Dangerous Hero

by Tom Bower

  An aggressive intolerance had been introduced into British politics. Most assumed the prejudice was confined to the class war – socialists versus capitalists. But they were mistaken.

  12

  The Jew-Haters

  Few Labour MPs were more troubled by Jeremy Corbyn than Louise Ellman, elected in 1997 for Liverpool Riverside. A soft-spoken mother of two, she was born in Manchester and had joined the party at eighteen. It was seldom mentioned that Ellman was Jewish: at Westminster and in her constituency, her religion was irrelevant. That changed after Corbyn’s election. The membership of her constituency soared from five hundred to 2,700, and at meetings the Corbynistas harangued her about Israel and Zionism. Older party members were disgusted by the anti-Semitic abuse. ‘It’s pretty nasty,’ Ellman reported to party headquarters in London. She blamed the revived Militant faction, reincarnated as Momentum, for plotting to deselect her. No one at headquarters acknowledged her concern, which did not surprise her.

  Ellman’s predicament had arisen soon after the creation of the Stop the War Coalition in 2001. She was among the first to protest against its anti-Semitism. The criticism of Israel and Zionism was couched in language markedly similar to the myths parroted over the previous two thousand years about Jewish wealth dominating the world. Jeremy Corbyn had been seen at its annual Al-Quds (the Arab name for Jerusalem) event opposing Israel’s existence, mingling among Palestinians distributing magazines featuring cartoons portraying Jews with large noses pulling the strings of puppet politicians, media moguls and bankers. ‘Rothschild’ was written on one ‘banker’ to illustrate the worldwide conspiracy of Jewish finance. The Nazi swastika adorned other placards to signal anti-racism. Newspapers, Ellman discovered, both national and local, were reluctant to report her complaints after a leader of the Muslim Association of Britain, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, threatened a libel action following her denunciation on Radio 4 of the group’s anti-Semitic activities. Just before Christmas 2003, she addressed an empty House of Commons about the ‘rising tide of anti-Semitism’. Jews were being targeted as the tiny elite who had stolen the wealth of the masses. With their removal the world would be a better place. To the sympathetic understanding of former foreign secretary Robin Cook, she blamed Islamist groups for ‘inciting racial hatred’ against Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism. She named the leaders of the Muslim Association of Britain, all of whom were connected to Hamas or other terrorist organisations, for promoting the image of a Jewish global conspiracy. They had been invited to speak in Parliament and at British universities to threaten Israel with extinction, she said.

  The reaction to her speech shocked her: ‘I was regarded as a freak.’ Letters published in the Guardian denounced her for identifying Muslims as anti-Semitic. The paper endorsed the complaint that all dispossessed Muslims were the victims of Zionism. At Westminster, several MPs shunned her. At the door of the Commons chamber the veteran Labour MP and outspoken anti-Zionist Gerald Kaufman, himself a Jew from Manchester, snapped, ‘Shut up. You sound like “Here we are, the Jews again.”’ In anger, Ellman shouted back at him. ‘You need a long cup of tea,’ Kaufman snarled. Anti-Semitism, he implied, was the Jews’ own fault. Ellman assumed he wanted to please Muslim electors in his Manchester constituency. The hatred against her intensified. Israel was ‘wagging the American dog’, Corbyn wrote in the Morning Star. He was heard by a member of his staff mocking Ellman as ‘the Honourable Member for Tel Aviv’ – an allegation he later denied. Jewish students in a number of universities were suffering the same persecution.

  Aggressive Muslim students, especially at the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) in London, ignored Britain’s established tolerance of free speech by threatening Jewish speakers. The students called Jews ‘Zios’ and, comparing Israel with Nazi Germany, denounced its citizens as white supremacists living in an apartheid state ‘intent to wipe out the Palestinian race’. Any defender of Israel was dismissed as racist, and the more extreme supporters of Hamas demanded that the country should actually be destroyed. Encouraged by leaders of the Stop the War Coalition, ‘anti-Zionism’ became interchangeable with anti-Semitism. By contrast, for instance, no one blamed ‘Russianism’ for the illegal occupation of large parts of Eastern Europe after 1945. ‘Zionism’ was used as a euphemism for ‘Jews’. That conflation accelerated after 2010, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, who was himself Jewish. Ellman, for one, was unconvinced by Miliband’s denial that there was a problem, and noted that his mother was an anti-Zionist. Equally disturbing to her was the refusal of other Jewish MPs, including David Winnick and Margaret Hodge, to attempt to counter the new persecution. ‘I always felt alone,’ she lamented. ‘I had to rely on Tory MPs.’

