There's a very powerful piece by Karen Harradine over at The Conservative Woman called Corbyn and his lackeys fan the flames of appalling anti-Semitism, which both Sue and myself would urge you to read - if you haven't done so already (and many have, judging by the deluge of comments there).
One of Karen's points...
Corbyn and his cronies have managed to achieve such cognitive dissonance between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that they cannot comprehend why anti-Semitism is such an issue. Jew-hatred is insignificant to them in comparison to their fight against Israel.
...half-echoes a point made by Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust on last night's The World Tonight (Radio 4):
Jeremy Corbyn has strongly condemned anti-Semitism and people accept he's no anti-Semite. But what does he mean by 'anti-Semitism'? And how do most Jewish people perceive anti-Semitism? And I think it's the difference between those two understandings that gets to the heart of the current problem. For the Jewish community to have the trust that it wants to have in the leadership of the Labour Party at the moment those leaders need to come out and be more explicit in what they mean by saying 'We condemn anti-Semitism.' They need to specify that they mean contemporary anti-Semitism and not its 1930s variant.
That World Tonight report (by Andrew Hosken) was welcome, if worrying.
It gave voice to the concerns of several people from the Jewish community and the Labour Party, and, being the BBC, also gave a right to reply to a senior Corbyn supporter - who happens to be Jewish.
The really curious thing about the report though was just how coy it was about giving specific examples.
The specific examples I've been reading about elsewhere (as in a grim, detailed piece by Guy Adams in today's Daily Mail) build up a depressing, overwhelming case. There are just so many examples, and it's just astonishing that anti-Semitism is happening now, and on such a scale, in one of the UK's two main political parties.
Being being so general and vague in its presentation of the problem, this BBC report would have given Radio 4 listeners very little sense of the sheer scale of the thing.
Hopefully, there's a good reason for that - perhaps that the BBC didn't want to air some of the disgusting things that have been said. (I fear I'm being too charitable there).
The Muslim angle wasn't pursued either.
We've watched this grow and grow. Anti-Jewish sentiment is acceptable if it is linked to Israel. That's somehow not racist in the way linking Muslims to Islamic terrorism is, but it's not logical. There are no voices on the BBC to explain this, even though an alleged 'Friend of Israel' is in a top executive position, and an actual Jew is head of news. There must be insane pressure on them.
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