Bombarded
by disinformation campaigns, many British Jews are being misled into
seeing Corbyn as a threat rather than as the best hope of inoculating
Britain against the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism menace
by
Jonathan Cook
End-of-year
polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and
political trends over the past year and predict where things are
heading in the next. But a recent poll of European Jews – the
largest such survey in the world – is being used to paint a deeply
misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a
new, left-wing form of anti-semitism.
Part
2 - 'Playing with fire'
Relating
to the poll, Vera Jourova, the EU’s commissioner for justice,
helpfully clarified what Britain’s terrible results in the
political sphere signified. The paper quoted her on Corbyn: "I
always use the phrase 'Let’s not play with fire', let’s be aware
of what happened in the past. And let’s not make the same mistake
of tolerating it. It is not enough just to be silent … I hope he
[Corbyn] will pay attention to this survey.”
However,
both Jourova’s warnings and an apparent perception among British
Jews of an anti-semitism problem fuelled by Corbyn fly in the face of
real-world evidence.
Other
surveys show that, when measured by objective criteria, the Labour
party scores relatively well: The percentage of members holding
anti-Semitic views is substantially lower than in the ruling
Conservative party and much the same as in Britain’s third party,
the Liberal Democrats.
For
example, twice as many Conservatives as Labour party members
believe typically anti-Semitic stereotypes. Even more significantly,
the percentage of Labour party members who hold such prejudices has
fallen dramatically across the board since Corbyn became leader.
This
fact suggests that the new members who joined after Corbyn became
leader – a massive influx has made his party the largest in Europe
– are less likely to be anti-Semitic than those who joined under
previous Labour leaders.
In other
words, the evidence suggests very persuasively that Corbyn has been a
force for eradicating, or at least diluting, existing and rather
marginal anti-Semitic views in the Labour party. More so even than
the previous leader, Ed Miliband, who was himself Jewish.
But all
of this, yet again, went unremarked by the Guardian and other British
media, which have been loudly claiming a specific “anti-semitism
problem” in Labour for three years without a shred of concrete
evidence for it.
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