"My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way you’d treat
any other minority."
Jonathan Freedland
"The row over Labour anti-semitism has exposed people who
claim to be anti-racist – yet chip away at an essential part of Jewish identity."
A RESPONSE: by Rod McCord - Stalybridge Labour Party (in a personal capacity):
"Let us now be clear. The murder of millions of Jews by Christians in Europe has been paid for by the blood of the Palestinian people whose sole crime was to be indigenous to the land that the Jews coveted. And those on the left who dare question this now find themselves in the dock answering to the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ laid against them by JF and others filled with righteous indignation and grown ‘weary . . . of these attitudes, indeed warned that they had found a warm space to incubate on the left for many, many years."
In his article in The Guardian of 30 April
2016, Jonathan Freedland implies that the political left in Britain is guilty
of anti-semitism and that such attitudes have ‘found a warm space to
incubate on the left for many years.’
In order to illustrate his contention, he draws an
analogy with a single black country which hypothetically emerges as a safe
haven for oppressed black people – invoking a very different reaction from the
left to the one it allegedly exhibits vis à vis the State of Israel.
The analogy, however, is disingenuous by virtue of
what JF elects, unwittingly or otherwise, to omit. We can, perhaps, be of some
assistance here, however, by logical extension of the analogy for the purpose
of bringing greater clarity to the issue
he raises. We can only speculate why he,
himself, fails to do this.
Accepting the basic premise of JF’s analogy, let us
give context to the emergence of this black country where, following centuries
of oppression and exploitation as slave labour by the imperialist and
colonialist nations of western Europe, including their ‘transportation’ in
coffin ships across the Atlantic to be worked to death in the sugar, cotton and
tobacco plantations of the Americas, black people sought refuge in a land that
they could call their own and where they could be free from the tyranny and
predations of the white man.
Let us assume, however, that, on account of the
Christian religion that their white masters had forced them to adopt, the
homeland to which black people naturally aspired was the land of their Saviour,
the Holy Land. And let us further
assume, that in order to establish their homeland, they waged a merciless war
of terror against its existing inhabitants – the Jews of Israel – the majority
of whom they drove out in a planned programme of ethnic cleansing, compelling
them to live in wretchedness and degradation in Gaza, the West Bank area of the
river Jordan and refugee camps in surrounding countries, with no hope of ever
returning to their ancestral home in Israel.
Having, thus, supplanted all but a small remnant of
the Jews in Israel, the black country, now rid of any effective Jewish
opposition, began to call itself a democracy and could prove it by affording
the emasculated, residual Jewish population equal voting rights, though socio-economic
discrimination remained ubiquitous.
Even worse was in store, however, for the dispossessed
Jews in exile, for many of their black persecutors nursed deeply-held religious
aspirations that their Christian homeland should have Jerusalem as its capital
and should extend from the Nile to the Euphrates as the Holy Land did of old.
And, so it came to pass, that the army of the black
country – one of the mightiest in all
the world with a dazzling array of modern weaponry supplied by its US, British
and French backers – invaded and occupied the West Bank and, thereafter,
colonised it with successive waves of black settlers, confining its Jewish
inhabitants to ‘reservations’ in much the same way as their US ally had done to
the indigenous peoples of North America.
In order to placate the modern-day sensibilities of the Americans,
however, the black country agreed to allow – within limits – a Jewish Authority to administer and police
the ‘reservations’ and, thereby, keep their inhabitants under control.
Many of the displaced Jews kept in their treasured
possession the title deeds – so dear to them – to the land in Israel that they,
and their fathers and their fathers before them, had owned and from which they
had been expelled by the black country – an event which they and their children
and their children’s children now refer to as ‘the catastrophe’.
Faced with the black country’s intransigence and the
world’s indifference to their plight, however, some Jews – both inside the
black country and in the occupied West Bank – had refused to accept the status
quo and had embarked on the road of
armed resistance adopting the very same methods as the black people had
employed against them during the black country’s ‘independence struggle’, such
as the use of car bombs, bus bombings, and other indiscriminate attacks on
innocent civilians – men, women and children.
The black perpetrators of these attacks, of course, now wore suits and
were prominent figures in the leadership of the black country and they condemned
these Jewish militants as ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’, their denunciations
echoed by the United States, Britain and the rest of the ‘international
community’.
In Britain, only a small segment of the left was
prepared to stand up in solidarity with the Jews, defending their right to
resist occupation and keeping alive the memory of their patrimony and the
reality of ‘the catastrophe’ that had befallen them. For this they were roundly condemned and
accused of racism in the form of anti-blackism. One of their number had posted
on Facebook that the black country should perhaps be ‘re-located’ to the US
(‘problem solved’), for which she was subsequently forced to apologise, no-one
at the time bothering to mention the reality on the ground in the occupied territories
and in east Jerusalem where the forces of the black country were re-locating
Jews on an almost daily basis, raising their homes to the ground and moving
them on. On the contrary, a powerful
article in The Guardian by its
liberal, progressive black political correspondent,– who, it must be said, has,
on many occasions, raised the question of the treatment of Jews in the black
country and occupied territories – joined in the chorus of condemnation of the
left asserting that the black country was such an essential component of black
people’s identity that to ‘chip away’ at it exposed the left’s claim to
be anti-racist.
Jews in Britain, however, were prepared to make common
cause with the left in the struggle to right the wrongs to which their brethren
in the black country (which they still referred to as ‘Israel’) and the
occupied territories had been, and were still being, subjected. They demanded an end to the occupation, the
right of return of the refugees, as required by international law, and full
compliance with UN resolutions, of which the black country remained in flagrant
violation, with the complicity of the US and Britain.
Some on the left,
with the support of large numbers of British Jews, questioned the black
country’s right to exist at the expense of the Jews, but they were traduced by
all in mainstream politics and the media as covert racists who paid lip service
to anti-racism but whose mouthings against the black country exposed their de
facto anti-blackism.
It remains unclear whether the white, liberal,
progressive Jewish political correspondent of The Guardian, Jonathan
Freedland, concurs with the demands of his fellow Jews or, as a life-long
anti-racist and anti-blackist, supports the right of black people to ‘live
as a majority in charge of their own destiny’ in their black country
homeland. Even though some ‘self-hating’ black critics of the black country have raised their voices against the Jewish ‘catastrophe’, it is thought that JF ‘would want to listen to the mainstream
black community and be guided by them.’
Or, perhaps not!
* * *
The black country analogy developed by JF is vitiated
at virtually every turn. Anticipating the ‘counter-arguments’ of ‘hardcore
anti-Zionists’ that the analogy only works if the imaginary black country ‘was
guilty of in-built discrimination against a non-black minority and was founded
on the forced dispossession of the indigenous people who already lived there,’ he maintains that ‘neither of these problems are rendered logically
inevitable by Israel’s existence.’
Such a claim is quite simply absurd. Israel’s existence is predicated on the
forced dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians which was, and remains,
the means by which the country established and maintains its Jewish majority
domination. Discrimination is the
essential guarantor of that majority, the preservation of which is an
existential imperative for which reason there can be no right of return for the
Palestinian refugees. This is the Jewish
State of Israel – racist both by definition and design. Immigration and subsequent citizenship is
confined to Jews. To maintain racial
purity, there can be no marriage between Jew and Gentile. Civil marriage does not exist in Israel; Jew and non-Jew must travel to Cyprus to be
wed.
To suggest, therefore, that Israel could develop along
the lines of Britain – a Christian country that is ‘an equal home for
non-Christians’ – is non sequitur. Britain, as JF states, is ‘shaped’ as a Christian country by its history, which
is still reflected in its institutions and customs, but it does not ‘define’ itself as the Christian State of Great Britain or strive, at all costs, to
maintain a Christian majority population.
Indeed, recent surveys indicate that Christians, if not already, are
rapidly becoming a minority in Britain.
Israel’s raison d’être, by contrast, is to exist as a refuge and
national homeland for Jews, fundamental to which, therefore, is the
re-inforcement and perpetuation of its Jewish character and Jewish majority. To
propose that re-possession of their lands by the Palestinians is nonetheless
compatible with Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish State borders on the
insane.
