Melanie Phillips's Blog, page 9

Jews and conservatism: an idea whose time has come

Last Sunday, I took part in the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York on Jews and conservatism. There were some excellent presentations from a line-up including Ruth Wisse, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Jonathan Haidt, Yoram Hazony and others.

The point of the conference was, in the JLC’s own words, to harness the power of conservative ideas to strengthen the Jewish people and revitalise American civic life.

It is not over-dramatic to say this is a project that is urgently needed to save the west. For the past several decades, the bedrock values of western civilisation have been under assault from the left’s “long march through the institutions”. The traditional family, the purpose of education and the very idea of the nation state based on historic western values have all been undermined, turned inside out and vilified.

At the root of this process is the belief on the left that the moral principles of the Hebrew Bible must be overthrown by secularism. Those principles which the Hebrew Bible introduced to the world include respecting the dignity of every human being and forming societies based on justice and compassion. It even introduced the revolutionary idea of a rational universe upon which western science is based and which made modernity a western concept.

The onslaught on western and Biblical culture and values has produced, in dire contrast, a culture of extreme individualism and social anarchy in which group fights group for power, man-made ideologies destroy the freedom to think and dissent and in which reason itself goes to the wall. Attacking the Biblical basis of the west is to cut off the branch on which it sits.

More chillingly still, this has all been done under the banner of “liberalism”, “tolerance” and “progressive thinking” on the basis that the Bible and its moral codes stand for the negation of liberty, conscience and rationality.

This is the kind of inversion of reality which is often called “Orwellian” and which owes its genesis to the mind-control perfected by the former Soviet Union to recalibrate the way people think and thus change society forever.

One might have thought that this war on the west by the cultural totalitarians of the left would have produced an energised and revitalised conservative resistance. On the contrary: failing to grasp the cultural revolution that has been under way, conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have scattered instead in intellectual disarray.

Spooked by the power of the left to change the cultural weather, they have either themselves chosen to go with the flow at least to some extent (hello, Theresa May) or show no interest in battling against it. They are no longer conservatives in anything but name. They have forgotten, or never understood in the first place, quite what they need to conserve.

This has all left American Jews in particular difficulties. Unlike British Jews, most of whom vote for the political party that at least calls itself Conservative, some three quarters of American Jews vote for a Democratic party that has embraced the identity politics, grievance culture and enraged narcissism that threaten to destroy American society.

Worse, these liberal Jews either embrace or minimise the animus against Israel and open antisemitism displayed on campus by the left and by personalities embraced by the Democratic party. Worse still, they have told themselves that these universalist, secular “liberal” values are authentic Jewish values. They are in fact the very antithesis of Judaism.

Thus liberal Jews – the overwhelming majority in America – are on course to destroy themselves as a community while aiding the left in the undermining of America.

That’s how bad it is. But here’s the hopeful thing. Last year saw the JLC’s first conference on Jews and conservatism and some 300 people turned up. This year, 800 attended with a further 200 on the waiting list, some reportedly offering in desperation black market prices for a ticket.

Something out there is changing, and in the right direction. The people, the ordinary, decent people who understand and value the basic principles of western culture and want to defend them, the American Jews who realise the terrible danger to their own community and who feel a duty and responsibility to help save American civic society, all those disenfranchised, silent millions are now beginning to stir. Conservatism, even for American Jews, is an idea whose time has come.

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Hatred of the Jews unites far left and right

Hatred of the Jews unites far left and right

Last Saturday a man called Robert Bowers allegedly walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue where the congregation was celebrating the sabbath and opened fire screaming “All Jews must die”. Eleven were killed and many others wounded.

Both Bowers and Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man accused of posting more than a dozen bombs to left-wing figures, are far-right conspiracy theorists. At the same time there are conspiracy theorists on the left who, like the far right, think that the Jews run American foreign policy in the interests of Israel.

The far right thrives on chaos, anarchic violence and the erosion of social norms. Which is where we’ve got to in Britain and America. Hatred and intimidation course through social media. People hurl insults at each other, destroying reputations and careers.

