![\"corbyn](\"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/corbyn-the-Js.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nEnd-of-year polls are always popular as a way to gauge significant social and political trends over the past year and predict where things are heading in the next.<\/span><\/p>\n But a recent poll of European Jews \u2013 the largest such survey in the world \u2013 is being used to paint a deeply misleading picture of British society and an apparent problem of a new, left wing form of anti-semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n The survey was conducted by the European Union\u2019s agency on fundamental rights and was given great prominence in the liberal-left British daily the Guardian<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n The newspaper highlighted one area of life in which Britain scored worse with Jews than any of the other 12 member states surveyed. Some 84 per cent of Jews in the UK believe there is a major problem with anti-semitism in British politics.<\/span><\/p>\n As a result, nearly a third say they have considered emigrating \u2013 presumably most of them to Israel, where the Law of Return offers an open-door policy to all Jews in the world.<\/span><\/p>\n Britain scored only slightly better on indices other than politics. Some 75 per cent said they thought anti-semitism was generally a problem in the UK, up from 48 per cent in 2012. The average score in the 12 EU states with significant Jewish populations was 70 per cent.<\/span><\/p>\n Jeremy Corbyn, head of the UK\u2019s opposition Labour party, has faced a barrage of criticism since he was elected leader more than three years ago for presiding over a supposedly endemic anti-semitism problem in his party.<\/span><\/p>\n The Guardian<\/em> has been at the forefront of framing Corbyn as either indifferent to, or actively assisting in, the supposed rise of anti-semitism in Labour. Now the paper has a senior European politician echoing its claims.<\/span><\/p>\n Relating to the poll, Vera Jourova, the EU\u2019s commissioner for justice, helpfully clarified what Britain\u2019s terrible results in the political sphere signified.<\/span><\/p>\n The paper quoted her on Corbyn: \u201cI always use the phrase \u2018Let\u2019s not play with fire\u2019, let\u2019s be aware of what happened in the past. And let\u2019s not make the same mistake of tolerating it. It is not enough just to be silent \u2026 I hope he [Corbyn] will pay attention to this survey.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n However, both Jourova\u2019s warnings and an apparent perception among British Jews of an anti-semitism problem fuelled by Corbyn fly in the face of real-world evidence.<\/span><\/p>\n Other surveys show that, when measured by objective criteria, the Labour party scores relatively well: the percentage of members holding anti-semitic views is substantially lower than in the ruling Conservative party and much the same as in Britain\u2019s third party, the Liberal Democrats.<\/span><\/p>\n For example, twice as many Conservatives as Labour party members believe typically anti-semitic stereotypes, such as that Jews chase money or that Jews are less loyal to Britain.<\/span><\/p>\n Even more significantly, the percentage of Labour party members who hold such prejudices has fallen dramatically across the board since Corbyn became leader.<\/span><\/p>\n That suggests that the new members who joined after Corbyn became leader \u2013 a massive influx has made his party the largest in Europe \u2013 are less likely to be anti-semitic than those who joined under previous Labour leaders.<\/span><\/p>\n In other words, the evidence suggests very persuasively that Corbyn has been a force for eradicating, or at least diluting, existing and rather marginal anti-semitic views in the Labour party. More so even than the previous leader, Ed Miliband, who was himself Jewish.<\/span><\/p>\n But all of this, yet again, went unremarked by the Guardian<\/em> and other British media, which have been loudly declaiming a specific \u201canti-semitism problem\u201d in Labour for three years without a shred of concrete evidence for it.<\/span><\/p>\n There are good grounds for Jews to feel threatened in much of Europe at the moment, with the return of ugly ethnic nationalisms that many assumed had been purged after the Second World War.<\/span><\/p>\n And Brexit \u2013 Britain\u2019s planned exit from the European Union \u2013 does indeed appear to have unleashed or renewed nativist sentiment among a section of the UK population. But such prejudices dominate on the right, not the left. Certainly Corbyn, a lifelong and very prominent anti-racism activist, has not been stoking nativist attitudes.<\/span><\/p>\n The unexplored assumption by the Guardian<\/em> and the rest of the corporate media, as well as by Jourova, is that the rise in British Jews\u2019 concerns about anti-semitism in politics refers exclusively to Corbyn rather than a very different problem: of a resurgent white nationalism on the right.<\/span><\/p>\n But let\u2019s assume that they are correct that the poll solely registers Jewish worries about Corbyn.<\/span><\/p>\n A separate finding in the EU survey underscored how Jewish opinion on anti-semitism and Corbyn may be far less straightforward than Jourova\u2019s presentation suggests \u2013 and how precisely the wrong conclusions are likely to be drawn from the results.<\/span><\/p>\n Buried in the Guardian<\/em> report was a starkly anomalous finding \u2013 from Hungary.