The Cult of Corbyn has been replaced by the Cult of Gender - The Jewish Chronicle

When are you old enough to learn about sexual abuse and antisemitism? All I know is that I was too young.

I was in pre-school, so about four, when a boy in my class would stand behind me and put his hand between my legs in the lunch queue. It is one of my oldest and most visceral memories; I can still smell him.

It was a year or two later, at my new school, that I had my first experience of antisemitism. A new friend uninvited me from going to play at her house because her parents had discovered I was a “dirty Jew”.

I didn’t experience much antisemitism growing up, but the sexual harassment was always there; the persistent comments on my breasts from teenage boys, the flasher at our netball courts, the hands between my legs on crowded Tubes, in nightclubs, at an Eminem concert. The ex-boyfriend who pinned me down until my flatmates heard me crying “stop”.

Some will say feminism has achieved all it wanted, but as I write I’m reading about the rapist policeman whose victims weren’t believed, about the raped female members of the armed forces who were accused of being mentally ill when they reported it, of the Afghan female MP who was shot by the Taliban. And of shameful scenes in the House of Commons on Tuesday when women speaking up for single-sex spaces were booed and heckled.

My Judaism and my womanhood have always been a part of my identity, but it’s only in recent years that I have started to speak about them as they both have come under attack from places I never expected. They are inextricably linked.

Much has been written on these pages about the antisemitism at the heart of Corbynism and the way we who fought it were accused of being right-wing supremacists, baby-killing Nazis and racists.

I started seeing the Corbynites who gaslit Jews making the same arguments against women who were arguing for the sanctity of female spaces; that we were white supremacists, racists, bigots and Nazis who wanted to kill children. In both cases, the fear we described to try and explain our position was thrown back in our faces — we were “weaponising” our pain. What a cruel and heartless phrase.

And once again, the brave women who speak up against this are the most vilified. Labour MP Rosie Duffield is bullied within her party and, just as with Jewish MP Luciana Berger who stood up against antisemitism, Keir Starmer says next to nothing to defend her. Rosie was one of the few Labour MPs who spoke up against Labour antisemitism but she is now so vilified she wasn’t even invited to this year’s Jewish Labour Movement conference because the bullies are winning.

There are things that divide Corbynism’s antisemitism from the women’s rights campaign against the gender ideology — not least the central messianic figure of Corbyn himself. But having put myself into both of these battles, I keep seeing similarities. I see cultish thinking.
Cults need certain things. One is ideological purity in which members are strongly discouraged from questioning the cult’s doctrine; Corbynism couldn’t be antisemitic because it was an anti-racist movement and anti-racists aren’t antisemites. In the gender creed, biology is no longer real; sex “is assigned at birth”. A man can say he is a woman because he feels like one and must be believed.

Conformity and control. Those who disagreed with Corbyn were heartless fascists who wanted people to die. Those who do not abide by the rules of trans rights find themselves losing their jobs, arrested and physically hounded because they want to “exterminate” trans people.

It is an us-versus-them mentality. Cult Corbyn were the good people who just wanted peace. And anyone who dares to question Cult Gender is a bigot.

I am not anti-trans — people should be able to live their lives as they would like as long as it doesn’t have an impact on the rights of others. I have got to know plenty of trans people who don’t agree with the demands being made in their name.

I know, as a Jew, what it is like to be a political football and how you feel like no one truly cares about what you actually think.

Our country is now facing a constitutional crisis — perhaps deliberately orchestrated by Nicola Sturgeon — over the issue of self-identity. Rishi Sunak hopes to block the legislation and from Starmer we’ve only had more sitting on the fence, the place he’s most comfortable.

I am not binary when it comes to my politics (apart from being cynical about the lot of them). But once again I see, just as left-wing Jews hoped Corbyn would be defeated, left-wing women leaving Labour. And for me, as a Jewish woman, I see Labour has simply replaced one form of cultish thinking for another and it makes me wonder if they truly learned anything from the antisemitism scandal.

Topics:

Antisemitism