Institutionalised racism goes to the very core of the
Jewish State; it is inherent in every aspect of its construction and modus
operandi and finds its most
sickening expression in the occupied territories where graffiti scrawled by
Jewish settlers proclaiming, Gas the Arabs, is commonplace. Nor should it be forgotten that the ethnic
cleansing of Palestine by the Jews in 1948 was not without precedent: their original occupation of the so-called
Promised Land was the earliest example of genocide in recorded history
involving the systematic extermination of the Canaanites – men, women and
children put to the sword without mercy in an unrelenting campaign of butchery and
conquest. JF’s call for understanding
and empathy for the Jews as victims of genocide conceals an older truth that
forms no part of his narrative: the Jews as perpetrators of genocide, a
genocide which forms an essential part of Jewish identity since it is upon this
genocide that the Zionist claim to a Jewish homeland in Palestine rests. The irony of it is excruciating: victims of the Nazi genocide waging a war of
terror and ethnic cleansing to establish a safe haven in an ancestral homeland,
itself founded upon genocide.
* * *
JF complains that, although a whole host of other
nations were forged in bloodshed, Israel alone is deemed to have its right
to exist nullified by the circumstances of its birth.’ The explanation for this, of course, is that
Israel is a modern state that has emerged within living memory whose borders to
this day remain unsettled and which continues to expand at the expense of the
Palestinians. Unlike in the other
countries JF mentions, Israel/Palestine remains in a bellicose state that is consequential for the peace and
stability of the entire Middle East and whilst the Palestinians are expected to
recognise Israel’s right to exist, the Israelis feel no equivalent onus to recognise
a Palestinian State. At the UN General
Assembly, Israel, with US support and Britain’s abstention, vehemently opposed
even observer status for a state of Palestine.
‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ would seem to be the Israeli position.
Justifying Jewish terrorism, carnage and forced
expulsions that were midwife to the birth of Israel by reference to the
bloodshed in which the US, Australia, Canada and so forth were born, JF
nonetheless has consistently condemned the IRA for employing the same methods to
achieve the same ends – nationhood – and, more to the point, condemns the
Palestinians for adopting the same Israeli terror tactics in their own quest
for nationhood. By any measure, this is
hypocrisy of the highest order.
Interestingly, although he refers to ‘the
circumstances of [Israel’s] birth,’,
JF gives no detail or clue to these other than by general allusion to
the accompanying ‘bloodshed’ and ‘dispossession of the Palestinians .
. . the Nakba.’ As a result, many of
his readers would remain ignorant of the true reality of the terrorist campaign
waged by the Jews against the Palestinians and against the British army and
administration in Palestine to put into effect Israel’s ‘right to exist’.
Guardian readers will not learn from JF of the killing sprees
perpetrated by Jewish terrorists against Palestinian civilians: the
indiscriminate spraying with bullets of Arab squares and marketplaces, the
bombing of Arab buses or the fact that it was the Jews that pioneered the use
of the car bomb as a political weapon; they would not learn from JF that the
reality behind the ‘dispossession of the Palestinians . . . the Naqba’ was a campaign of ethnic cleansing,
striking fear into the Palestinian population and, thereby, provoking a mass
exodus by the systematic use of terror and intimidation, including such
atrocities as the wholesale massacre of over 100 unarmed men, women and
children, ruthlessly gunned down in a clinically planned, premeditated attack
by Irgun and Stern Gang (Lehi) fighters under the command of Menachem Begin on
the peaceful village of Deir Yassin, the proven efficacy of the operation
subsequently confirmed by the consequential mass flight of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian refugees into neighbouring countries, never to be
allowed to return.
Neither would Guardian’ readers learn from JF
of the cold-blooded murder by Lehi of former Colonial Secretary, Lord Moyne and
his British army chauffeur in Egypt, the letter-bomb campaign against members
of the British Cabinet, the bombings of the Jerusalem railway station, the
Semiramis hotel, the British Officers’ Club and King David Hotel, headquarters
of the British administration in Palestine, or the execution by Irgun of two
abducted British army Intelligence Corps sergeants, their booby-trapped bodies
left hanging from trees in an orange grove.
The terrorists that committed these and other
atrocities are honoured annually by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in a
memorial service and by an official commemoration ceremony, but no reports of
this ever manage to find their way into The Guardian or any other newspaper in this country. The
terror campaign of mayhem and murder waged by the Jews has now largely been
air-brushed from history by the British press and media, which, like the political ‘mainstream’, now faithfully presents to the world the Jewish narrative
of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East whose ‘David and Goliath’ struggle for survival in 1948 pitted it against the combined forces of the
surrounding Arab nations, its terrorist origins conveniently and silently
interred.
