Anti-semitism

When Ilhan Omar says that there’s too much money in American politics, she’s stating the obvious. That’s why I support her brave campaign against the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, General Electric, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Business Roundtable, the AARP, and Boeing. These are America’s top 10 lobby groups, ranked by total spending over the last 20 years. In 2018, the US Chamber of Commerce spent $94.8 million on lobbying. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, spent $21.7 million and surged to Number Eight on the charts. The America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) ranked Number 157, and spent $3.5 million.

Ilhan Omar is a confused anti-Semite. In 2012, she thought Israel (translation: the Jews) controlled the world through hypnosis. Now, seven years later, she believes something else: ‘it’s all about the Benjamins.’ Both ideas are classic anti-Semitic tropes. In a piece for Commentary magazine late last month, Abe Greenwald dissected the trope that had inspired Omar’s 2012 tweet. He writes: ‘The history of mystical anti-Semitism is long indeed. It predates Christendom and thrived, at times, long afterward. Martin Luther wrote that “a Jew is as full of idolatry and sorcery as nine cows have hair on their backs, that is: without number and without end.

Is there a name for the moment something objectionable becomes so mainstream that those responsible can solemnly lament it as a fact of life? I propose that we call it the Formby Point. This week, Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby reportedly told a parliamentary party meeting that it was ‘impossible to eradicate anti-Semitism and it would be dishonest to claim to be able to do so’. Note the sly wording, the subtle distancing; you can almost hear the affected sigh of resignation. The woman who runs an institutionally racist party that refuses to challenge its institutional racism can, with a straight face, regret the inevitability of racism.  As a matter of fact, it is possible to eradicate anti-Semitism from a membership-based organisation.

Jews in this country have long been accused of holding dual loyalties. This week, that canard was brought back into the media and political landscape not by white supremacists chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, but by Rashida Tlaib, a freshman Democrat, and a woman of color. In response to a bill that would, among other things, challenge the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Tlaib said that supporters of the legislation had ‘forgot what country they represent.’ Those words are familiar to anyone who’s read anything about anti-Semitic rhetoric. The implication is that Jews, especially Jewish public servants, are all nothing more than foreign agents – traitors, in other words.

Pittsburgh is less a city than a loose federation of urban villages, of which Squirrel Hill provides a classic example. A long-thriving heart of Jewish life and culture, an authentically rooted community, Squirrel Hill is now irrevocably scarred by the murderous actions of one monster, whose crimes will leave a legacy of social harm and intimidation for a generation. Robert Bowers’s attributed words about wishing to kill Jews leave no doubt of the explicitly political character of the act. No worthwhile definition of terrorism could fail to include an act like this. But as in any case of terrorism, identifying an act is only the first stage in a much larger process of interpretation and rhetorical expansion.

Former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has been roughed up enough lately and I am loath to add to the calumnies but something he keeps saying bothers me. ‘The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.’ Sacks has dropped this aphorism into speeches and articles for the past few years and no wonder: it’s a pithier version of the Niemöller verse, a shorthand for the metastatic nature of prejudice. First of all, I’m not convinced it’s true. They always come for the Jews but they don’t always come for the Communists or the Catholics or the trade unionists, not least because the Communists and the Catholics and the trade unionists are sometimes busy coming for the Jews themselves. There is a more fundamental objection.

It is quite clear what today's NEC results mean for the Corbynites in the Labour Party: they've consolidated their control over the party structures. All the candidates who won were backed by Momentum, apart from Peter Willsman, who had seen the Corbynite grassroots organisation drop its support after a recording emerged of him making anti-Semitic comments. Willsman pushed moderate candidate Eddie Izzard out and will remain on the party's ruling body. Izzard and 'independent left-winger Ann Black' came 10th and 13th respectively. Less clear is the implication for that rather nebulous group of anti-Corbynites generally known as 'the moderates'.

Why does Jeremy Corbyn show such disdain for the mainstream Jewish community? Why does he prefer to associate with terrorist “friends” in Hamas and Hezbollah? And why does the Corbyn clique now in charge of Labour insist on diluting the internationally accepted definition of anti-Semitism? The fact is that – despite its own boasts about “anti-racism” – the far-left has had a longstanding problem with Jews, and not just with “Zionists.” This problem pre-dates 1844, when Karl Marx published On The Jewish Question; but Marx’s essay is a good place to start. In On the Jewish Question, Marx tied up Jews with capitalism: “What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money....

Imagine if there existed a photograph of Boris Johnson next to a man whose associates subsequently axed to death four imams in a mosque. Just imagine it. Imagine how much discussion there would be about the mainstreaming of Islamophobic fascism. About how Boris was enabling murderous racial hatred. About how the Tory party was falling to an extremist loathing of Muslims. Corbynistas in particular would never stop talking about it. Everything they wrote about Boris, forever, would mention his rubbing of shoulders with a man who was cool with the slaughter of imams. Of course, no such photograph of Boris exists. But a photograph of Jeremy Corbyn in a similar position exists. It was revealed in the Times this morning.