Michael Rosen reflects…

In 2006 the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Stephen Pollard, announced that there was a ‘battle to save Western civilisation’ and the ‘enemy’ was ‘the Left in any form’.

In 2012, Pollard was ‘delighted to host’ an evening meeting with Nigel Farage.

In 2015, Pollard wrote a fiercely condemnatory article for the Daily Express about Margaret Hodge, deemed at the time to be a bit of a lefty for some quite punchy appearances as chair of the audit commission.

At around this time, one of the journalists on Pollard’s paper, Alex Brummer [CORRECTION: Geoffrey Levy] wrote the famous article in the Mail which attacked Ed Miliband’s father for being a Jewish marxist traitor. [NB Correction 2 – it was Alex Brummer who defended Levy’s article a week later in the same paper]

Pollard announced that Miliband was ‘toxic’ for Jewish voters and a good deal of publicity went into claiming (perhaps correctly) that Jewish voters had stopped voting Labour, Miliband’s views on Israel being cited as the reason.

All this was before Corbyn was elected leader.

Once Corbyn was elected, the ‘Corbyn is an antisemite’ narrative kicked in backed up by ideas that the Labour Party was itself totally and institutionally antisemitic – a narrative written up weekly by Pollard and his Political Editor, Lee Harpin in the Chronicle.

At times, I’ve argued with Harpin on twitter with the consequence that a few weeks ago he accused me of being a ‘cheerleader for Soros’. I need hardly say that I am not a cheerleader for Soros though I have noted that Soros is used as a kind of cipher for the Nazi trope that Europe was being brought to its knees by international Jewish finance.

The rise of Trump, Bannon, Farage, Johnson, Orban and others represent the rise of what Bannon called ‘economic nationalism’.

Farage has never been afraid to use classic antisemitic slurs in his radio interviews talking antagonistically about Soros, and the power of the Jewish lobby in the US etc etc. The Guardian and the Independent have highlighted these.

Now, just recently a guy called Yosef David has announced that he is going to stand for the Brexit Party (yes!) against Corbyn in his constituency of Islington North. David is Jewish. He is being given a lot of well-wishes by people who talk as if he has the hopes of the ‘Jewish community’ on his side.

Straightaway, Lee Harpin, scourge of Labour antisemitism has wished him ‘Mazel Tov’ (congratulations) on Twitter.

Think about that.

Lee Harpin, who has done all he can to expose what he sees as antisemitism in the Labour Party is congratulating someone who is supporting a leader who has come out with obvious and blatant antisemitic slurs.

David presumably thinks he’s fighting antisemitism by supporting an antisemite.

It all rather does look as if these folks were never really interested in fighting antisemitism. They were either only interested in fighting antisemitism in the Labour Party or perhaps just ‘fighting the Labour Party’ – exactly as Pollard announced that he was going to do back in 2006.

Taking a longer wider view, what’s going on here is an alignment of right wing forces which has the support of some Jews even if these right wing forces are happy to go in for classic antisemitic statements. This alignment sees Islam and the Left as ‘the enemy’ and will do battle with either or both in order to secure a new kind of nationalist capitalism – as they see it or call it (even if it’s going to be as international as all capitalism is anyway).

What’s been particularly sad and pathetic is seeing various kinds of liberal commentators eagerly gobbling up the faux fight against antisemitism, not realising that they are being taken for a ride by this new right talking antisemitism one day and claiming to fight it the next.