https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/opinion-rod-liddles-journey-im-woke-to-the-new-antisemitism/
Roderick E. Liddle is an English journalist and an associate editor of The Spectator.
Call it a ‘personal journey’, if you like. That’s what the dimbo TV documentary producers like to call it. Rod has been on a personal journey, and now he is woke, praise the Lord. Oh, I’m woke all right. Woke to the new antisemitism – which isn’t, when you poke and pry at it a little – terribly different from the old antisemitism.
I remember 15 years back a report coming out which showed that there had been a steep rise in antisemitic attacks and graffiti in London. The weird thing was, I thought at the time, the producers of the report (it was somehow attached to the Greater London Council) played this headline down. Usually anti-racist organisations scream blue murder at any rise in racism.
One bloke, involved in the report, was insistent that the antisemitic thing was not really important. That was a man called Lee Jasper. I knew of him as being part of the truly mentalist Labour far left. But still, why would he play down the shocking findings from his own organisation? More importantly, why do others on the far left play it down now?
Yes, I was slow to realise – you guys were on to this long before me.
This new rise in antisemitism, which I had thought long dead, was not shaven-headed white imbeciles from the far right. It was Muslims, a large chunk of it. The giveaway was the graffiti the report didn’t show: “Allah U Akbar!” The National Front rarely paint that on walls.
Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked. From that moment on, it all fell into place.
Fast forward 13 years and I was kicked out of the Labour Party, of which I’d been a member for 40 years, for having attempted to explain the party’s strange affection for antisemitism.
It was the consequence, I reckoned, of the growing number of Muslim activists and councillors within Labour (four had just been suspended for making antisemitic statements) and the infantile supposedly liberal far left whose unconditional support for “Palestine” (to the exclusion of every other supposedly persecuted minority in the world) was an even more potent symbol of their status than shopping at Waitrose and eating quinoa. These groups loathe Israel as much as they loathe the capitalism which has given them their comfortable existences.
Suddenly I grasped that the British far left didn’t want people to know about antisemitism because it pointed the finger at people they really, really liked.