When a culture falls apart, people invariably turn on the Jews. Antisemitism is always the sign of a terminal cultural sickness. The Pittsburgh massacre was not just an attack on Jews. It was yet another warning to the west.

To read my whole Times column (£), please click here.

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The onslaught on the US border

There are now three waves of central American migrants aiming to force their way into the US across the border.

As reported here by JE Dyer, the first group was temporary halted by a Mexican police barricade.  Mexican authorities offered the migrants asylum, jobs, and an array of social assistance programs. When they refused them, the police took down the barricades and the migrants resumed their trek.

On Sunday afternoon, the second wave from Honduras reached the border with southern Mexico. The Mexican border guard requested entry in an orderly manner.

“The men at the front began to throw rocks, and rushed to attack the border gate.  According to news media on-scene, the attacking men broke down a gate and at least 100 of them were able to push through it.  An unknown number of people were injured in the resulting scuffle. A 26-year-old Honduran migrant reportedly died of a head injury, which some outlets are saying was the result of being hit by a rubber bullet from the Mexican guards”.

A third group is now setting out from El Salvador. “One young man held up a handy, professionally printed map of migrant routes through Central America and Mexico for a photo op.”

There has been much speculation about who is funding this prospective invasion across the US border. I have read several theories but have yet to see a convincing account. But I can’t help noticing a familiar pattern.

For Dyer goes on: “At the moment, the military troops are being dispatched solely for logistical support to the Border Patrol.  Clearly, however, the Border Patrol by itself won’t be able to mount the entire response if there is a coordinated, asymmetric attack by the migrants at the border.  Presumably any tactical border defense effort will be coordinated between the U.S. and Mexico; we can reasonably hope that no situation will deteriorate into the use of “military” style force against lightly-armed migrants.

“(They may be lightly armed, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt anyone.  No soldier or Border Patrolman is obliged, and none should be, to simply accept injury or death from flying rocks, or small arms the migrants may be carrying surreptitiously, because of an asymmetric force situation.  That said, not one of the men and women in uniform at the border wants to kill people”.

Remind you of anything? Like this?

Yup: this central American onslaught on the US border looks rather similar to the Gazan onslaught on the Israeli border. Similar optics: poor, downtrodden “refugees” using force of numbers and their own “defenceless” bodies to pit themselves against the firepower of the army of an “oppressive” state in order to storm illegally and (in Gaza) murderously into someone else’s country.

Now let’s look at some dots that might be joined up. Here is evidence by Emanuele Ottolenghi about the way Iran and Hezbollah have been radicalising thousands of Latin Americans to become a hotbed of anti-Americanism and a forward operating base for Iran.

During his confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo also noted that the “toxic crime-terror nexus” in Latin America, largely driven by the Lebanese Hezbollah group, “is fueling both the rising threat of global jihadism and the collapse of law and order across Latin America that is helping drive drugs and people northward into the United States.”

“It is thus facilitating their efforts to build safe havens for terrorists and a continent-wide terror infrastructure that they could use to strike U.S. targets,” he warned.

There may well be various different bodies behind the migrant onslaught. Trump tweeted that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with it. Of course he was duly bawled out for racism, imbecility, dog-whistling, racism, yada yada. Of course he couldn’t possibly be reflecting intelligence information he had received. Ya think?

Vice-President Mike Pence told Fox News: “What the president of Honduras told me is that the caravan was organized by leftist organizations, political activists within Honduras, and he said it was being funded by outside groups, and even from Venezuela”.

Hamas runs Gaza. Hamas is trying to storm the Israel border. Hamas is supported by Iran. Hamas has its own deep ties with Latin America.

Coincidence?

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How the west has created antisemitism denial

Acute concern continues to grow about the antisemitism and Nazi imagery now on such rampant and brazen display in the West.

In America, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has spawned anti-Israel incitement on dozens of campuses, involving repeated accusations of Nazism and fascism along with virtually every other crime against humanity.

In Britain, some of the most egregious examples of this venom have surfaced in the Labour Party under the leadership of the ultra-leftist Jeremy Corbyn and his “Momentum” comrades.

