Excuse me as I try not to ramble too much....
One of the things that gets forgotten in the ongoing storm around AS, which goes some way to explaining peoples blindness to it, is the recent history of witch-hunting of the left within the party. When Corbyn first stood, and the supporting members category was created, the Compliance Unit spent a vast amount of time finding any excuse to exclude left-wingers, often for the most spurious and tendentious reasons. Having signed a nomination form for an opposing candidate (tho, oddly enough, it was okay if that candidate was a tory!), calling Owen Smith a cunt (tho, oddly again, it was okay to call Owen Jones a cunt), being generally a bit gobby and irritating.
At that point, despite digging through years’ worth of social media posts, I don’t think anyone was excluded for anti-semitism, it certainly wasn’t a significant part of he narrative. As late as the end of 2016 Chukka Umunna and leading lights from the JLM were saying they had never seen any AS within the party. And they had undoubtedly seen Corbyn and knew of his ‘pro-Hamas; speeches. The only people claiming Labour had a problem with anti-semitism then were right-wingers like Stephen Pollard, and GnasherJew, who were, undoubtedly, overwhelmingly concerned about supporting Israel, not maltreatment of jewish people in the UK. When there was an AS debate in the Commons, it was dominated by those Tories, who, in at least one case, changed the date of the AS attack on his wife to make it appear to have happened under Corbyn’s leadership (although, even then the abuse wasn’t actually made by someone known to be a LP member!). The idea that these tories seriously cared about anti-semitism was a bit of a joke, and it absolutely definitely couldn’t be said that any of them believed the Labour Party should be held to a higher standard than the party they supported. This goes even more for the recent recruit to the cause – David ‘friend of the EDL & Herut supporter’ Collier. He has submitted more complaints than Margaret Hodge did.
So the attacks rang hollow, and didn’t really gain any traction amongst the wider public.
That changed with that fucking mural. Something that Corbyn undoubtedly should have noticed and picked up on, and that he was entirely rightly held to account for. The one ‘good’ thing to come out of that was that a fair few more people wised up to the extent of conspiraloonery and it’s connection to anti-semitism. It was only after that, that the likes of DC etc went back through many more people’s posts and found those Rothschild posts, and crude posts about Israel and excessive use of the word Zionism.
There is no doubt, even amongst those who have signed up to Labour Against the Witch-hunt, that there are a small number of people who are explicitly anti-semitic, and who should be expelled. But, for the most part, those who are complained of have done nothing worse than be crude. Replacing the DWP logo with ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ is not the most politically astute thing to do, but it’s been a mainstay of disability politics for years. Passionately supporting Palestine is not anti-semitic even if the writer does like to overuse the word Zionist – and this is especially true for those old enough to remember ’67 and ’73, and the reason why Israel became the most boycotted country in the UK, along with apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile (which was first recognised by… Israel). Pointing out that the Israeli state does find ways to funnel money to various MP's and uses Mossad anod other tools of the state to undermine others, isn't anti-semitic in and of itself. Education and political argument is what is needed to deal with such people, not screaming anti-semite at them. It’s (almost) funny), this board has a long history of denouncing the SWP’s way of tackling racism by shouting ‘racist’ at people with ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration etc, but it’s good politics to shout ‘anti-semite’ at someone who misuses a word?
If I weren’t in the LAW (unofficial) facebook group, the only examples of anti-semitic comments I have seen would consist of one local member posting one Rothschild meme (which he was taken up on) and one person in the Sheffield Momentum group, who, it turned out, wasn’t in either Sheffield or the Labour Party. He was, immediately and without opposition, kicked from the group. Within the LAW group – which now includes a lot of people being investigated for AS - there are another two, maybe three, who I think should be fucked right off, and quite a few more (tho no more than a couple of dozen or so) who really should learn to moderate their language and keep their ego’s in check. Unless those people are, like Livingstone, leading members, they should be reprimanded and educated, not expelled.
All that said, it is sad and pathetic to see a couple of trot micro-sects refusing to deny there is any issue at all, and refusing to challenge any conspiraloonery or recognise the anti-semitic roots of certain statements, and even defending the ‘right’ (free speech bollox) to quote Icke. But they are a miniscule section of the membership who hold no influence over anything, thankfully.