  By 2012 she had become aware that Jeremy Corbyn, sitting on the highest bench at the back of the Commons chamber, often spoke in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel. That year, at a time of intense fighting between Hamas and Israel around Gaza, he repeatedly protested about Israeli brutality, without mentioning provocations by Hamas or atrocities committed by Muslims against fellow Muslims. However, Ellman had no personal knowledge of his attitude towards Jews outside the Israeli conflict. She had not heard about ‘Freedom for Humanity’, a large mural that had just appeared in east London. The vivid image, painted by Kalen Ockerman, an American artist known as ‘Mear One’, portrayed Jewish financiers playing Monopoly on a board supported by the naked backs of the world’s oppressed – mostly blacks. Even after a brief glance, no one could fail to grasp the familiar caricature of grotesque-looking Jewish bankers engaged in a worldwide conspiracy to manipulate subjugated slaves. The mural perfectly illustrated Malcolm X’s damnation of ‘Zionist dollars’ bankrolling colonial oppression, an important influence in Jamaica at the time of Corbyn’s stay there in the 1960s. After protests, Tower Hamlets council ordered the mural to be scrubbed out.

  The matter came to Corbyn’s attention. Looking at the mural on his computer, he saw rich white Jews, international powerbrokers, exploiting oppressed blacks. Immediately he protested against the mural’s removal ‘on the grounds of free speech’. He also wrote to Ockerman, ‘You’re in good company,’ referring to the removal of a mural by Diego Rivera in New York back in 1934: ‘Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.’ He apparently did not think twice about making what seemed to him an unexceptional remark about a class enemy. Except, to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, he referred to Jews as ‘Zionists’ – although he had never publicly drawn a distinction between the two terms when voicing in public meetings his outrage at the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. On those occasions he effortlessly lapsed into anti-Semitic language, convinced that a backbencher’s prejudice would not attract attention beyond his loyal audience.

  In that vein, soon after he had approved Ockerman’s mural, he spoke without inhibition at a meeting of the Palestinian Return Centre (PLC), a group known to blame the Jews for the Holocaust. Among his audience was Manuel Hassassian, the Palestinian Authority’s representative in Britain. In an unusually light-hearted manner, Corbyn addressed the difficulty British ‘Zionists’ experienced in coping with an alien culture. ‘So clearly two problems,’ he summarised. ‘One is that 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 … so I think they need two lessons which we can help them with.’ Jews had lived in Britain since at least 1656, yet in making such statements Corbyn was employing classic anti-Semitic tropes describing otherness. The Wandering Jew, a cosmopolitan unaligned to any nation, was the age-old stereotype. Corbyn would never criticise any other religion in the same language.

  With that mindset, he was unsurprised two years later, in February 2015, to hear that ‘Zios’ had been banned from Oxford’s gay and lesbian clubs. The paradox was that Israel protected homosexuals, while in some Muslim countries they were murdered. Oxford’s an
ti-Semitism came to a head after Corbyn’s election as Labour leader. ‘Some members,’ Alex Chalmers, the co-chair of the university’s Labour Club, wrote, ‘have some kind of problem with Jews.’ This anti-Semitism, Chalmers noticed, was driven by Marxists, in particular two Momentum activist members of the club: Max Shanley, a friend of Jon Lansman, and James Elliott, a contributor to Corbyn’s youth manifesto.

  After unsuccessfully seeking help from senior Labour officials, Chalmers resigned from the party. Iain McNicol, Labour’s general secretary, asked Jan Royall, an academic and former Labour leader in the House of Lords, to investigate. On the basis of eyewitness testimony, including that of Labour Youth’s representative on the NEC Jasmin Beckett, about James Elliott’s anti-Semitism, Royall highlighted individual prejudice worthy of further investigation. ‘I was dismayed and ashamed,’ she wrote, ‘that the ancient virus of anti-Semitism had infected our party.’ Nevertheless, she concluded that endemic loathing did not exist in the club. In the final version of the NEC’s report, Corbyn’s political secretary Katy Clark removed all Royall’s references to proven animosity towards Jews. Even with those omissions, Corbyn ordered that the report should not be published. Concealment, he agreed with Milne, would close down the problem. Shanley and Elliott were acquitted by the NEC of racism, but Jasmin Beckett was not protected, and Corbyn loyalists demanded that she be expelled from the party. Bombarded with verbal violence for telling the truth about an anti-Semite at her first NEC meeting, she needed Tom Watson’s protection to escape the Corbynistas’ intimidation. In December 2015 Louise Ellman mentioned Oxford’s hostility in the Commons. Corbyn dismissed her protest. He abhorred anti-Semitism, he said, without explaining why he was targeted by so many allegations.

  Among the casualties were members of his own family. His brother Piers criticised the calls for a crackdown on anti-Semitism within Labour as absurd. ‘My brother isn’t wrong,’ said Jeremy Corbyn, ‘and actually we fundamentally agree.’ Then his youngest son Tommy was revealed as the events manager of York University’s Palestinian Solidarity Society: his group was celebrating ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ with a play called Seven Jewish Children, described by the Spectator as a ‘ten-minute blood libel’. Tommy also failed to delete a series of violently anti-Semitic statements posted by others on his Facebook page until he was prompted to do so by the media.

  Unsure how far the virus had spread, Jewish groups began to fight back, probing John McDonnell’s record to discover that he too was tolerant of anti-Semites. In 2012 he had appeared on a platform with Gerry Downing, a Trotskyist who demanded that ‘the Jewish problem’ of Zionist Jews ruling the world should be addressed. With McDonnell’s help, Downing had become a Labour Party member, and had appeared on BBC TV as the party’s representative to complain that a ‘number of millionaires and billionaires of Zionist persuasion within the American ruling class and within the European ruling classes in general’ were committing ‘heinous crimes’ against Palestinians. Years before, in 1985, when McDonnell had been co-editor of the Labour Herald, the paper had compared Israelis to the Nazis and supported Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel as the consequence of ‘the racism at the heart of the Israeli state’. Like Corbyn, McDonnell was not overly troubled by anti-Semites in the party, although he did suggest that Labour must ‘sit up and listen’ to the concerns of Jews. To reinforce that impression, in the post-2015 makeover McDonnell’s office had removed the links on his web page to ‘Innovative Minds’, a site that praised the Islamist suicide bomber who in 2001 had killed twenty-one Israelis in a Tel Aviv nightclub, one among many Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians.

  In 2014 Vicky Kirby, a Labour parliamentary candidate, had been expelled from the party after she tweeted, ‘What do you know about Jews? They’ve got big noses and support Spurs. LOL.’ She also wrote that Jews ‘slaughter the oppressed’, and that Hitler was ‘a Zionist god’. Corbyn agreed that Kirby should be readmitted to the party. Soon after, she became a vice chairman of the branch in Woking. Once her past was exposed, Corbyn reluctantly conceeded that she should be suspended. Kirby looked forward to having that suspension raised after Benazir Lasharie, a Labour councillor in Kensington and Chelsea, was readmitted despite blaming Jews and Zionists for the 9/11 attacks on America. The party’s new tolerance also benefited Khadim Hussain, a former Labour mayor of Bradford who had complained on the internet that Britain’s schools ‘only tell you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler’. Aysegul Gurbuz, a Labour councillor in Luton, tweeted in 2011 that Hitler was the ‘greatest man in history’, and hoped that Iran would use a nuclear weapon to ‘wipe Israel off the map’. Two years later she tweeted, ‘The Jews are so powerful in the US. It’s disgusting.’ She too was temporarily suspended. To Corbyn’s frustration, Iain McNicol prevented him exercising any control over the party’s disciplinary procedures.

  For all his denials, Corbyn collaborated with anti-Semites. He had accepted £2,000 from Ibrahim Hamami, a London GP and a Hamas sympathiser, who applauded the stabbing of Jews and denied that Israel had the right to exist. Corbyn wrongly registered the donation in the Commons, and refused to explain what he did with the money. In 2013, Middle East Monitor (MEM) funded a trip for Corbyn and his wife to Gaza, and in 2015 he accepted an invitation from Ibrahim Hewitt, MEM’s senior editor, to speak at the group’s annual conference. Hewitt, another Hamas supporter, approved stoning adulterers to death and lashing gay men. At the conference, Dr Azzam Tamimi spoke about suicide bombers as noble martyrs. Hewitt said of Tamimi, ‘I consider him to be a very good friend and I think he’s done a fantastic job.’ Corbyn’s association with such people had gone largely unnoticed while he was on Labour’s fringe. After his election as leader that changed, although he did not anticipate the investigation of his past alliances, or how they would be interpreted.