<\/span><\/p>\n Hungary is a country in which Jews and other minorities undoubtedly face a very pressing threat to their safety. Its ultra-nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orban, used the general election in April to whip up a frenzy of anti-Jewish sentiment.<\/span><\/p>\n He placed the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire George Soros at the centre of his anti-immigration campaign, suggesting that the philanthropist was secretly pulling the strings of the opposition party to flood the country with \u201cforeigners\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n In the run-up to the election, his government erected giant posters and billboards all over the country showing a chuckling George Soros next to the words: \u201cDon\u2019t let Soros have the last laugh.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Raiding the larder of virtually every historic anti-semitic trope, Orban declared in an election speech:<\/span><\/p>\n We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the world.<\/span><\/p>\n All of this should be seen in the context of Orban\u2019s recent praise for Miklos Horthy, a former Hungarian leader who was an ally of Hitler\u2019s. Orban has called him an \u201cexceptional statesman\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n So did Hungarian Jews express to EU pollsters heightened fears for their community\u2019s safety? Strangely, they did not. In fact, the percentage who regarded anti-semitism as a problem in Hungary was only slightly above the EU average and far below the concerns expressed by French Jews.<\/span><\/p>\n Not only that, but the proportion of Hungarian Jews fearful of anti-semitism has actually dropped over the past six years. Some 77 percent see anti-semitism as a problem today, compared to 89 percent in 2012, when the poll was last conducted.<\/span><\/p>\n So, the survey\u2019s results are more than a little confounding.<\/span><\/p>\n On the one hand, at least according to the British media and the EU, British Jews are in a heightened state of fear about the UK Labour party, where the evidence suggests an already marginal problem of anti-semitism is actually in decline. And on the other, Hungarian Jews\u2019 fears of anti-semitism are waning, even though the evidence suggests anti-semitism there is on the rise and government-sanctioned.<\/span><\/p>\n There is, however, a way to explain this paradox \u2013 and it has nothing to do with anti-semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n Corbyn\u2019s socialist-lite agenda faces a devastating array of opponents that include British business; the entire spectrum of the UK corporate media, including its supposedly liberal components; and, significantly in this case, the ultra-nationalist government of Israel, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.<\/span><\/p>\n The British establishment fears Corbyn poses a challenge to the further entrenchment of neoliberal orthodoxy they benefit from.<\/span><\/p>\n Meanwhile, Israeli politicians loathe Corbyn because he has made support for the Palestinian people a key part of his platform, becoming the first European leader to prioritise a Palestinian right to justice over Israel\u2019s right to maintain its 51-year belligerent occupation.<\/span><\/p>\n Hungary\u2019s Viktor Orban, by contrast, is beloved of big business, as well as the country\u2019s mainstream media, and, again significantly, the Israeli government.<\/span><\/p>\n Rather than distancing himself from Orban and his Jew-baiting electioneering in Hungary, Netanyahu has actually sanctioned it. He has called Orban a \u201ctrue friend of Israel\u201d, thanked him for \u201cdefending Israel\u201d, and joined the Hungarian leader in denouncing Soros.<\/span><\/p>\n Netanyahu, like Orban, intensely dislikes Soros\u2019s liberalism and his support for open borders. Netanyahu shares Orban\u2019s fears that a flood of refugees will disrupt his efforts to make his state as ethnically pure as possible.<\/span><\/p>\n Earlier this year, for example, Netanyahu claimed that Soros had funded human rights organisations to help African asylum seekers in Israel avoid a government programme to expel them.<\/span><\/p>\n Netanyahu has many practical and ideological reasons to support not only Orban but the new breed of ultra-nationalist leaders emerging in states like Poland, Italy, France and elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n Nativism in European states is primarily directed against Muslim and Arab immigrants arriving from the Middle East and north Africa, though domestic Jews could well become collateral damage in any future purge of \u201cforeigners\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n Europe\u2019s ultra-nationalist leaders are therefore more likely to sympathise with Israel and its own \u201cArab-Muslim problem\u201d, especially since Netanyahu and the Israeli right have proved adept at falsely presenting the Palestinians as immigrants rather than the region\u2019s native population.<\/span><\/p>\n Netanyahu would also like to see Europe paralysed by political differences, so it is incapable of lobbying for a two-state solution, as it has been doing ineffectively for many years; it is unable to agree on funding human rights activism designed to protect Palestinian rights; and it is too weak to move towards the adoption of sanctions against Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n But most importantly, Netanyahu and the Israeli right can identify with the anti-semitic view of \u201cthe Jew\u201d shared by Europe\u2019s hardline nationalists.