UK: Corbyn's antisemitism isn't a scandal, it's a strategy

Via The Weekly Standard (Tamara Berens):

[…] an old video recently resurfaced of Jeremy Corbyn linking a terror attack in Egypt to “the hand of Israel.” The 2012 interview on Iranian-owned Press TV saw him pedal anti-Israel conspiracy theories in a discussion of a bombing where 16 Egyptian policemen were killed in the Sinai desert. His comments from 2012 were defended last week by a Labour party spokesperson, who asserted that his “speculation” had been factually based on previous Israeli actions in Egypt.  

Many focus on the question of whether Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite himself. He may or may not be. However, his deliberate actions to reject the Jewish community’s concerns, silence his moderate Labour detractors, and pedal anti-Zionism as central to his political image show that he is more than happy to utilize antisemitism for political purposes.

Anti-Zionism—and by extension, giving credence to antisemites—is fundamental to the worldview Corbyn has cultivated on his journey to political stardom. For most of his political career, Corbyn was a fringe socialist politician and supporter of the USSR, Syria’s Assad, the Iranian Ayatollahs and Maduro’s Venezuela. After becoming Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn toned down some of this support for radical anti-Western groups. Nonetheless, he has consistently maintained his support for anti-Zionist causes. What’s undoubtable is that throughout his career, his ultimate goal has remained the same; rejecting Western values and embracing the alliance between radical socialists and Islamists in a strategic bid to normalize and implement socialism in the UK.

Politically, Corbyn’s strategy is working: According to a recent YouGov poll, 61 percent of the party believes Corbyn is handling accusations of antisemitism well. And 80 percent of the party deems him a good leader overall. The events of the past few weeks indicate that the Labour leadership has been able to build on their apparent success to formally distance themselves from the overwhelmingly Zionist British-Jewish community. This perhaps became most apparent last Friday, when Jeremy Corbyn published another article in The Guardian disregarding his part in normalizing antisemitism in the party. The piece came out at 5pm, when the majority of Jews in the country were busy preparing for the Sabbath.

The reality is that support from the Jewish community is no longer an indispensable part of the Labour party. In fact, Corbyn’s foreign policy—a large aspect of his political differences to Blair’s Labour—rests on weakening UK-Israel relations. Corbyn has constructed a successful strategy for claiming the Labour party as his own socialist vehicle for disruption of the Western liberal order. Labeling recent events a “scandal” greatly underestimates the strategic nature of his leadership. 

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