  Asked about his association with the anti-Semitic Muslim extremist Dyab Abou Jahjah, he denied that he knew him. Shown a photograph of himself with Jahjah, he said that he had forgotten about a request he had made in 2009 for a visa for his ‘friend’. His memory was also weak when in August 2015 the Jewish Chronicle asked him to explain his relationship with the Holocaust denier Paul Eisen. ‘Paul Eisen,’ replied Corbyn’s spokesman, ‘is not someone Jeremy Corbyn’s office has any dealings with.’ The production of another photo, this time of Corbyn at Deir Yassin Remembered (DYR), prompted his recollection. Some years previously, he admitted, he had been present at such an event, and had donated money: ‘At that time I had absolutely no evidence that Paul Eisen was a Holocaust denier.’ He also forgot accompanying Eisen to a DYR meeting in St John’s Wood on 9 April 2013, at least five years after Eisen had made his views public. Then he was asked why he had called Hamas and Hezbollah ‘our friends’. Again, he had difficulty recalling having done so, until a tape-recording was produced. He then explained that he used the term ‘friends’ towards both Hamas and Hezbollah ‘in a collective way’, and did not agree with ‘what they do’. Asked why he spoke to either group, he replied that his ambition was to bring about peace. ‘Does it mean that I agree with them?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘That’s not the point.’ He could not name a single Israeli politician with whom he had discussed peace, or explain why he suggested boycotts and reprisals only against Israel, and not against any other country. Nor could he explain why the Stop the War Coalition had allowed anti-Semitic banners at its annual Al-Quds event.

  Linked together, Corbyn’s encounters could not be dismissed as coincidental or arbitrary, but rather spoke to a pattern of association with Holocaust deniers, terrorists and outright anti-Semites. When Ivan Lewis, another Jewish Labour MP, accused him of ‘anti-Semitic rhetoric’ and association with racists, he replied that it was ludicrous to liken him to Holocaust deniers. The idea that he was anti-Semitic was ‘appalling, disgusting, deeply offensive’. In his opinion, he, and not Jews, would decide whether his anti-Zionism was racist. During the Labour Party conference in Brighton in 2015
he made a reluctant appearance at a reception for Labour Friends of Israel. Compelled to fulfil the leader’s traditional visit, in his speech he condemned the ‘siege of Gaza’, without mentioning that Hamas was firing rockets into Israel, and noticeably refused even to use the word ‘Israel’. His bias provoked Michael Foster, a generous Jewish donor to the party, to describe Corbyn’s close aides as Nazi SS shock troops and Corbyn himself as an anti-Semite. With Corbyn’s compliance, Foster was instantly suspended from the party.

  That single act changed little. Luciana Berger, another Jewish Labour MP, revealed that she had received 2,500 abusive messages over three days, telling her to ‘eat pork’ or ‘move to Israel’, and had had a yellow star superimposed on an image of her face with the hashtags #filthyjewishbitch and #kike. Berger had been director of Labour Friends of Israel for three years before she became MP for Liverpool Wavertree in 2010. Manny Shinwell, her great-uncle, was famous in the post-war years as a pugnacious Red Clydesider Member of Parliament. In the weeks after Corbyn’s election, the overt racism included online messages telling Berger that Hitler was right – six million times. Despite this vilification, she stood to be Labour’s candidate for mayor of Liverpool. To her disappointment, Corbyn personally endorsed her opponent, and she was attacked by his supporters for being Jewish. ‘It’s completely unacceptable,’ said Corbyn; but he ignored calls to do anything about it.

  For the first time, the existence of anti-Semitism among Labour supporters attracted public notice, and anger against Corbyn grew. Lord Levy, the party’s former fundraiser, was the type of prominent Blairite Corbyn instinctively disliked, so his expression of ‘shock and horror’ at the failure to condemn anti-Semitism was relatively easy to ignore. More awkward was the protest of Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. ‘Most people in the Jewish community can’t trust Labour,’ he said. ‘There’s an ideological bigotry towards Israel prevalent on the far left that Israel can do no good.’ Reluctantly, Corbyn agreed to meet Arkush and the Board of Deputies, complaining to his staff in the Commons that inviting the ‘bourgeois’ Arkush was ‘unfair’.