Jeremy Corbyn and the Fascist Threat

“Those in authority should have stopped the obscenity of past-war fascism. They didn’t. So, we did.” Morris Beckman (The 43 Group)

Most people just want a life lived without unnecessary distraction, pain, or inconvenience. A few go out of their way to cause suffering, to coerce and to spoil the simple world we live in. Miseducation is crucial in any attempt to control society. They create fear, but most important, they attempt to fashion us in their image, or at least, in the image they believe we need to fit.

I use the word “image” because they are akin to idolaters — their god is fashioned from an ideal they passionately believe we must follow — whether it is for their profit, our benefit or someone else’s benefit is of no consequence because their self-belief is immutable and therefore any debate is also irrelevant.   They demand obedience from us and subservience to them. Oppose them and you are damned. If this sounds like fascism it is because it is just that. I accuse the radical left (of which Mr Jeremy Corbyn is an honoured member) of fascism for good reason.

Fascism can be defined in almost any way but its primary contemporary usage seems to have deteriorated so that it is now understood to be little more than an epithet to be used against those with whom we passionately disagree. But in his book “Liberal Fascism” Jonah Goldberg says “the liberal fascist project can be characterized as the effort to delegitimize good dogma by claiming all dogma is bad.” I would modify that by stating that fascism is the replacement of one set of beliefs with another, using propaganda in place of fact; sophistry and mendacity as tools of trade. Jeremy Corbyn and his kind provide good examples of this.

In an interview with Britain’s premier broadcasting network, BBC Television managed to educate a new generation of people about a Jewish blood libel while giving Britain’s leading Labour Party contender for leader of the opposition an easy ride that forgave him his iniquity in consistently siding with holocaust deniers, racists and anti-Semites.

The tools of fascism are simple — lie consistently and the people will replace the truth with your updated narrative. A few days ago Jeremy Corbyn was interviewed by the BBC about his past — he denied knowing that a friend was a Holocaust denier and referred to meeting up with him some fifteen years earlier. Since that interview, a photograph has surfaced on the official internet site of Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. It shows Corbyn at a formal reception for Eisens’ organisation (Deir Yassin Remembered), held in 2013.

Corbyn was also given the opportunity to explain to the BBC and its millions of viewers that Eisen’s organisation was all about keeping in the public memory an atrocity allegedly carried out by “the Zionists” (failing to mention his organisation being the vehicle for a Holocaust denying Jew hater). The BBC then showed bodies piled neatly up but unlike any other news programme I have ever encountered failed to provide any warning that it was going to show the photo. Jeremy Corbyn deliberately misled the public on British national television when he stated that the massacre was the work of “Zionists”. In 1948, there were Arabs and there were Palestinians — all organisations of administration and governance in Palestine with the name “Palestine” in the title were Jewish.

The radical left has followed the Arab/Muslim lead in dividing Jews into two groups, those who are anti-Israel and the rest. Jeremy Corbyn deliberately misrepresented a conflict that was never that simple because central to the Arab-Israeli conflict is Arab conquest inextricably mixed with Islamic theological prejudice. Corbyn demonized all Jews living in Palestine at that time and if we follow through with his unspoken logic, accused all Jews of supporting terror simply by identifying with the Jewish right to self-determination.

The Arabs do not and did not (in 1948) kill Zionists — they kill(ed) Jews. But massacres carried out by people are rarely, if ever referred to as massacres carried out by Muslims. They are carried out by ISIL (an acronym few people can break down by its constituent letters). They are carried out by organisations. In Palestine the militias were identified as socialists, as right wingers or as Arabs dedicated to a pan-Arab unity against the rest. The massacre was carried out by Palestinian fighters against local Arabs. Specifically it was carried out by Irgun and Lehi fighters. But Corbyn was scoring points, aided and abetted by the BBC.

Here is my problem with the fascist, Jeremy Corbyn. He lies, he is indifferent to the consequences of his actions, and he is morally selective in his support of those who justify religious genocide. He calls an antisemite who propagates blood libels against Jews his friend. He dishonestly applies general principles to particular cases of moral conduct (in this case, his anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism because he deliberately chooses to ignore the prejudice and religious hatred that is fundamental to the beliefs of Israel’s enemies).

It is truly simple. If he is not anti-Jewish he has no problem sharing a platform with those people who are anti-Jewish, or, calling them his friends and proclaiming the validity of their causes. What does that make of the morality of the man who would be Prime Minister of Great Britain?

The man who would be Prime Minister has also worked for Iranian State TV — so he has received money from an organisation that is the international mouthpiece for a regime that again, denies the Holocaust as well as hanging gays, persecuting its Baha’i minority, murdering members of the radical left (such as he), crushing free speech and killing protesters.

I started this blog with a quote from a founder of the 43 Group. The 43 Group were an anti-fascist organisation set up after World War II by Jewish ex-servicemen (and women) as a consequence of the support given to British fascist and anti-Semitic organisations by the Labour government of Clement Atlee (not known for his love of Jews)! I call it support because the fascists used the Public Order Act of 1936 and the Public Meetings Act of 1908 to prevent Jews from defending themselves against fascist incitement and violence. In the years that followed the end of World War II news of Hitler’s death camps was often the subject of headlines and graphic newsreels. And yet Labour governments were conspicuous by their inactivity against fascism. In the timeliness of their non-support for Britain’s returning Jewish servicemen and women (as well as ordinary citizens) Britain’s Labour government encouraged and was therefore complicit in fascism’s anti-Semitic incitement.

The Left and not just the radical left have always had a problem with Jewish rights; we have the right to assume that this prejudice extends to Jews as a group and as individuals. There will always be people who will point out the large number of Jews who have been ideologically and intellectually at the forefront of radical and left wing politics. But almost always this has been at the expense of any positive Jewish identity. It is easy to understand why. If acceptance means renunciation of part of ones own identity, Jewish Uncle Toms have been consistent in using a wholly specious anti-Judaism to gain that acceptance and speak with an essentially spurious Jewish authority when attacking Jews and Judaism.

The crux of the matter is that Jeremy Corbyn comes across as a true social democrat, a person who cares about people and supports minorities irrespective of their race, religion, sex or sexuality. At the same time he is politically in bed with people and organisations that are misogynistic, fascistic, murderous, classically anti-democratic and anti-Semitic.

Can we then trust him to be a leader for all the people of Britain? Only a fool would believe that.