Barry Shaw – The Curious Case of Corbyn
Corbyn leads a political ideology that sees evil in the world. It is not the evil of communism that has slaughtered and repressed hundreds of millions of their own people in places like the Russia and China.
It is not the evil of hard left socialism that has ruined countries and impoverished people with failed socialist economic policies in countries such as Cuba and Venezuela, despite Corbyn’s idolization of Castro, Che Gevara, and Chavez.
It is not the evil perpetrated by 3rd World and Arab liberation movements that leave a trail of bodies and millions of refugees in their wake, but that Corbyn supports ideologically.
Corbyn’s perceived evil is western imperialism, European colonialism, things of the past but to which Corbyn still clings today, and capitalism, another evil in the eyes of Corbyn.
They like to call his movement the new socialist left, but it’s not new, and it is certainly not democratic socialism. It is more a hardened socialism.
The glue that links the triple towers of American imperialism, European colonialism, and capitalism is Israel via the Zionist cause. And, according to Corbyn, at the heart of this malevolent movement are the Jews with their money, their powerful influence, and Israel with its evil and racist tendencies to trample over the human rights of downtrodden Palestinians whose land has been stolen from them by the Zionist colonialists aided and abetted by Britain and America – a wrong that can only be corrected with the establishment Palestine, preferably in place of the illegal state of Israel.
According to the Corbyn credo, Zionism is racism and the Jews of Britain are guilty by association, by their support for Israel, a support that goes back a century. Zionism is racism and if you are Jewish and love Israel you are a racist, and that doesn’t make corbyn or his cohorts anti-Semites. So goes the mantra according to Corbyn. Israel is a mistake and a crime that must be rectified in the name of social justice and human rights.
This is evidenced by a 2012 wall mural daubed with stereotyped figures depicting Jewish bankers playing a game of monopoly (money) with their table top resting on the backs of half-naked workers.
Corbyn originally supported the artist’s work but, after a hullabaloo, the Labour party, and then a corbyn spokesperson, fumbled a lame excuse that Corbyn had supported the artist in the name of freedom of speech, and not the content of his artwork to which he hadn’t really paid attention.
This is the lazy anti-Semitism of Corbyn.
It is no coincidence that two of his sons inherited a detestation of Jews and Israel.
In March, 2018, Britain’s Daily Mail revealed that son, Tommy, posted a Nazi-style cartoon on his Facebook page showing an arm with a Star of David crushing people. It came with the Tommy Corbyn message, “why is it that I can critique my own, or any other government, but criticism of the Israeli state is branded anti-Semitic?”
Well, maybe son, that’s because you emblazon your page with stereotype cartoon that demonizes Jews.
He was followed into the Facebook pit he had dug for himself by someone who posted “Hitler was a Zionist.” You see where it leads. Tommy Corbyn belonged to several Facebook pages that regularly posted anti-Semitic screeds that included claims that members of the royal family were Jewish and they controlled the world with the Rothschild banking dynasty. Or one depicting the earth with a Star of David and the anti-Semitic message, “the new world of Zionism is almost here! One government. One currency. One religion. Act now!”
Sickeningly, it goes on, and on.
And the other one, Ben, is much the same. Keen to see a Palestine in place of Israel. Cries for dead Palestinians. Not a tear for dead Israelis.
The apples don’t fall far from the rotten tree.
Jeremy Corbyn sent out a statement.
‘tomorrow evening it will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I’ve also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well…the idea that an organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about a long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labelled as a terrorist organisation by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.” Jeremy Corbyn March 3, 2009.
The following year, thirteen Palestinian terror groups headed by the Islamist Hamas launched a military campaign against Israel in an attempt to derail peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian authority.
During the fighting, Corbyn stood in Trafalgar Square and told a crowd of thousands gathered in support of a Hamas war against Israel that “in our thousands, in our million, we are all Palestinians.”
Corbyn’s spin-master, Labour’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications, Seumas Milne, explained that Palestine had become “the greatest international cause of our time.”
It can’t be because of the Palestinians killed by Israel in response to the wholesale Hamas-motivated violence, although this was their excuse, because, right next door to Israel, the number of people killed in the Syrian civil war enormously outnumbered those in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Included in the dead in Syria were almost 200,000 Palestinians yet, as Dave Rich wrote in his book, the left’s Jewish problem, we have never heard corbyn chant “in our thousands, in our million, we are all Syrians.”
Why is this? Could it be he doesn’t really care about the Syrian dead, or the Palestinian dead in Syria?
The reason he is not a Syrian is because Syria is backed by Russia and Iran. Had Assad been backed by America, or perversely, Israel, Corbyn would have screamed about being a Syrian – but he didn’t, and that is telling.
Could it be that he supports Palestinians because his target for abuse is exclusively Israel, and he can’t pin the massive Syrian death toll on the Jewish state?
