In June, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned that the Trump administration would not allow a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government to take office and would “push back” to prevent this.
Pompeo made his threat at a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations. He was asked, if Corbyn “is elected, would you be willing to work with us to take on actions if life becomes very difficult for Jews in the UK?”
Replying, Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best. … It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”
Pompeo was as good as his word. The frenzied media campaign branding Corbyn, the Labour Party and its left-wing members above all as anti-Semitic is the “push back” in action.
Ever since Corbyn’s election in 2015, Labour’s right-wing Blairite faction have worked with Zionist groups, the Conservative Party and the media to portray every criticism of Israel and its brutal war on the Palestinians as anti-Semitism. What is made clear by Pompeo’s remarks is that this witch-hunt is a PSYOPS campaign involving the security services of the United States, Israel and Britain.
The political alliance through which this campaign is waged is epitomised by leading Blairite John Mann, who played a critical role in driving Corbyn’s ally, Ken Livingstone, out of the Labour Party in 2018. He was awarded a peerage for services rendered by Prime Minister Theresa May, and then chosen in September by Boris Johnson to be his new “Anti-Semitism Tsar.”
Corbyn’s opponents are desperate to keep the issue of anti-Semitism at fever pitch during the general election campaign.
On Friday, Buzzfeed reported that Labour MP Dan Carden—Corbyn’s shadow international development secretary—had supposedly changed the lyrics of the Beatles song “Hey Jude” to “Hey Jews” while singing in a coach on the way back from a Cheltenham horse-racing festival. According to the article, “When the chorus reached the word ‘Jude,’ Carden chanted at the top of his voice: ‘Jews, Jews, Jews’.”
The writer, “senior reporter” Alex Wickham, claimed the incident happened on March 15 last year and that “Also present were other Labour MPs as well as MPs from other parties.”
Yet, as Carden pointed out, “This was a coach full of journalists and MPs. If anyone genuinely believed any anti-Semitic behaviour had taken place, they would’ve had a moral responsibility to report it immediately. Yet this allegation is only made now when a General Election is imminent.”
Only Wickham reported the event after saying nothing for more than 20 months, even though he says he was sitting behind Carden and former Labour whip Conor McGinn. Such silence on a major political scandal is inexplicable, especially given that Wickham has played a central part in the anti-Semitism witch-hunt against Corbyn.
Wickham was news editor at the right-wing Guido Fawkes blog, which was critical in publishing the claims that, as Forbes reports, “ignited the Labour party’s ongoing anti-Semitism crisis.”
Faced with such inexplicable failures, Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times is now claiming to have been sent “contemporary” WhatsApp messages “that appear to corroborate claims [Carden] sang ‘Hey Jews’ to the tune of Hey Jude on a raucous coach trip last year…the messages passed to this newspaper detail Carden as drunkenly singing ‘nasty’ ‘anti semitic and homophobic’ songs. … The messages allege Carden and two others on the bus were at one point singing ‘we hate the gays’.” The “second witness” has “asked to be anonymous,” but there is no explanation as to why.
As bizarre as the changed lyrics allegations are, one also has to ask why on earth Carden—who is an openly gay MP who consistently champions LGBT rights—would be on a coach singing homophobic songs, including “we hate the gays”?
The Blairites are also demanding the removal of prospective Labour MP Zarah Sultana, who was selected to stand in the Coventry South seat. The Jewish Chronicle began the witch-hunt last week, reporting that in 2016 she posted on Facebook, “The Labour Right are scum and genuinely make me sick. Is there any form of discrimination that they won’t weaponise to politically point score like they’ve done in the past with antisemitism and now with homophobia?”
The previous year in response to a tweet saying, “Don’t celebrate the death of any person regardless of what they did,” Sultana replied, with sentiments shared by millions, “Try and stop me when the likes of Blair, Netanyahu and [George W.] Bush die.”
Sultana now faces deselection, with her case to be heard by Labour’s National Executive Committee (NEC).
These and similar stories provided a platform for Natan Sharansky to write in the Sunday Telegraph declaring Corbyn’s “extreme anti-Zionism” as “almost impossible to differ sometimes from anti-Semitism” and akin to the anti-Semitic rhetoric of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Sharansky, 71, a former Soviet dissident, is a right-wing Zionist ally of Benjamin Netanyahu whose political biography demonstrates that opposition to Zionism is entirely legitimate and not anti-Semitic. He has spent his long career opposing all concessions to the Palestinians, urging landgrabs in the Occupied Territories and describing left-wing Israelis as “collaborators” with the “new antisemitism.”
Sultana abased herself before her critics, saying that her remarks from several years ago were made “before the narrative had gained the traction it has now dismissing deeply-felt concerns about anti-semitism in the party as ‘smears,’ in which the word ‘weaponised’ is often used.”
She cited as her model Corbyn, writing, “I absolutely reject that narrative and, as Jeremy has said, I believe that anyone says it’s ‘all a smear,’ is wrong and is contributing to the problem. I would not use the word weaponise today and apologise for having done so.”
It hardly needs saying that a Corbyn-style apology will only ensure that Sultana’s days as a prospective MP are numbered. Corbyn is a political coward who has refused to defend his own allies and, most importantly, rank-and-file members in the face of a ferocious, unprecedented witch-hunt.
In the name of maintaining “party unity” with the Blairites, he has presided over the NEC’s expulsion of Livingstone, Jackie Walker and Marc Wadsworth. Just last week, while Corbyn stayed silent, Chris Williamson was told by the party’s pro-Corbyn NEC that he would not be able to stand as an MP in his Derby North constituency. Williamson, like Sultana, had merely pointed out that the anti-Semitism campaign is “proxy wars and bullshit”—the “weaponisation of antisemitism for political ends.”
Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump confirmed this appraisal. Following on from Pompeo’s threat, he declared on a phone-in to LBC radio’s “Nigel Farage Show”—hosted by the far-right Brexit Party leader—that “Corbyn would be so bad for your country, he’d be so bad, he’d take you on such a bad way, he’d take you into such bad places.”
LBC, owned by Global, the largest commercial radio company in Europe, is playing a central role in the witch-hunt. Last November, the Metropolitan Police launched an investigation into the Labour Party over anti-Semitism after Commissioner Cressida Dick was handed a dossier of complaints as she appeared on an LBC phone-in show. In March, this served as justification for the Equality and Human Rights Commission opening an investigation into claims that Labour was now anti-Semitic and racist.
Consciously or unconsciously, everyone involved in the anti-Semitism witch-hunt is involved in a state-intelligence operation.
Corbyn is not, and never has been anti-Semitic. Labour is not an anti-Semitic party, and the entire filthy campaign is a transparent fraud. Corbyn’s cowardice in the face of this witch-hunt is proof, before he ever comes to power, that he would act as a bogus “left” figurehead for a right-wing, pro-capitalist, pro-war government and would impose all attacks demanded by big business against the working class just as readily as he throws his supporters to the wolves.