Britain: Jeremy Corbyn - They will tell any lies.

Jeremy Corbyn At Labor Rally

by Roger Silverman.

Since the election of lifelong socialist Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labor Party in 2015 by a landslide vote of ordinary rank-and-file workers, there has been an unprecedented campaign of abuse against him, not only at the hands of the Tories and the capitalist press, but equally from many sitting Labor MPs inherited from the days of Tony Blair's right-wing "New Labor" regime. The latest and dirtiest of their accusations is of "anti-Semitism", a lie they justify on the basis of the long-standing sympathy of Corbyn and other left Labor activists with the plight of the Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation. In this comment, a Jewish Labor Party member puts the record straight. 

First they tried to lynch Corbyn by claiming he would leave Britain defenseless against foreign attack; then by linking him to the Provisional IRA; then by suggesting he was sympathetic to Islamic terrorists... Now they're scraping the bottom of the barrel by branding him, of all people, an anti-Semite.

It is the Tories who have always been steeped in racism and specifically in anti-Semitism. My own grandfather was the victim of a racist anti-Semitic murder in the hysteria whipped up by these creatures. They introduced the Aliens Act in 1905 to restrict immigration by Jewish refugees from pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. It was Tory MPs who founded the so-called "British Brothers' League" at that time to keep out "destitute foreigners", and in the 1930s the "Right Club", whose aim was to "oppose and expose the activities of organized Jewry". 

At that time the Daily Mail carried a banner headline "HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS", and the Daily Express "JEWS DECLARE WAR ON GERMANY". And these are the creatures now daring to call the Labor left anti-Semitic? 

People have forgotten that dirty tricks to smear the Labor Party were always standard practice in the years before New Labor. In 1924, days before a crucial general election, the Daily Mail published a fake letter allegedly written by Zinoviev, secretary of the Communist International, which was later admitted by MI5 to be a blatant forgery; it helped bring down Britain's first-ever Labor government. In 1945, when the Tories were desperate to avoid a Labor victory, Churchill came out with the hysterical lie that a Labor government would set up a Gestapo police state like that of the Nazis. 

It is not ultra-conspiracy mania to infer that one element in the story is a natural effort by Israeli diplomacy to avoid the election of a prime minister potentially sympathetic to Palestinian aspirations; but this is not the main explanation. It is above all the establishment's fear of a government committed to working "for the many not the few" that is behind this brazen and desperate smear campaign.

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