How rare it used to be to hear overt anti-Semitism. You’d sometimes see it in subtitles when masked Hamas types or Slavic nationalists were on the news. But you’d almost never hear it in English. Not in Britain. Not, at any rate, until now.
The rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the aged Marxist who, incredibly, is the strong favorite to be elected leader of Britain’s Labor Party next week, has changed all that. A number of his supporters turn out to be undisguised Jew-haters. They don’t bother with the usual sophistries (“It’s not Jews I have a problem with, only Zionists…”) They give it to you straight, as the following selection of quotations, taken more or less at random from the Twitter accounts of Corbyn supporters in the Labor Party, demonstrates.
“We’ve had the Holocaust rammed down our throat by Zionists forever ensuring only Jewish suffering counts.”
“Jews and Zionists own the whole world.”
“Zyklon B was used for delousing.”
One Palestinian cleric with whom Corbyn took tea in the Commons is Raed Salah, found guilty of propagating the blood libel. The blood libel is so outlandish these days that many people have forgotten its actual meaning, and use the phrase simply as a rough shorthand for any anti-Jewish slander. It comes almost as a physical shock to hear someone seriously averring that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make Passover bread.
Corbyn himself is no anti-Semite. The self-righteous old boob, who seems to go out of his way to cultivate the appearance of a scruffy Reform rabbi, is sincere in his dislike of racism. But his campaign has dragged the Jew-hatred of elements of the Left into full public view.
Many commentators seem surprised, having evidently associated anti-Semitism with the far Right. They should read their history. The man who invented the word “socialist” was an anti-Semite: Pierre Leroux, a 19th-century French radical, told his comrades, “When we speak of the Jews, we mean the Jewish spirit — the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, of speculation; in a word, the banker’s spirit.”
Conversely, the man who coined the term “anti-Semitism” was a leftist. “Anti-Semitism is a socialist movement,” declared Wilhelm Marr, “only nobler and purer in form than social democracy”.
“How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?” Adolf Hitler asked his party members in 1920. No one thought it an odd question. Anti-Semitism was by then widely understood to be part of the broader revolutionary movement against markets, property and capital.
Listen to Karl Marx himself, for all his rabbinical family roots: “The root of the Jewish soul is expediency and self-interest; the God of Israel is Mammon, who expresses himself in the lust for money. Judaism is the embodiment of anti-social attitudes.”
How is it that so many people who regard themselves as opponents of racism and bigotry manage to make an exception for Jews?
The answer is that most anti-racists are motivated not by a disinterested dislike of discrimination, but by a desire to stand up for groups that they see as under-privileged. They can be quite enthusiastic about racial discrimination when it comes to, say, university quotas for designated victim groups.
Jews, in their minds, don’t fit into the category of underdog. Indeed, Israel exists precisely because its founders had had enough of playing that role. I find the resurrection of the Jewish state after nearly 2,000 years an inspiring tale; but it holds little appeal for who base their political opinions around an imagined hierarchy of victimhood.
Our political opinions often follow our character traits. If you’re an optimistic person who admires enterprise and enjoys the success of others, you’ll find the endurance and eventual triumph of the Jewish people uplifting. But if you’re determined to see every exchange as a form of exploitation, every success as someone else’s defeat, every trade as a swindle, then the same promptings that put you on the far Left might also make you anti-Jewish.
It’s a tragic condition, a form of existential envy, and it goes back, if the Book of Esther is to be believed, 2,500 years:
And Haman told them of the glory of his riches, and the multitude of his children, and all the things wherein the king had promoted him, and how he had advanced him above the princes and servants of the king.
Haman said, Yet all this availeth me nothing, so long as I see Mordecai the Jew sitting at the king’s gate.
This article appears in the Sept. 8 edition of the Washington Examiner magazine.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