Actually, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption.
Israel is, for Corbyn, the epitome of his perfect enemy.
The Jewish state is, for corbyn, the donkey he can beat and kick to his heart’s content. It fits all the evils of his malevolent mind. He can trot out all the hard left epithets and craft them to match his fevered image of Israel.
Corbyn can construct Israel to be a white European colonial power, no matter that the majority of Israelis are Mizrahi Jewish refugees kicked out of Arab and Muslim lands. Or that a colonist is someone enlisted by a major power to colonize a conquered territory, a description palpably out of whack with how and why a Jewish majority exists in Israel.
Corbyn can posit Israel as stealing someone else’s land when, in fact, the international community granted a specified mandate to re-establish the national homeland of the Jewish people on the barren land of a dead ottoman empire.
This bequeath was an acknowledgement of a history in which the Jews were the original indigenous people on the ancient land of Israel. But you will never find this in Corbyn’s vocabulary.
To Corbyn, Israel is scarred with the twin sins of deserting socialism for capitalism, made more bitter by the modern success of Israel’s free economy, and of Israel being a close ally of America.
To Corbyn, these are unforgiveable sins and must be opposed by all means possible, even disreputable ones.
Corbyn frequently calls on the British government to stop supplying Israel with military supplies and armaments. But Corbyn has no objection to Britain supplying infinitely larger supplies of military hardware to Turkey, a country that has been occupying the small European island of Cyprus for about as long as Israel has been in the West Bank, a Turkey that is killing Kurds with gay abandon, without restriction, and without a peep from Corbyn. No “We are all Cypriots” from Corbyn’s mouth.
In Corbyn’s fevered mind, Israel is the most racist, violent, oppressive state on the planet.
We have to ask ourselves why he thinks this way. There is more behind it than the massive support it brings him allied to his threat of inflicting a socialist economy on Britain, an economy that brought Britain to the brink of ruin in the 70s.
So what can it be if it is not the famous Natan Sharansky definition of anti-Semitism when applied to Israel. Watch out for the three d’s – demonization, delegitimization, and double standards. Check this out, Corbyn is guilty of all three.
Corbyn hosted Hamas in the British parliament. Can anyone tell me if Corbyn ever hosted an Israeli diplomat or minister to hear their views, for balance, if little else, to question the Israeli perspective in healthy debate, rather than propagandize an anti-Israel message? It never happened.
Did Corbyn ever applaud Israel’s efforts to bring about the long-term peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt? Does he have anything positive to say about prolonged Israeli efforts to reach agreements with the Palestinians? There were three substantial concessions offered to the Palestinians by Israeli leaders. The Palestinians rejected all of them, reject the notion of living alongside the Jewish side, reject any negotiations with Israel.
Did Corbyn ever criticize the Palestinians for their decades of violence and terror and their rejection of Israel’s right to exist?
Strange behavior for someone who claims to be a man of peace.
Corbyn spoke about a “long term peace” for “the good of the Palestinian people.” What is he talking about? Did his friends, Hamas or Hezbollah, ever did anything to bring about a long-term peace in the region, let alone with Israel?
Did he?
What is Corbyn’s definition of a terrorist organisation if Hamas and Hezbollah are not included. On second thought, I am not interested in hearing his definition. His definition will be Israel and America.
At the end of last August, when Israel achieved a break in Hamas’s hostilities against the Jewish state with the help of Egypt and Qatar, an angry Mahmoud Abbas said that “Hamas is a gang and its leaders are thugs and thieves.”
Apparently, it takes a Palestinian to recognize a Palestinian.
He went on, “we will not allow anyone to turn Hamas into a legitimate government in the Gaza Strip, even if that means a direct confrontation with Egypt and Qatar.”
So much for long term peace between the Palestinians, Mr. Corbyn, let alone with Israel.
Truth be told, Corbyn is a fraud.
What should disqualify corbyn as a leader of Britain is his grave and gross errors of judgment.
Corbyn and his ‘Stop the War Coalition’ have always been on the wrong side of history. He and they have stopped no wars. On the contrary, they have been disrupters to peace processes.
He sided with the IRA against Britain. His heroes have been Castro and Chavez. Can you pick any greater socialist disasters than these regimes, a disaster he is keen to impose on Britain?
There is nothing meek, weak, peace-loving, or positive about Hamas, Palestinian Islamic jihad, or Hezbollah. They are the opposite of peace-makers. They are peace-destroyers. They are recognized internationally as terror organizations and the cause of instability in the middle east. They threaten and oppress not only eight million Israeli citizens, but their own people.
In Hezbollah’s case, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen have been negatively impacted, by Hezbollah’s violent interference. Thousands have been killed and injured by this proxy of the not-so-peaceful Islamic republic of Iran.
