University Labour Club after its Chair resigned, saying that members seemed to have “some kind of a problem with Jews”. These were the students who taunted Jewish members calling them “Zios” and singing “Bombs over Tel Aviv”. – See more at: http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001608.html#sthash.JkHXvBzB.dpuf