Last week, Momentum joined other far-left and pro-Palestinian activists at a meeting in London as part of a national tour to build support for their Israel and Jew-bashing platform. Two Jewish women who went to protest Labour antisemitism were roughed up, with one of them hospitalized after being kicked in the head.

Jews who support Israel are increasingly being called Nazis and fascists, particularly if they draw attention to the disproportionate amount of antisemitism in the Muslim community. This obscene comparison is itself deemed antisemitic under the definition adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

Many people are understandably aghast and bewildered that antisemitism and such abuse of the memory of the Holocaust and the Nazi nightmare could have returned in this way.

An even more painful question surely needs to be asked. For the West isn’t short of Holocaust memorials. Schoolchildren go in their thousands on supervised visits to Auschwitz. Holocaust education has been a feature of school curricula for some three decades.

All this has been done in the belief that, with proper education about what happened in Nazi Germany, those horrors will never be repeated. And yet here we are again with rampant antisemitism stalking the West.

Who, though, can be surprised given the way in which the Holocaust has been relativized? For one of the underlying messages of much Holocaust education and memorializing is that there was nothing unique about the Holocaust of the Jews. Children are taught instead that there have been many Holocausts.

And the message underlying that is that absolutely everyone is capable of becoming a Nazi. So for those who buy into the Palestinian narrative of victimization, it’s a small step to claim that in Israel the Jewish people whose state was recreated from the ashes of the Holocaust have turned into Nazis themselves.

A 2015 research study by the Centre for Holocaust Education at University College, London interviewed more than 8,000 pupils aged 11-18 in England, where the Holocaust is the only compulsory subject in the national history curriculum. This found that many children had no understanding of Nazis as a political movement and thought they were merely “Hitler’s minions.”

Some 32% of secondary school students believed that Britain declared war on Germany because of the Holocaust. In fact, of course, Britain declared war in 1939 in response to the German invasion of Poland.

The study found that while most students knew Jews were the primary victims, they had little understanding of why the Jews were persecuted. The students’ explanations often relied on misconceptions and stereotypes. A number of them referred to the Jews being “rich” or “having power” and being perceived as a threat as a result. They had no idea what antisemitism actually was.

Similarly, while other groups were often listed as victims of the Nazis, few students could explain why they too were targeted beyond a vague notion of hatred of people who were “different.”

In America, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany made a similar finding. Its study of 1,350 adults found two-thirds of American millennials could not identify Auschwitz, while 22% said they hadn’t heard of the Holocaust or weren’t sure whether they had or not.

Again, who can be surprised? The word “genocide” is now used to describe many mass killings. So the attempt to annihilate an entire people – the true meaning of the word – has been lost.

“Victim culture” encourages an ever-increasing range of racial, religious, sexual, gender groups and others to regard themselves as victims of oppression. But if everyone’s a victim, no-one’s a victim.

The very idea of victimhood has thus been devalued. Hatred has been made vacuous: a vague, ghostly, nightmarish shadow that now points an accusing finger at each and every one of us before dissolving before our eyes and vanishing out of sight.

“Social justice warriors” have not just produced a kind of victimhood fatigue within society in general. They have also helped obscure the unique significance of the Nazi Holocaust.

Politicians are also to blame. In America, both Republicans and Democrats use these comparisons to insult each other. Earlier this year, Donald Trump Jr. said the Democratic Party platform was similar to the 1930s Nazi party.

Among Democrats, it is commonplace to compare US President Donald Trump to Hitler and the Republicans to Nazis.

Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price produced an ad for the mid-term Congressional elections next month in which he compared Trump to Hitler.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Democratic Representative Yvette Clarke stood in front of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Manhattan and declared: “We are standing in front of a building that has become the headquarters for the Gestapo of the United States of America.”

Even Jewish Democrats are guilty of this. Democratic Representative Stephen Cohen was forced to apologize after he likened the Republicans’ promotion of healthcare policy to the propaganda of Hitler’s henchman Joseph Goebbels.