***
In respect of what JF refers to as Ken Livingstone’s ‘version
of history’, which he describes as ‘garbled and insulting’, I am inclined to agree. This is not, however, evidence, per se,
of anti-semitism. Livingstone has,
however, made a previous comment in poor taste which was said to have cost him
Jewish votes in the 2012 London mayoral election; on the other hand, he has for many years been
a prominent figure and committed activist in the anti-fascist and anti-racist
movements in this country.
Playing ‘the
Holocaust card’ in the way that he
does, however, really is ‘bad form’ on the part of JF. His assertion that Livingstone’s contention ‘that
Israel’s creation in 1948 was a mistake . . . a “travesty” ‘, and the
corollary that he draws from it that its creation would, presumably, equally
have been a mistake in the 1930s, thus denying ‘6 million [Jews] the one
lifeline that might have saved them [from the Nazis]’ is the very worst kind of sophistry. The reality is that the State of Israel was
not established in the 1930s and those that prevented its establishment – ‘the
one lifeline that might have saved [the Jews]’ – were Tory Prime Minister
Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax supported by the entire
Conservative Cabinet as well as Winston Churchill from the backbenches. These are the guilty men, if we are to follow
JF’s logic, so it is fair to ask why he reserves his spleen for Livingstone and
not those who not only shut the door on Jewish emigration to Britain but also
to Palestine.
A similar charge might also be levelled against Clem
Atlee, Foreign Secretary Ernie Bevin and
the Labour Cabinet collectively, who from 1945 -1947, prevented by force of
arms the creation of a Jewish state.
Does JF hold the entire pre- and post-war British governments to be
anti-semitic? If he does, he should say
so.
* * *
Sardonic reference by JF to his playing ‘the
Holocaust card’ is also revealing in
other ways. It exemplifies the way in
which the Holocaust has been appropriated by the Jews and equated with the Nazi
extermination of six-and-a half million of their number. The word ‘holocaust’, however, signifies
wholesale slaughter, death and destruction and the Holocaust of World War II
was infinitely more extensive than the exclusive claim laid upon it by the
Jews, involving horrendous loss of life from Europe to the Far East on a scale
far in excess of Jewish victims, including, not least, 28 million Soviet
dead.
The Jewish monopoly on the Holocaust is implicit in
the accusation of ‘holocaust-denier’, a term employed specifically to describe
those who seek to deny that Jewish deaths numbered six-and-a half million or
were anywhere near that figure. In
reality, the Holocaust consumed many times that figure, Jew and non-Jew; Jews, specifically, were the victims of
genocide – extermination on an industrial scale that constituted the Nazi ‘Final Solution to the Jewish problem’.
It comprised a terrible component of the Holocaust but was not
synonymous in the way that Jews, including JF, employ the terminology, a way that is now woven deep into the fabric
of the modern-day narrative in the West.
Jewish ‘ownership’ of the Holocaust is insulting to
the memory of the millions of other victims.
28 million Soviet war dead notwithstanding, who today would know that
more Gentiles than Jews perished in the Nazi death camps? Who today remembers the million-and-a half
gypsies that were rounded up and herded to their deaths? Their persecution across Europe continues to
the present but where are the calls for a national gypsy homeland; where is the
demand that they be afforded the right to return to the land of their
forefathers in Bengal? And who today
outside the LGBT community remembers the countless numbers of homosexuals put
to their deaths in the camps or the disabled or the 4.5 million Soviet
prisoners-or-war. Neither the holocaust
nor the genocide is the exclusive property of the Jews and to conflate either
with Jewish deaths alone as is now the norm is to demean and diminish the
suffering and sacrifice of millions of non-Jews who shared the same fate.
From what JF calls ‘the Holocaust’ – the extermination
of the Jews - springs, he insists, the
rationale for Israel’s existence which he implores the left to understand and
empathise with. He concedes that ‘Israel’s
creation came at a desperately high price for Palestinians – one that Israel
will one day, I hope, acknowledge, respect and atone for through word and
deed;’ though he cannot be ignorant
of the futility of his sentiments. How
can it be possible for Israel to atone for the dispossession of the
Palestinians – which continues to this day – without providing for the return
of the dispossessed, which would signal the end of the Jewish majority in
Israel and ultimately, therefore, the Jewish State. JF is fully aware of this and, after shedding
his crocodile tears for the hapless Palestinians, adds emphatically that ‘it
is impossible for most Jews to see it [the dispossession of the Palestinians]
as a mistake that should be undone.’ [my
emphasis]
He is demanding of the left, therefore, that it must
lend its imprimatur to the Nakba, deny the right of return of the refugees and
become complicit in the continued persecution and dispossession of the
Palestinians. Only then can it shake off
the opprobrium of anti-semitism that its solidarity with the oppressed victims
of the Jewish usurpation of Palestinian lands allegedly constitutes. For according to JF, Jews and Jews alone, are
the arbiters of anti-semitism, a courtesy that the left, he declares,
customarily extends to other minorities, affording black people the right to
define what is racism, women to define sexism and Muslims to define
Islamophobia.