<\/span><\/p>\n These far-right groups see Jews as outsiders, a discrete community that cannot be assimilated or exist peacefully among them, and one that has separate loyalties and should either be encouraged to leave or be sent elsewhere.<\/span><\/p>\n Netanyahu agrees. He also believes Jews are different, that they are a distinct and separate people, that their primary loyalties are tribal, to their own kind, and not to other states, and that they can only ever really be at home and properly Jewish in Israel, their true home.<\/span><\/p>\n Zsofia Kata Vincze, a professor of ethnology in Budapest, recently referred to the ideological affinity between Netanyahu\u2019s Zionism and Orban\u2019s Hungarian-Christian nativism:<\/span><\/p>\n They found a common language very easily. They kept talking about mutual values, which are nationalism, exclusivism \u2026 Hungarian purity, Jewish purity \u2026 against the Others.<\/span><\/p>\n In fact, Netanyahu\u2019s views are widely shared in Israel. A few years ago the celebrated liberal Israeli author A B Yehoshua outraged American Jews by saying they could only ever be what he called \u201cpartial Jews\u201d outside Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n Speaking of the divide between them and Israeli Jews, he said: \u201cIn no way are we the same thing \u2013 we are total and they are partial.\u201d He called the refusal of all Jews to live in Israel and become \u201ccomplete Jews \u2026 a very deep failure of the Jewish people\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n The high levels of racism among Israelis towards non-Jews is highlighted in every poll.<\/span><\/p>\n According to one this month, more than half of Israeli Jews \u2013 or those willing to admit it \u2013 believed that \u201cmost Jews are better than most non-Jews because they were born Jews\u201d. Only a fifth rejected the statement outright.<\/span><\/p>\n Some 74 per cent were disturbed by hearing Arabic, the mother tongue of the fifth of the country\u2019s population who are Palestinian citizens. And a further 88 per cent did not want their son to befriend an Arab girl.<\/span><\/p>\n A separate poll this month found that, apart from Greeks, Israelis hold the most anti-immigrant views of 27 countries surveyed \u2013 more so even than Hungarians.<\/span><\/p>\n By immigrants, of course, Israelis mean non-Jews. They do not regard the millions of Jews who have arrived in Israel from Europe and the Americas over the past decades as immigrants. Instead they are viewed as olim, or those who \u201cascend\u201d to Israel, supposedly returning to their biblically ordained home.<\/span><\/p>\n It is this ideological affinity \u2013 between a European ultra-nationalism and the kind of Zionist ultra-nationalism dominant in Israel \u2013 that explains why the far-right in Europe venerates Israel while despising Jews, and why so many Israelis prefer an Orban to a Soros.<\/span><\/p>\n And it also, of course, explains why Netanyahu and most Israelis detest Corbyn.<\/span><\/p>\n Not only does Corbyn offer an inclusive domestic political agenda, unlike the Orbans of Europe, but worse he also refuses to shy away from confronting the legacy of European racism and colonialism.<\/span><\/p>\n The chief historic victims of that racism in Europe were Jews. But today that same European racism is channeled both into fervent support for Israel as a supposedly \u201csafe haven\u201d for Jews and into a general indifference \u2013 aside from handwringing \u2013 towards the Palestinians who for decades have been displaced and oppressed by Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n Corbyn represents a huge break with that tradition and is therefore a threat to Israel. That is why behind the scenes Israel has been seeking to redefine anti-semitism in a way that tars anti-racists like Corbyn and his supporters in the Labour party.<\/span><\/p>\n I have documented before in Middle East Eye Israel\u2019s role in stoking the supposed \u201canti-semitism crisis\u201d in Labour and in cornering the party into adopting a new, convoluted definition of anti-semitism that for the first time makes criticism of Israel the benchmark of anti-semitic discourse.<\/span><\/p>\n Last month Netanyahu made that conflation explicit in a video message to a conference in Vienna. While praising Orban, he averred: \u201cAnti-semitism and anti-Zionism, anti-Israeli polices \u2013 the idea that the Jewish people don\u2019t have the right for a state \u2013 that\u2019s the ultimate anti-semitism of today.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But it is not just Netanyahu who is stoking the patently preposterous notion that anti-racists like Corbyn \u2013 those whose principles require that they reject Jewish privilege over Palestinians \u2013 are really secret Jew-haters.<\/span><\/p>\n If that were the case, the criticisms of Corbyn might not have as much traction with British Jews as this month\u2019s EU poll suggests.<\/span><\/p>\n The UK media have played a vital role in promoting a false image of Corbyn, as a survey by the Media Reform Coalition found in September when it analysed British coverage of the Labour party.<\/span><\/p>\n The coalition, which is led by academics, concluded that there had been systematic \u201cdisinformation\u201d from media outlets. Inaccurate and misleading reporting by the supposedly liberal Guardian<\/em> was especially pronounced.