If everyone’s a Nazi, the real Nazis stop being uniquely evil. They become instead Everyman. Thus the Holocaust is traduced, bad people get a free pass and the innocent are demonized.

The impulse behind Holocaust education and memorializing was noble and understandable. But it missed something crucial.

This was the need to teach the world about Jewish history in both the land of Israel and the Diaspora; to teach the world what it has done to the Jews over the course of recorded time; to teach the world how Judaism itself embodies a unique and unbreakable connection between the people, the religion and the land.

Judaism lies at the heart of western values. Yet it has been misrepresented and demonized by Christianity, Islam and secularism. It is that continuing ignorance and bigotry over Judaism itself which fuels the demonization of Israel, the misreading of the Holocaust and the return of open antisemitism.

In a culture framed by Holocaust memorializing, the West has itself become the avatar of antisemitism denial.

Jerusalem Post

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Preachers of hate prey on our liberal values

Preachers of hate prey on our liberal values

What do you do with a problem like Anjem Choudary? In 2016, he was jailed for five and a half years for inviting support for Islamic State. Last Friday, he was released on licence halfway through his sentence.

Choudary, who emerged from prison reportedly reaffirming his support for Isis, is no run-of-the-mill extremist. He has arguably had more influence on radicalising British Muslims than has any other Islamist.

Choudary avoided arrest for many years by exploiting legal loopholes. Few believe the threat he poses will now be neutralised, despite the heavy cost to the public purse of the attempt to do so.

To read my whole Times column, please click here.

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The caravan of hatred marches ever on

The mainstream media is continuing to betray journalism by framing President Trump’s utterances and policies in a jaw-dropping way.

Two days ago, Trump told a rally he was a nationalist. Pass the smelling salts!

He made it quite clear what he meant by this: that he loved America. He was using it as a synonym for patriotism. Good luck with that one! What he meant was irrelevant. He had apparently damned himself irrevocably as an anti-human. The New York Times reported:

“Asked in the Oval Office on Tuesday why he used that word given its association with racist movements, Mr. Trump professed ignorance of its history but did not back off. ‘I never heard that theory about being a nationalist,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard them all. But I’m somebody who loves our country.” Undaunted, he added: ‘I am a nationalist. It’s a word that hasn’t been used too much. Some people use it, but I’m very proud. I think it should be brought back.’”

What happened then was no less disgraceful for being entirely predictable. Elements of the media claimed he had sent out a racist dog-whistle by using the n-word and had thus revealed himself to be a Nazi. As the Daily Caller reported:

“CNN’s Jim Acosta asked the president if he was sending coded messages to white nationalists by using the term, then completely mischaracterized Trump’s response. Then MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace compared the president to Hitler for using the term.”

Do you think Nicole Wallace knows what Hitler actually did? Do you think she cares?

Then there’s the central American caravan. Caravan? A caravan looks like this.

The march of thousands of mainly male would-be migrants marching through Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador with the aim of crossing the US border looks like this.

That’s not a caravan. It’s an invasion force.

If Trump doesn’t admit all these people into America, that will apparently prove that his policy of enforcing border controls and stopping illegal immigration is racist. Yet who said this in 2005:

“We all agree on the need to better secure the border and to punish employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants. We are a generous and welcoming people, here in the United States, but those who enter the country illegally, and those who employ them, disrespect the rule of law and they are showing disregard for those who are following the law.

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States, undetected, undocumented, unchecked and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants in this country.”

You guessed it: then Senator Barack Obama.

But if Trump resists an unprecedented, organised invasion force of thousands of potential illegal immigrants attempting to overwhelm controls at the American border, that’s racist white nationalism.

Of course.

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Wilful denial over Britain’s sex grooming gangs

When 20 Pakistani Muslim men were convicted at the end of last week on charges of more than 120 child sex offences including rape, inciting child prostitution and abducting a child, the Home Secretary Sajid Javid tweeted:

“These sick Asian paedophiles are finally facing justice. I want to commend the bravery of the victims. For too long, they were ignored. Not on my watch. There will be no no-go areas.”

