Antisemitism. Something’s gotta give

Antisemitism is in the news. Antisemitism of the left, antisemitism  among students, politicians, academia, the media, and presently and particularly, in relation to the Labour Party; outside of the dedicated “BBC bias” blogs, however, the BBC’s part in this hardly gets a mention.

The BBC has succeeded in mainstreaming anti-Zionism and establishing pro-Palestinian advocacy as the norm. In fact nowadays it’s so much the norm that no-one thinks twice about it. Hardly anyone, I mean. Alongside the belief that the left is right and the right is wrong, it’s just the norm.

At the risk of overlapping Craig’s post, a website that frequently addresses the BBC’s political biases recently featured a piece by Karen Harradine about antisemitism in the Labour party, which generated a big response. I think there were far more comments on that thread than I’ve ever seen on The Conservative Woman (for that website, dear reader, is the one to which I allude)

See, it’s on our sidebar. In our blog roll. Look, over there, bottom right. 

I have to say that for a popular Conservative blog, which frequently focuses on the left-leaning, socialist, pro-EU agenda that accidentally slips through the lip-service the BBC’s charter obliges it to it pay to impartiality (whatever that is - as HRH Prince Charles might say) TCW hasn’t shown a great deal of interest in the BBC’s bias against Israel. Perhaps they’ll be encouraged to do so more often.

Of course the BBC isn’t biased against Jews as such. The Jews that suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis are great favourites of the BBC. It’s the rest they don’t much care for. You know, the bankers, the bankers, the bankers.

The Labour party has had a core of hard-left antisemites amongst the ranks for many years, but of course it has also had an equally prominent and influential Jewish membership. Not so long ago the Jewish vote traditionally went to Labour, but now that the Corbynite team have risen, you can understand why many formerly loyal Labourites have been frightened off. 

Their replacement, the new intake of immature Corbynistas, seem to be driven by a rather retro kind of class war. They seem to neither know, nor understand history, geography, economics or religion. 

 Consequently, they’re incapable of connecting the terrorists of ISIS with the terrorists of Hamas; the antisemitism of Hitler with the antisemitism of Hasan Nasrallah or Raed Salah, or the anti-Zionism of Khaled Mashal with the anti-Zionism of, say, Seumas Milne. They’d surely be incapable of connecting the whole lot of it with outright racism. 

Cavalierly displaying a kind of cognitive dissonance which is becoming increasingly obvious,  and seemingly unwilling to confront reality, the Labour leadership must now surely see that something had to give. They have to see that it’s high time the hard-core antisemitism is prised out of the closet.

Jonathan Arkush writes about it in the Telegraph, Karen Harradine tackles antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labour Party, Melanie Phillips addresses it in the Jerusalem Post, and so does OMG The Daily Mail, more of which later. 

Melanie Phillips is one of the very best and most articulate writers on the topic. Here she expresses her views with such clarity that I couldn’t resist reproducing much of it here (complete with American spelling):

“For years, anti-Semitism in Britain was the prejudice that dared not speak its name. The hostility toward Israel endemic in educated circles was emphatically declared to have nothing whatever to do with hatred of Jews. Anyone who claimed a connection was denounced as “waving the shroud of the Holocaust” to silence legitimate “criticism” of Israel.”

“ANTI-SEMITISM IS NOT merely one of many prejudices. It has unique features, the same ones that characterize the demonization of Israel. Both are irrational obsessions consisting entirely of grotesque lies and libels. Both accuse a group of people of a conspiracy of evil of cosmic proportions. Both accuse those people of committing abuses of which they are not only innocent, but are, in fact, the victims. 

In Britain, there is virtually no reporting of the murderous Palestinian attacks on Israelis occurring almost daily. There was no mention of last year’s report by the committee of high-level military folk from nine countries, including the US, France and Germany, which stated that the standard the IDF set in protecting innocent Arab civilians during the 2014 Gaza conflict was too high for any of their own countries to match. 

Instead, the British media and politicians portrayed Israel in that conflict as the willful killer of Palestinian children and civilians. They depict as callous aggression Israel’s attempts to defend its population against mass murder. And then people wonder why there is an eruption of Jew-bashing. 

In the past couple of weeks, the media has begun to pay attention to the contribution made by British and EU taxpayers to Palestinian Authority backing for terrorism.
The British still don’t understand, though, that the UK and Europe have long funded and connived at not just Palestinian terrorism, but the incitement that causes it. 

They don’t understand that this incitement is based on anti-Semitism, not a dispute over land boundaries. 

They don’t understand that anti-Semitism is the signature motif of a deranged culture that should be treated as a pariah rather than excused, sanitized and rewarded, as Britain does with the Palestinians. 

They don’t understand that the anti-Semitic derangement that drives the Palestinians also drives the Muslim war against the West. 

They don’t understand that by indulging the lies, intimidation and moral inversion of Palestinian Jew-hatred, Britain and Europe have made it impossible to fight off the Islamist threat to themselves. 

They will only start to defend themselves properly when they start treating Israel as their indispensable ally rather than a cosmic foe.

However, the main expose - the one that will generate the most interest in the general ‘disinterested’ public, is of course the article about it in the OMG TDM.

I hope everyone will take a look. They’ve found a whole lot of images from the 80s with Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell in the old black’n’white days in the heyday of the Labour Herald, a newspaper of the hard left with a penchant for publishing “virulently antisemitic” articles. 

“During the early Eighties, when it was publishing racist cartoons, the newspaper was rightly regarded as an organ of the extreme far-Left, whose — often wrongheaded and occasionally odious — views were almost entirely irrelevant to mainstream political debate. 

Yet today, things are suddenly very different. Former co-editor John McDonnell (who often used it to run articles praising Corbyn, then Labour MP for Islington) is now Labour’s Shadow Chancellor. Ken Livingstone is a key Corbynista and recently tipped for a peerage. He was conducting Labour’s defence review before handing over to Emily Thornberry. 

In other words, two of the men who were at the helm of the sometimes anti-Semitic Labour Herald, and who are steeped in its political traditions, recently became the party’s biggest power-brokers.

This is only the beginning. It’s high time the BBC investigated these issues for themselves. They should start by correcting some of the historical misinformation they put out time and time again. The BBC  mustn’t let John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn get away with making vacuous statements about not tolerating antisemitism, then denying it exists. They’ve got the resources at the BBC. They’ve got the ways and means. Now lets see the will.