If Jews would get out of Israel and also stop drinking the blood of gentile children, perhaps the rest of the world would like them a little more. That seems to be the fairly broad view among the Hamas groupies on the white British left as well as throughout almost the entire Islamic world. But in particular within the left of the Labour party, which has imbibed this foul ideology for a long while (dating back to the Cold War). A member of the party’s National Executive Committee, Peter Willsman, has blamed Jewish supporters of Donald Trump for fabricating claims of anti-Semitism against Labour. Willsman then asked fellow members if they had ever witnessed anti-Semitism within the party, adding: ‘I’ve certainly never seen them.’
Sadly, almost as he was speaking, Labour was forced to suspend a Bognor Regis councillor for suggesting that Jews drink the blood of gentile children and also rape them — probably rape them first, I suppose, otherwise it would be terribly messy. Oh, and that Jews need executing. Damien Enticott at first said that someone must have hacked his Facebook account. But then it was pointed out that a couple of years before he had made the acute observation that Hitler would have found a solution to the Israel problem and that the Jews needed gassing again.
Ah, OK, it’s a fair cop, this fair-minded socialist subsequently confirmed. But still on the message boards, Corbynista morons were defending Enticott, echoing Willsman’s line that this was all a confected outrage and isn’t it funny that when the government is in big trouble the newspapers start making up these stories about anti-Semitism in the Labour party? And who owns the newspapers? Yes, it’s those pesky hooked-nose bastards again. Just like they run the world and were the architects of the very capitalism which is strangling our people, etc etc. The left is consumed with hatred — of Tories, of people who disagree with them on message boards, of Jews.
I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times in which I suggested that Labour was not alone in buying into this foul creed: it is the default position of, for example, the BBC, and I cited the example of Radio 4 serialising a book by a Palestinian writer, Raja Shehadeh. Raja claims to be a moderate but this, I think, was contradicted by his vernacular, which painted Israel as an evil, fascist, occupying state. I made the point that I had no objection to hearing Shehadeh’s views, but that it was unthinkable that the BBC would balance them by serialising a book from an Israeli, because the BBC swallows whole the Hamas propaganda which is, in part, the cause of the anti-Semitism within the Labour party.
Cue an immediate riposte from a halfwit called Miqdaad Versi, a functionary at the Muslim Council of Britain, who said I was a ‘bigot’ who was ‘undermining’ the definition of anti-Semitism. It is a pleasure to be called a bigot by the representative of a self-appointed organisation which in the past boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day and was headed by a man who said death was ‘a bit too easy’ for Salman Rushdie. An organisation which even the last Labour government thought neither use nor ornament and violently opposed to Israel.
Versi had previously complained about a very short article I had written for the Sun which simply called for a little more explanation about the causes of the exodus of the Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, a little bit of the back story. By which I meant the murders and atrocities committed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, including the massacre of 99 Hindu Burmese last year, violent attacks upon police stations and army posts, the persecution of non--Muslim Burmese citizens — stuff which began in 1961 and is still going on. This seemed to me at least germane to the issue and yet it was scarcely mentioned by the BBC (or the liberal broadsheets), delighted that they had found a story where, for once, Muslims were simply pristine victims and could be presented as such.
But this was also an example of my bigotry, apparently. A wish to hear two sides is bigotry incarnate, I suppose. But then I scrolled through Versi’s Twitter feed and the obsession with Israel was all too apparent. In my book, that’s anti-Semitism, no matter how much Miqdaad might tell you he loves Jews and some of his best friends are Jewish. If you are not Jewish or Palestinian but are nonetheless obsessed beyond measure with the supposed perfidy of the Israeli state — not the perfidy of Iran or North Korea, just Israel — then I reckon that’s indicative, you know?
The present crisis within the Labour party reminds me of the time when I was filming a television documentary in Palestine a few years back. One after another the interviewees lined up in that flyblown, arid landscape. Grizzled old thugs from Al-Fatah. Sinister bespectacled little Hamas factotums. Peasant farmers, middle-class teachers, landowners and scruffy teenagers in Barcelona shirts. In front of the camera they all said the same thing: ‘Jews are our frenz. We have no quarrel with Jews. Only the Israeli state!’ And then, when the camera was turned off, they all said the same thing. ‘There is a reason nobody likes them, isn’t there?’ And ‘Nobody will tell the truth because they control the media.’ And ‘The United States and Britain are run by Jews.’
This happened not once but every time, with every interview, once the camera was turned off. A deep, immutable and deranged hatred drawn directly from a sacred text. Exactly the same sort of hatred you will find today on the Momentum left, acquired in part from the protected characteristics of the Muslims whom they unconditionally support, and partly from Christianity’s own dark history of oppression of the Jews.
Offer ends in:
