UK: The Labour Party’s problem with Jews (a nasty new strain of anti-Semitism)

Frank Furedi @ Spiked:

Hatred for Israel and identity politics have given rise to a nasty new strain of anti-Semitism.  

[…] If you want to see how the insidious culture of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party works, just watch the video in which the Tory health secretary Matt Hancock raises the problem of left anti-Semitism at an election hustings. No sooner does Hancock mention the need to rid British politics of anti-Semitism than a group of Labour activists erupts in fury. They jeer at him and insult him and try to shut him down. The spontaneous animosity with which they respond to his suggestion that anti-Semitism is a bad thing exposes the depth of the problem in the Labour Party.  

The problem is not that thousands of Labour members go around calling Jews ‘subhuman’. It is that far too many of them pretend they didn’t hear an anti-Semitic insult or that left-wing anti-Semitism isn’t that big a problem. In essence, they acquiesce to the creation of a climate in which telling a Jewish comrade to go home and count his money is unlikely to be called out. They may not utter such crude comments themselves, but they are silent collaborators to the open anti-Semites who do. […]  

Since hatred for Israel has become a foundational viewpoint of 21st-century leftism, it is not surprising that left institutions have attracted anti-Semites. What has happened is that, gradually, anti-Zionism has strayed into the territory of anti-Semitism, to the point where it seems to have become okay for Labour Party members to make jokes about greedy Jews.  

There is a distinction between criticism of Israel and prejudice against Jewish people. In recent years, however, this distinction has been significantly eroded. Some people have embraced the anti-Israeli cause as a way of expressing their attitude towards Jews. This is particularly pronounced among sections of the Muslim community, who refer to Israel and Jews interchangeably when they condemn Zionism. Given the electoral weight of this community, Labour activists have chosen to look the other way when they hear such sentiments.  

One key point that tends to be overlooked in discussions of anti-Semitism is the role of the politics of identity. In an era when identitarian entrepreneurs enjoy great influence over Western culture, anti-Semitism is frequently written off on the basis that other minority groups suffer worse hatred than Jews do. 

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