Anti-semitism and the bourgeois left

        

Rodd Liddle

Article published by 'The Sunday Times'  

November 24, 2019

It’s not only Corbyn’s mob (Labour party, UK) that welcomes anti-semites. It’s the whole bourgeois left.

On a scale of one to 10, how much would it surprise you that the Labour Party’s new poster boy, the young activist featured prominently in its election campaign material, is a semi-literate anti-semite? I think, if you’ve been watching carefully these past few years, the score is probably around the two to three area. Kierin Offlands likes to use the term “Zio Nazis”, compares Israel to Nazi Germany and referred to Israeli soldiers as “stormtroopers”. He wrote: “I hate Zionism. I oppose the State of Israel. It is one of the worst thing’s ever created. To some extensiveness, Zionism is Nazism.” Well, thank you for that, Kierin. I think to some extensiveness that you are a racist halfwit.

Did the Labour Party choose an anti-semite as its poster boy because it couldn’t give a toss about anti-semitism? Or was it because it couldn’t find anyone in the approved section of the party —that is, the far left —who hadn’t expressed anti-semitic views? Maybe a bit of both. We know that the left of the Labour Party is riddled with a foul and visceral anti-semitism. Jeremy Corbyn’s own personal contributions to this creed —always excused with the moron alibi of “I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing”—would take several pages to detail. You know the gist by now.

But less spoken about is anti-semitism’s immense popularity beyond the Labour Party, and especially among the middle-class, far-left activists within the Greens, the Extinction Rebellion mob and our university students and lecturers. 

It is quite the thing to be, an anti-semite. The co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, announced recently that the Holocaust was nothing special: just “another f***ery in human history”, as he put it, bringing to mind the fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen’s assertion that the Holocaust was merely “a detail of history”. Meanwhile on our university campuses, Jewish (not Zionist) groups are either opposed outright or face charges of £2,000 for every meeting, on account of the violent opposition they may provoke.

In 2018 there were 1,652 anti-semitic incidents logged by the Community Security Trust, a charity that protects British Jews from threats. About one quarter were associated with the far right —yes, Jews still have to worry about the fascists. This suggests the vast majority came from the far left.

The bien pensant left has soaked up all the old anti-Jewish clichés and now trots (geddit) them out with a lack of shame that would do credit to Julius Streicher’s Nazi propaganda sheet, Der Stürmer. And they have been soaked up to justify, to buttress, their imbecilic conviction that in each and every situation there is an oppressor and an oppressed: the world seen in black and white, sometimes literally.

Palestinians are oppressed. As a consequence, no crimes can be laid at their door. They are unequivocally in the right. Jews are the oppressors, they are unequivocally in the wrong (and worse than that, control the media, Hollywood, capitalism and probably Angry Birds and The X Factor too).

It is time we “called out”, to use the fashionable if sententious phrase, the middle-class left’s rancid hierarchy of victimhoods, its fascistic adherence to the concept of “protected characteristics”, which is used to administer a sour bigotry far more impinging than the one it was designed to replace.

If you are on the radical-chic left, it is better to be a woman than a man. It is better to be a lesbian than a straight woman. It is better to be a trans woman than a lesbian. All the way up the ladder of bigotry until you reach its glorious apotheosis, which I guess is a disabled trans Palestinian woman with mental health issues. If you are that, you are pretty much inviolable (except in, er, Ramallah or Hebron. Good luck there.).

And at the bottom of that ladder of bigotry is the Jew, fair game for all the vileness you can muster. It is a horribly divisive, petty, childish and ignorant view of history and the human condition. And yet it holds sway, out there on the affluent liberal left. Jeremy Corbyn and his Momentum munchkins have placed it centre.

I suppose we should thank them for that.