He was immediately accused of racism for mentioning the ethnicity of these criminals. Javid’s language was indeed misleading, although that wasn’t what got people foaming with fury.

For these criminals weren’t just “Asian”. The gang wasn’t composed of Chinese or Vietnamese, Hindus or Sikhs. Its members had a very specific ethnic and religious identity as men of Pakistani Muslim origin.

No matter. The Labour MP David Lammy said: “It does no service to the victims of this evil to pin the blame on any one group.” But those who maintain that the ethnic and/or religious identity of these criminals is irrelevant couldn’t be more wrong.

For this was but the latest in a series of criminal trials of men involved not just in sex offences but in a particular, and particularly odious, pattern of criminal activity which has claimed several thousand victims over a period over the past two decades.

This involves targeting specifically white girls, mainly young teenagers or pre-teens from the wrong side of the tracks, and luring them into situations where they are plied with drugs or alcohol and then raped, pimped, prostituted and treated as dehumanised sexual objects often by multiple men over several hours at a time.

This systematic abuse and violaton of so many young girls over such a long period of time was first exposed by my Times colleague Andrew Norfolk in 2011. Astoundingly, it had been ignored for years by police and welfare officials who had looked the other way. Some, particularly the police, dismissed these girls as white trash; the main reason, though, for ignoring what was happening was that these officials were frightened of being accused of racism if they did anything about it.

The latest convictions, following three linked trials at Leeds crown court, involved 15 child victims in the Huddersfield area. Other towns where these grooming gangs are known to have operated include Keighley, Bradford Rochdale, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, Bristol and Telford. 

These appalling offences involve anti-white racism. That is apparently unsayable. They also raise urgent questions about Muslim culture. That is even more unsayable. For although these men represent in their number a tiny minority of Pakistani Muslim men in Britain, this is not irrelevant. When such a strong pattern emerges in the background of the vast majority of those who commit a particular kind of crime, and over such a wide swathe of the country, it is essential to look at how that background may have contributed to that crime.

Yet for some, that is even more unsayable. Zubaida Haque, the deputy director of the Runnymede Trust, said: “It’s extraordinary that Sajid Javid set up an inquiry to look at why Asian men were more likely to be in CSE [child sexual exploitation] grooming gangs when his priority all the time should have been why and how victims were vulnerable and where safeguards had failed.”

What’s extraordinary is that such critics are so uninterested in the perpetrators. Just imagine if, say, gangs of white Jehovah’s Witnesses were targeting black or Asian girls up and down the country and raping, pimping and prostituting them. Can anyone doubt the media would be heaving with pieces denouncing the religion and culture of such people for producing such systemic, racist and abusive behaviour? Yet very few pieces have appeared about the grooming gangs, other than news reports.

Some very brave Muslims have spoken out about the disturbing implications of these activities for their community. They are ignored. Others who do speak up honestly about it find themselves victimised – and their plight ignored.

Sarah Champion, Labour MP for Rotherham, said there was “a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls” in her constituency. For this, Muslim and Labour party activists branded her a bigot, an Islamophobe and a racist and there were calls for her to be expelled from the party. Of course.

To dismiss or ignore the cultural factors behind this pattern of appalling crimes, or worse to pillory those who raise them as “Islamophobic”, is to connive at the perpetuation of such abuse of young vulnerable girls.

#MeToo, anyone?

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Our crazy world: Labour antisemitism, Brexit, Khashoggi

Our crazy world: Labour antisemitism, Brexit, Khashoggi

Please join me below as I chew over some of the major issues around at the moment with Avi Abelow of Israel Unwired.

We discuss the recent shocking assault on two Jewish women when they attempted to protest against Labour party antisemitism at a meeting of hard-left and anti-Israel activists.

We also discuss the latest crunch moment for Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May in the country’s never-ending Brexit agony (you can read my thoughts about this here).

And finally we discuss the presumed murder of the Saudi exile Jamal Khashoggi and the implications of this debacle for Saudi/US relations (you can read my detailed take on this here).