This is arrant nonsense: none of these groups can even
agree amongst themselves what constitutes these phenomena. Are we to believe that the left should defer
to the likes of Gangsta Rappers on racism, the Women’s Institute on sexism or
radical Islamists on Islamophobia?
Proceeding along this line of argument, might we expect JF’s next step
to be a call for the ‘no-platforming’ of the left and safe spaces and
trigger-alerts for Jews? And why
on earth, it might be asked, should black people be afforded the exclusive
right to define something as generic as racism?
Indeed, when, for that matter, did women acquire minority status?
The left, of course, is attentive to what its black,
female and Muslim comrades have to say on these issues and, likewise, its
Jewish comrades in respect of anti-semitism – some of whom will, presumably, be
amongst the 7% of ‘mainstream British Jews’ for whom, in the 2015 survey
to which JF alludes, Israel forms no part of their identity as Jews and for
whom the plight of the Palestinians represents something more than ‘a
mistake that should be [left] undone.’ It
might be added that there are, no doubt, Jews amongst the 93% in the survey for
whom Israel ‘forms some part of their identity as Jews’ that are also on the left and also question
Israel’s right to exist as presently constituted.
At this juncture, we are perfectly placed to address
the issue central to JF’s critique and which forms the sub-heading to his
article: namely, that alleged anti-semitism in the Labour party has exposed
people on the left who claim to be anti-racist but ‘chip away at an
essential part of Jewish identity,’ by which he means the State of Israel.
The clear implication is that anti-semitism is rife on the left, evidenced by
its constant and unparalleled attacks upon Israel – for
which it is ‘consumed with hatred’ – and upon its right to exist, and,
therefore, upon Jewish identity.
The first point that should be made is that, contrary
to what JF implies, similar, or more intense passions have, indeed, been
released on the left, mainly, it should be said involving, Israel’s staunchest
allies: the United States, apartheid South Africa and fascist Chile – a telling
commentary in itself. The American
invasion and round-the-clock carpet bombing of Vietnam, institutionalised white
supremacy in South Africa and the CIA-engineered coup against the
democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile and the summary
execution of thousands of workers, students and peasants, were all met with a
degree of enragement on the left of a kind that JF complains is now reserved
exclusively for Israel.
The distinctive point he makes that the attacks on
Israel ‘uniquely’ call into question its very existence, I have already
addressed. The implication that to thus ‘chip
away at an essential part of Jewish identity’ is anti-semitic,
however, needs to be challenged. Like much else in his piece, it is a
distortion. The 2015 survey he relies
upon found only, according to his report, that for 93% of ‘mainstream’ British Jews (whatsoever that may mean) –
not 93% of all British Jews – ‘Israel forms some [my emphasis] part of their identity as Jews,’ which is quite different from averring,
as JF does, that it is ‘an essential [my emphasis] part of Jewish identity’; it may form a large or a miniscule part of
the identity of some, many or only a few of the 93% of the mainstream; it may,
or may not, be ‘essential’; it
may be quite abstract and unimportant; we have no way of knowing from the
reported information.
Even if we could conclude that it were ‘essential’ to Jewish identity, would it be safe to imply,
as JF does, that to challenge an aspect of a people’s identity is racist and,
in this case, anti-semitic? Female
genital mutilation is, arguably, ‘essential’, or may form ‘some’ part
of the identity of certain communities in Britain. Is it, therefore, racist to ‘chip away’ at
the practice? White supremacy formed an
essential part of the identity of the Boers and of the segregationists of the
American South; was it racist to chip away at it? The British Empire erstwhile
formed an essential part of British identity; is it, therefore, to be inferred
from JF’s logic, that left-wing opponents of imperialism and colonialism were
unpatriotic, traitorous and anti-British, as the right invariably portrayed
them? Today, immigration into this
country chips away at an essential part
of the identity of all ‘true-born Englishmen’; are the proponents of
immigration, therefore, guilty of racism towards this John Bull breed?
