Jeremy Corbyn's 2013 speech about 'British Zionists' unveiled a new level of his revulsion towards the vast majority of British Jews, writes Lee Harpin
August 30, 2018 14:33
There can be little doubt that the former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks echoed the thoughts of a sizable majority of the community when he labelled Jeremy Corbyn’s remarks about British Zionists “the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician” since Enoch Powell’s infamous “Rivers of Blood” speech.
And there is no better indicator of the warped political agenda now advanced by the supporters of Mr Corbyn that, in response to Lords Sacks’ headline grabbing attack, they saw fit to label the former Chief Rabbi a “far-right extremist.”
In reality, Lords Sacks has shown himself over many decades to be a principled and thoughtful individual with diplomatic skills that many a political leader would seek to inherit.
Mr Corbyn, on the other hand, has immersed himself in a far murkier world in his years of political activism.
Last week’s revelation of a recording of the 2013 speech the Labour leader, then a backbencher, delivered at an event organised by the Palestine Return Centre, gave perhaps the greatest insight yet into the real Mr Corbyn.
Zionists, he announced, “have two problems: one is they don’t want to study history and secondly having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either.”
Previous outbursts and actions by Mr Corbyn – such as labelling Hezbollah and Hamas his “friends” and attending a wreath laying ceremony at the graves of Palestinian Munich terror atrocity plotters in Tunisia – hinted at how close the Labour leader’s pro-Palestinian activism took him into straying into the territory typically adopted by outright antisemities.
But somehow, with his repeated claims to have been a “militant opponent” of antisemitism throughout his entire political career, Mr Corbyn managed just to avoid falling off the side of the cliff into the Jew-hate cesspit.
But the discovery of his 2013 speech has unveiled a new level of revulsion by the Labour leader towards the vast majority of British Jews – the 90 per cent of them who have regularly declared themselves to hold pro-Zionist views in one opinion poll after another.
Mr Corbyn, of course, claimed his this week that the British Zionists he was making reference to in this speech were “pro-Israel activists” and that his words were not meant as “a euphemism for Jewish people.”
But we have now been given a glimpse into the doomsday scenario in which Mr Corbyn, perhaps as a British Prime Minister, decides it is perfectly fine to treat the vast majority of British Jews with utter contempt because of their support for Zionist ideals.
Meanwhile, the tiny anti-Zionist fringe with whom Mr Corbyn has spent much of political life, will almost certainly be upheld as the “proper Jews.” The ones that Mr Corbyn actually likes – and the proof in far-left circles that claims of his alleged antisemitism have always been nothing more than a “far-right smear.”
But Mr Corbyn’s remarks about irony in the same 2013 speech are just as problematic.
To claim British Zionists “don’t understand English irony” implies that the vast majority of Jews, despite being born in this country, are not really at one with the majority population at all.
It carries with it the implication that Jews are somehow different - and unable to grasp “irony”, a concept clearly viewed by Mr Corbyn as being part of the English tradition.
And therein lies the major problem moving forwards for the Labour leader.
If he really does view the vast majority of British Jews as “different”, how can he ever expect these same majority of Jews to drop their own opinion of him as being a bona fide racist?
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