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All that matters now to save the UK: Theresa May has to go

According to the Sunday Times, Theresa May has 72 hours to save her premiership before a crucial back-bench 1922 Committee meeting on Wednesday. In my view, that should read 72 hours to save the country.

Let’s cut to the chase. Forget the Irish backstop, transition extensions, the role of her chief Brexit official Oliver Robbins and all the other interminable details and lurches involved in this process. If the UK is actually to leave the EU, May has to go. If she stays as Prime Minister, it won’t.

It is only now apparently dawning on her Conservative colleagues that May will not be diverted from a deal which will keep the UK tied up with the EU for the foreseeable future.

That was always entirely predictable from the start and for this reason. The EU’s red lines – particularly its need to keep the UK attached in some way to the customs union, and its need to be seen to punish Britain severely in order to prevent other member states from attempting a similar exit – were real red lines. They were therefore non-negotiable.

May’s ostensible red lines – no single market or customs union, “Brexit means Brexit” – were not her real red lines at all. In reality, she had one very different red line. That was leaving the EU with no deal being done. That was what she was not prepared to tolerate.

So she handed victory to the EU from the start. She was not only negotiating with a non-negotiable agenda but she made it clear – not least by the shocking absence of any preparations for “no deal” – that whatever she said in public, a bad deal would be preferable to “no deal”.

The logic of this was that she would have no option but to accept the EU’s red lines. The EU understood that elementary logic. She did not.

When she said she would stubbornly hold firm to her red lines and uphold the British people’s decision and the best interests of the country, this meant she would stubbornly hold firm to her real red line which meant betraying the British people’s decision to leave the EU and undermining the interests of the country.

Those of us who always understood this – the supposedly “hardline” or “extreme” Brexiteers in BBC-speak – are in fact the only ones who have called this correctly.

The British people have been subjected to a ferocious scare campaign based on the premise that “no deal” would be an unmitigated disaster for the country. Of course, “no deal” would be worse than an advantageous deal. But that was never going to be on offer.

“No deal” would undoubtedly have a downside. Not only, though, would this be manageable but, as outlined here, it would be offset by greater potential advantages. These depend on the UK’s freedom to negotiate its own bilateral deals unshackled from EU constraints that have prevented it from acting in its own best interests until now.

Those who portray “no deal” as jumping off the cliff without a parachute fail to acknowledge the impact of this shock on the EU itself. EU member states would hardly think it’s in their interests for their planes to be unable to land at Heathrow or for their goods lorries to be stuck at Dover because of gridlock caused by customs checks.

With the balance of trade in Britain’s favour, not to mention intangibles such as intelligence co-operation, the global primacy of the English language, London’s pre-eminent status as the world’s financial hub and so on, the EU has always stood to lose more from Brexit than the UK will lose from departing.

Few Brexiteers can have believed that the immense challenge of disentangling the UK from the EU would be achieved without any pain. But most undoubtedly believed this would be a price worth paying for the priceless long-term political, social and economic gains.

And that’s what a proper national leader should be saying right now to the British people and should have said from the start. A national challenge on the scale of Brexit requires above all leadership of a high order. Yet Theresa May has provided no leadership at all.

What’s held her colleagues back from getting rid of her is the absence of a credible candidate to replace her as Prime Minister. Transfixed by the superstar phenomenon of Boris Johnson but distrusting his flaws, they have been paralysed by timidity, head-in-the-sandery and institutionalised mutual knife-in-the-backery.

At this 59th minute of the eleventh hour, they must now all re-focus with ruthless self-discipline. Britain does not at present need a new person to govern the country because there is no actual government going on. All serious government business has been subsumed by the great Brexit agony.

What’s needed now – and it’s the only thing that’s needed – is a leader who will take the UK out of the EU. Not “out” in name only while leaving the UK half-in, half-out and therefore not out at all because it remains tied up with EU laws and processes. Unequivocally, indisputably, unalterably out.

Once the UK has safely left the EU, only then can the discussion start about who would make the best Prime Minister to govern the country. Because if the UK does not unequivocally leave the EU, it will never again become an independent nation able to govern itself in its best interests. In those circumstances, the question of who becomes the leader of a government that doesn’t actually have the power to govern becomes of no real consequence, since the UK will itself become of no real consequence as a nation that isn’t really a nation at all.