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTwo thirds of the news segments on television contained at least one reporting error or substantive distortion,\u201d its researchers also discovered.<\/span><\/p>\n These failures included \u201cmarked skews in sourcing, omission of essential context or right of reply, misquotation, and false assertions made either by journalists themselves or sources whose contentious claims were neither challenged nor countered.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The group is reluctant to infer that these consistent media failures indicate an intention to smear Corbyn.<\/span><\/p>\n But revelations this month provide reason to believe that powerful interests in the UK are prepared to use dirty tricks to keep the Labour leader out of power.<\/span><\/p>\n According to hacked documents, a network of politicians, academics, journalists and military personnel in Britain and elsewhere have been engaged in covert propaganda to shore up pro-western narratives and smear dissidents through an organisation called \u2018Integrity Initiative.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n In the UK, these operations have been overseen by an even more shadowy group called the Institute for Statecraft, with a fake address in Scotland. In fact, it is headquartered in London and staffed by former and possibly current military intelligence officers.<\/span><\/p>\n The UK government has been forced to admit that the institute has received substantial payments from the foreign office and defence ministry, and from the British army.<\/span><\/p>\n Much of what the Integrity Initiative is up to is unclear, but from public records \u2013 such as its Twitter history \u2013 it can be seen that it has repeatedly sought to damage Corbyn and his key advisers by implicating them in supposed Russian \u201cdisinformation\u201d campaigns.<\/span><\/p>\n It is worth recalling that shortly after Corbyn was elected Labour leader in summer 2015 an unnamed British army general was given a platform in the Establishment\u2019s newspaper, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times, to denounce Corbyn. He warned that the army would use \u201cwhatever means possible, fair or foul\u201d to prevent the Labour leader from becoming prime minister and being able to carry out his policies.<\/span><\/p>\n Certainly, the fingerprints of the British establishment now look all too visible on some of the recent efforts to malign Corbyn in the media.<\/span><\/p>\n Maybe not surprisingly, despite the huge implications of the story for British politics, it has been given only the barest reporting in that same media. At the time of writing, the Guardian<\/em> had referred to the Integrity Initiative only in the most pro forma fashion \u2013 in the context of government denials of wrongdoing.<\/span><\/p>\n Is it credible that those covertly trying to paint Corbyn as a \u201cKremlin stooge\u201d are not also seeking to exploit Israeli covert efforts to vilify the Labour leader as someone who encourages anti-semitism in his own party?<\/span><\/p>\n There is a serious, if rarely explored ideological tension between Israeli-style Zionism and a progressive or liberal outlook, just as there is between Orbanism and liberalism.<\/span><\/p>\n In a political climate where European nativists are on the rise, the stark choice facing Europe\u2019s Jews is to double-down on their traditional left-liberal worldview or abandon it entirely and throw their hat in with Israel\u2019s own nativists. Corbyn represents the first choice, Netanyahu\u2019s hardline Zionism the second.<\/span><\/p>\n Bombarded by disinformation campaigns, it looks like many British Jews are being misled into seeing Corbyn as a threat \u2013 of a confected \u201cleft wing anti-semitism\u201d \u2013 rather than as the best hope of inoculating Britain against the resurgence of a very real menace of right wing anti-semitism.<\/span><\/p>\n Jewish emigration to Israel will make matters far worse. It will pander to the prejudices of Europe\u2019s white nationalists, weaken the European left, and bolster an equally ugly Jewish nationalism that requires the oppression of Palestinians.<\/span><\/p>\n\u2018Playing with fire\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Labour party problem?<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Prejudices in decline<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Resurgent white nationalism<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Anti-Jewish sentiment<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The Hungary anomaly<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Array of opponents<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Orban: Israel\u2019s \u2018true friend\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Hostility to Muslims<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Ethnic purity and the Other<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Only \u2018partial\u2019 Jews<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Anti-immigrant views<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Legacy of Europe\u2019s racism<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The \u2018ultimate\u2019 anti-semitism<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Media distortions<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Covert propaganda<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018Fair or foul means\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The real remedy<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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