And, what of the displaced Palestinians? Palestine forms an ‘essential’ and
fundamental part of their identity at which Israel has not simply ‘chipped away’, but has smashed to smithereens, an ethnically-directed terrorist
atrocity that JF sanctions as ‘impossible for most Jews to see . . . as a
mistake that should be undone.’ Applying,
therefore, the same logic and same criteria by which JF adjudges the left to be
anti-semitic, the Israelis and their Jewish and non-Jewish supporters are
guilty of the most vile racism that seems, however, not to disturb JF’s semitic
sensibilities in the least or, indeed, at all.
It is worth recalling, that it is not so long ago that
JF’s liberal newspaper, The Guardian, along with the rest of the
British, European and American media proclaimed with one voice: Je suis
Charlie Hebdo, echoing the message of solidarity for the victims of the
Paris shootings and for the French people at large that rang around the western
world. The call to defend and uphold the
enlightenment values of the French Republic was near universal: freedom of speech and of the press were
deemed inviolable; freedom of religion
was likewise sacrosanct – but so too was
the right to offend, including the right to publish caricatures in the press of the Prophet
Muhammad, notwithstanding the fact that this chipped – nay, hacked – away at ‘an essential part’ of Muslim
identity, and would, by definition, therefore, according to the criteria laid
down by JF, be tantamount to institutionalised racism. There is no evidence in this instance,
however, that JF applied the same criteria that he applies to condemn the
left. The right to offend Muslims does
not, apparently, extend to the right to offend Jews.
* * *
Let us now be clear. The murder of millions of Jews by
Christians in Europe has been paid for by the blood of the Palestinian people
whose sole crime was to be indigenous to the land that the Jews coveted. And those on the left who dare question this
now find themselves in the dock answering to the charge of ‘anti-semitism’ laid against them by JF and
others filled with righteous indignation and grown ‘weary . . . of these
attitudes, indeed warned that they had found a warm space to incubate on the
left for many, many years.
Such short memories do these people have! They would do well to remind themselves that
this is the self-same left that has always been at the very forefront of the
fight against anti-semitism: organising the defence of the Jews against
Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s in the East End of London, culminating in the
battle of Cable Street; leading the Anti-Nazi League in the struggle against
the recrudescence of fascism with the rise of the National Front in the 1970s
and 80s; and, in recent times, taking to the streets to stem the threat posed
by fascism in its latter-day incarnation, the BNP. The left has a proud record that is second to
none in the fight against anti-semitism and against all forms of oppression –
and that necessarily extends to and includes the oppression of the
Palestinians; it is not the left that is
guilty of double standards in this respect but JF and his ilk who demand
special dispensation for Israel and claim exceptionalism for the Jews on
account of their recent (and past) history. There is no right of the oppressed
to become the oppressor on account of their own oppression, particularly so
when those they oppress played no part in their oppression. The elephant in the room to which JF turns a
blind eye is, in fact, Jewish racism towards the Palestinians for which he
himself appears from the content of his piece to be no more than an abject
apologist.
This leads us to examine another of the crude
distortions that devalue his so-called ‘plea to the left’. Taking isolated examples of alleged
anti-semitic remarks from individuals allied to the left wing of the Labour
Party, JF begins his diatribe by indicting ‘a small but vocal section of the
left’. However, what he goes on to
refer to as ‘this noisy segment of the left’
very soon in the course of the article metamorphoses into simply ‘the left’, which remains the butt of his critique thereafter, so that the
piece appears under the rubric: My plea to the left: treat Jews the same way
you’d treat any other minority.
Thus, from making unsubstantiated and unconvincing
claims of implicit anti-semitism against less than a handful of leftist
individuals, JF proceeds to generalise and tar the entire left with the same
brush, a well-worn tactic on which his fellow journos at the Daily Mail and Sun could give him a few lessons, were he to ask nicely.
At no point in his piece does JF reveal or define whom
or what he means by ‘the left’, with the result that his discourse appears as
nothing more than a gratuitous smear against the Labour party as currently
configured under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (against whom he casts
aspersions for failing to repudiate a caller to a Press TV programme he was hosting in 2010 who referred
to Israel as ‘a disease’).
Can this have been his primary motive?"