Lebanese Hezbollah chief, Nasrallah, is not subservient to the Lebanese government, but take his orders from the Iranian Khamenei, both being Muslim Shia. Less to do with loyal nationhood. More to do with a religious affiliation with a foreign power. Is this Corbyn’s sense of democratic values?
Corbyn cannot be further from the truth in his definition of Israel. He is incapable of dispassionately seeing the world in general and the middle east in particular as it really is. He is too invested in his personal biases and his political ambitions to be swayed by facts.
The Palestinians have been let down, depressed, oppressed, had their hopes for a better future dashed, by their own failed leadership, and by the outside influence of troublemakers.
At the end of the day, Corbyn has done absolutely nothing positive for peace or for the Palestinians in decades.
Even with his intimate contacts with the most brutal elements of the Palestinian leadership he has been unable or unwilling to heal the rift in the Palestinian political divide between Fatah and Hamas, a chasm that erupted in a Palestinian civil war and the ensuing murder of over six hundred Palestinians by Palestinians.
When they are not killing each other, they are killing Israeli Jews.
What sort of Palestine is Corbyn working for? Is it a two-state solution? Or is it one without Jews and without a Jewish state? For one thing is predicted with an awful certainty. If there is to be a Palestine, by the ballot or by the bullet, Hamas will usurp power. Which raises the question, do we really want to see another Hama tan in the West Bank, overlooking the narrow coastal plain of Israel, threatening Jerusalem?
In short, Jeremy corbyn and his ilk must recognize the fundamental national rights of the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, to accept the rights of Israelis to live without fear and without threats to our survival, and acknowledge that Israeli society share the same creative, constructive, peace-loving values cherished by good people everywhere.
To paraphrase the great Howard Jacobson once, like me a Mancunian and a Socialist, I end with these prophetic words.
Isn’t it strange how the anti-Zionists rewrite the past in order to present a false image of Israel today.
People such as Corbyn claim that if I disagree with them I exhibit a Jewish paranoia or worse, I am a Zionist and share the same institutional racism as my evil Israel.
To this I answer, as someone who has studied the history of Zionism, and have experienced it on a daily basis, that I am aware of no such thing.
I am aware, however, of the rantings that are so far from the truth as to indicate that the accuser suffers from some form of derangement.
Corbyn has stopped listening, or thinking, about an Israeli perspective. There is something totalitarian about his unreasoned dogma.
It is amazing how this Corbyn, as with the BDS fanatics, are so certain about absolutely everything in their almost religious and ethnic hating where unreason battens down the unthinking mind.
As for the proposition that it is not anti-Semitic to be critical of Israel, like the idea that those who want to close down Israel are being critical, we need a new word for “critical.”
So, when we accuse the Corbyns, of which there are many, of bigotry, when we say they must be fired by an animosity they do not declare, and may be unaware they possess, it’s because we cannot understand the inordinacy of their language when they say that Israel is more Nazi than the Nazis, that we practice an apartheid more heinous than the apartheid of South Africa, an Israel that is guilty of every crime against humanity, and doubtless others they have yet to discover – torture, ethnic cleansing, massacre, genocide, indiscriminate slaughter, and even when it can be seen to be retaliating, we do so “disproportionately.”
This is no country that ever existed outside of Hell.
So let them tell us that if Jew hatred is not at the heart of it. In what furnace of a boiling mind is this nation, evil beyond all others, forged? And why, in its pitiless unheeding malevolence does it so closely resemble the closed world of the pariah Jew as it appeared to the medieval imagination?
We need the language free of issues of religion and ethnicity to describe the intellectual crime of, quite simply, picking on one small nation and loathing it above all others, and against all reason, or of simplifying and perverting a history to fit a narrative that transforms your ideology of victim and oppressor, and of shutting down every ingress of intelligence to prevent the argument of those who think differently from being heard.
In the end, it is not about Israel or Jews at all. It is about the way they practice thought in Britain these days. It’s about the absolute certainty of a closed and intolerant Socialist mind, for anything different, anything open, would herald intellectual defeat.
But Britain, poor Britain! What is to become of you?
Howard quoted the ancient Dunciad’s “The Triumph of Dullness” which I paraphrase here;
“Lo! Dread Empire. Chaos is restored.
Light dies before their uncreating word.
Their hand, great Anarchy, let’s the curtain fall
And Universal Darkness buries all.”
Barry Shaw is the Senior Associate for Public Diplomacy at the Israel institute for Strategic Studies.
He is the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS, and Anti-Semitism.’
Https://www.amazon.com/fighting-hamas-bds-anti-semitism-violence/dp/1508595534/ref=sr_1_1?ie=utf8&qid=1536139192&sr=8-1&keywords=fighting+hamas%2c+bds%2c+and+anti-semitism