Only if the UK leaves the EU will the occupant of No 10 Downing Street actually matter. If the UK doesn’t leave, the Prime Minister won’t matter much at all. At this historic moment, all that matters is that the UK actually leaves the EU. That’s why Theresa May has to go.

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Jeremy Corbyn is not the cause of left-wing Jew hate, he’s the result

The Academy of Ideas, a vigorous generator of debate, conferences and discussions, originated in a group of revolutionary communists. Some years ago, they turned on a dime and became libertarians fiercely critical of the left (don’t ask).

The Academy is one of the most refreshingly open-minded forums for discussing contemporary trends that at present exists. Last Sunday, I took part in a panel discussion on antisemitism at its annual Battle of Ideas talk-fest in London.

The audience was largely sympathetic to concerns about the resurgence of antisemitism in Britain and Europe. There was, nevertheless, some resistance to identifying this problem with the Labour party and the left.

In the discussion about the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bigotry erupting in Labour’s ranks, there were demands for statistical evidence to prove this was more significant on the left than anywhere else. Examples of some of the appalling things that people on the left had been saying about Israel and the Jews were dismissed as merely “anecdotal” and “emotional”.

This was as offensive as it was revealing. It brushed aside reality as of no consequence; it disdained lived experience as of less consequence than “research” whose methodology is often questionable but which flatters the vanity of academics.

In any event, antisemitic discourse is frequently camouflaged and unrecorded. It doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical collection. Even more to the point, the demand to prove bigotry through quantifiable data is a requirement made of no other group that claims it is being victimised.

It’s a demand not made of black people or Muslims or women or gays. It’s only made of Jews. It’s a double standard which is itself is a form of prejudice, no less real for being unconscious.

Obviously, antisemitism is not confined to the left but rears up across the political spectrum. In the second Iraq war, you could barely have slid a cigarette paper between The Guardian and the Daily Mail over their warped and paranoid perception that a Jewish conspiracy between Jerusalem and Washington had sent western soldiers into a disastrous war in the interests of Israel.

The far right remain viscerally anti-Jew. But their numbers and influence are minimal. Antisemitism on the left poses the greatest threat because the left is so dominant in our culture. It represents the default position in the universities, the media, the cultural world. And its antisemitism long predates Jeremy Corbyn.

In 2009, Caryl Churchill’s play Seven Jewish Children accused the Jews of inflicting upon others through the State of Israel the exterminatory treatment that had been meted out to them.

It rooted this murderous trait in Judaism itself, with lines such as this one: “Tell her I don’t care if the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re chosen people.”

More than a decade earlier Jim Allen’s 1987 play Perdition foreshadowed the Ken Livingstone row by claiming falsely that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis.

There are two two principal reasons why the left is institutionally antisemitic.

The first is that “Palestine” is its signature cause of causes. And the “Palestine” cause inescapably rests upon the extermination of Israel and the obliteration of the Jewish people from their own national story in their ancient homeland — the triple connection which constitutes Judaism itself.

The second is that, for the left, the world is divided into the powerful and the powerless. Those with power can never be good; those without power can never be bad. So every group deemed to be powerless claims victim status.

But grotesquely, Jews aren’t seen as victims because, as everyone “knows”, they emerged from the Holocaust to run the financial world, the media, the law, the arts, American foreign policy.

What’s more, since Israel is highly armed (solely for its defence) the Jews are seen as an all-powerful global force.

And so ancient anti-Jewish paranoia has been given loathsome legs on the left. And hence also the left’s extreme reluctance to acknowledge the disproportionate involvement of Muslims in antisemitic incidents in Britain and Europe.

The frequency of overt antisemitism on the left is not the key issue. It’s rather the collusion by Jeremy Corbyn with this bigotry — not only his refusal to deal with it in his party, but the fact that he himself is associated with these attitudes.

This is a cultural poison of long standing of which Corbyn is not the cause but the extremely problematic result.

Jewish Chronicle

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