The new antisemitism eats its own
by Melanie Phillips:
The British Labour party leadership will be hoping it has now parked its antisemitism crisis for the summer. MPs have gone on holiday, tempers will cool, the fury and uproar of the last few weeks over the party’s definition of antisemitism will now all die down. Or so the leadership is presumably telling itself.
But this issue isn’t going away. Exchanges over the past few days have underscored the fact that it is still shockingly unresolved.
Last week, the party was electrified by reports that its grandee Dame Margaret Hodge, whose relatives were murdered in the Holocaust, had called its leader Jeremy Corbyn an antisemite and racist to his face – and that for so doing she was being threatened with disciplinary measures.
There had already been convulsions, which I wrote about here, over the way the party had in its own new code of practice narrowed the wording of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in order to allow the continued defamation of the State of Israel. Now one of the party’s very grandest of grandes dames was accusing Corbyn of antisemitism and racism.
To his supporters, it was akin to calling Mahatma Gandhi a war criminal. To those already horrified by Corbyn’s refusal to deal with the antisemitism now rampant in his party, it was an unconscionable attempt to punish a Jew for protesting about antisemitism.
The main reason why this issue is continuing to erupt is that it has still not been accurately defined. Not only are the warring factions speaking at cross purposes, but even some of those protesting against the party’s failure to deal with antisemitism are failing properly to define the problem.
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