(Jewish Group) The Left and the Jews: A Tale of Three Countries

[Behind the Aegis]

(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP! RESPECT!!)

In the early spring of this year, an angry dispute broke out in the United Kingdom between the mainstream Jewish communal organizations and the leader of the radical left, currently head of the Labour Party, who is Jeremy Corbyn; and a couple of days later, a roughly similar dispute broke out in France between the equivalent French Jewish organization and Corbyn’s counterpart on the French left, who is Jean-Luc Mélenchon; and the double outbreak suggested a trend, which raises a question. It is about America and the Democratic Party. To wit: When the delegates to the Democratic National Convention assemble less than two years from now, will the showdown between centrists and progressives that everyone expects actually occur? Will a few zealots of anti-Zionism take their place among the progressives? Will they push their way to the microphone, and will they send mad orations beaming outward to the American public, calling for the elimination of an entire country? And will the mad orations lead to grisly chants and an occasional outbreak of medieval superstition, hither and yon? In short, will the same miserable battle that has torn apart large portions of the European left spread to America, not just on a miniature scale (which has already happened), but full blast, with national consequences? This is not a silly question.

The crisis of the democratic left all over Europe is typically presented as a product of modern economics, arising from excessive fluidities of labor and capital, and from social democracy’s inability to keep afloat amid the turbulence. But the crisis has had its cultural dimension, too, arising from still other pressures, one of which, larger perhaps than is sometimes recognized, emerges from a tide of political Islam, or Islamism, across several swaths of the world. This is the pressure on the Western left to accommodate, in the name of anti-racism and Third World solidarity, as many Islamist principles as possible, in regard to blasphemy, gender roles, and the iniquity of the Jews—a pressure on the left, that is, to temper or creatively adapt various of its own historic fundamentals. The British and French incidents of a few months ago showed how powerful the pressure has become, in certain quarters of the European left. And a few incidents of that sort in America would rip a big wound in the Democratic Party.

You will perhaps remember the initial incident in the U.K., back in the spring. The argument over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party had been going on for a few years by then, such that, by 2016, there had already been an official intraparty inquiry, led by Shami Chakrabarti. Alan Johnson, the editor of Fathom magazine, submitted his own presentation to the inquiry and usefully described the problem as a matter of political ideology, with its root in a peculiar and distended anti-Zionism: “a modern anti-Zionism of a particularly excessive, obsessive, and demonizing kind, which has co-mingled with an older set of classical anti-Semitic tropes, images and assumptions to create anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.” The Chakrabarti report concluded that, here and there in the Labour Party, a “toxic atmosphere” did seem to have emerged. And the report proposed ways to control the toxin. Labour Party members were instructed not to call people “Zios,” nor “Pakis.”

But the report cleared the party as a whole. By extension, it cleared the party’s leader. And, in this way, the Chakrabarti report, instead of resolving the problem, deepened it. The exonerated leader, who was Corbyn, displayed his gratitude by appointing his exonerator, Shami Chakrabarti, to the House of Lords, which did not look good. A story about Corbyn and a Nazi-style wall mural in London (depicting hook-nosed Jewish bankers under a Masonic seal playing Monopoly on the backs of the dark-skinned oppressed of the world) was particularly unfortunate, with Corbyn likening the mural to something by Diego Rivera, then backing away with the explanation that he had not looked closely enough at it. But there were many incidents and anecdotes, and not all of them involved famous personalities and national events.

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