As the most left-wing candidate you should get my vote. But you won't. And here's why.
Congratulations!
By securing a place on the ballot to become the next Labour leader you have put a spring in the step of many party members and trade unionists who feel that you embody their values better than any other candidate. (You embody only some of mine, trampling on some others, but I will get to that.)
You represent a clear alternative to the suffocating consensus that says there is no alternative to neoliberalism: marketisation, deregulation, privatisation, financialisation, an assault on the bargaining power of labor, regressive tax regimes, and cuts to welfare.
You will not tell us to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting ‘filthy rich’ and you will not sneer at the trade union movement.
You are acutely aware that the transformation of European social democracy into a political force pursuing only a slightly kinder and a slightly gentler neoliberalism has caused the erosion of the emotional connection between the party and the working-class.
And you know that neoliberalism has eroded local democracy and the public realm, pushing aside actors other than those at the center, and then micro-managing Britain through a grim and relentless bureaucratising cult of quasi-government bodies.
On that basis you will secure the votes of many party members and trade unionists.
But you won’t get my vote.
You won’t get it because Labour’s best traditions also include anti-fascism and internationalism while your support – to me, inexplicable and shameful – for the fascistic and antisemitic forces of Hezbollah and Hamas flies in the face of those traditions. In particular, your full-throated cheer-leading for the vicious antisemitic Islamist Raed Salah is a deal-breaker.
Why did you lend your support to Raed Salah? No, he is not a ‘critic of Israel’, but a straight-up Jew hater.
You said in 2012, ‘Salah is far from a dangerous man’, even though the left-wing, anti-Netanyahu Israeli newspaper of record, Ha’aretz, reported that Salah was first charged with inciting anti-Jewish racism and violence in January 2008.
You said ‘Salah is a very honoured citizen’, even though Salah was found guilty of spreading the blood libel – the classic antisemitic slander that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make their bread. He did so during a speech on 16 February 2007 in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Wadi Joz.
I mean, just listen to Salah: ‘We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children’s blood’, he said. ‘Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the holy bread.’ (The UK Appeal Court decided that ‘We do not find this comment could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews.’ It also decided that this would ‘offend and distress Israeli Jews and the wider Jewish community.’)
You said: ‘Salah represents his people extremely well’, even though after the 9/11 terrorist attacks Salah wrote this in the October 5, 2001 issue of the weekly Sawt al-Haq w’al-Huriyya (Voice of Justice and Freedom): ‘A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.’
You said ‘Salah’s is a voice that must be heard’ even though he has called homosexuality a ‘great crime’ and recently [preached that ‘Jerusalem will soon become the capital of the global caliphate’ which will ‘spread justice throughout the land after it was filled with injustice by America, the Zionist enterprise, the Batiniyya, reactionism, Paganism and the Crusaders.’ i.e. everyone who does not follow his brand of Sunni Islam.
You said ‘I look forward to giving you tea on the terrace because you deserve it!’, even though the Islamic Movement [the northern branch of which Salah heads] has eulogised Osama bin Laden and Salah has incited Muslims against Jews by writing incendiary lies such as this: ‘The unique mover wanted to carry out the bombings in Washington and New York in order to provide the Israeli establishment with a way out of its entanglements.’ Who do you think he meant by ‘the unique mover’?
Why is that kind of conspiratorial antisemitism, dripping with threat and menace, worthy of tea on the terrace?
And it isn’t just a problem with Salah, is it? You said it was ‘my pleasure and my honour’ to host ‘our friends from Hezbollah and our friends from Hamas’ in the Commons.
Really?
Why do you not care that the Hamas Charter states that ‘Islam will obliterate Israel’ and enjoins all good Muslims to kill Jews, whom it blames for all the wars and revolutions in classic antisemitic fashion?
Why don’t you challenge your ‘friends in Hamas’ about the inclusion in their Charter of this canonical Hadith: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’
And why are Hezbollah your friends? They are an antisemitic Islamist goose-stepping ‘Party of God’ who persecute (and assassinate) liberals and democrats in Lebanon whenever they can. The Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said ‘If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.’ (NY Times, May 23, 2004, p. 15, section 2, column 1.) Your ‘friends’ were enthusiastically slaughtering Syrian civilians on behalf of the Assad regime long before ISIS or Jabhat Al-Nusra joined the fray.
Yes, you will say I am part of the Israel lobby and people should pay no heed. Yes, I work at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. But here’s the thing. I have the same views now about the Israel-Palestine conflict as I did when I was a member of the Socialist Organiser Editorial Board and you were with Labour Briefing back in the 1980s. (I think our two organisations may have even ‘fused’ at some point, though those days are a bit hazy now.)
My views have not changed since I was a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism. They are the same views I had when we debated each other at Birmingham University some years ago: I believe in two states for two people, a secure Israel and a viable Palestine, a democratic solution to an unresolved national question based on mutual recognition and support for the right to national self-determination of both peoples.
I edit a journal, Fathom, which publishes many voices critical of the current Israeli government, from the Israeli left, from Israel’s Arab citizens, and from Palestinians.
I just do not understand how you can support so unthinkingly those political forces which oppose to their dying breath everything – literally, everything – the labour movement has ever stood for: trade union rights, freedom of speech and organisation, women’s equality, gay and lesbian rights, anti-racism, the enlightenment, and reason.
But as long as you do support those forces you will not get my vote. As long as you do, I will just have to remain politically homeless. Which is a pity, because there you are on the TV screen, talking with élan like a proper social democrat about full employment.
I want to cheer you on. Can you respond in such a way that I can?
Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom – For a deeper understanding of Israel and the region, and works for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)
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497 Responses to “An open letter to Jeremy Corbyn”
WetWork
Now here is a slogan for Labour leader Corbyn could run under in 2020
“A Leader like Chavez and a nation like Venezuela!”
My God, you would have people flocking to the polls, there would even be queues before they opened.
Duncan_McFarlane
President Abbas of Fatah was elected in the last Presidential elections in the Palestinian Authority in 2005. Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Legislative elections in 2006, making Ismail Haniyeh the elected Palestinian Prime Minister (the PMs appointed by Abbas were appointed unconstitutionally as the Palestinian legislature must approve such appointments under the Palestinian Authority’s Constitution.
After this Israel and Egypt placed a blockade on Gaza and refused any negotiation with half of the elected Palestinian government, despite Hamas representatives having stated repeatedly before and since the elections that they were willing to talk to and make a long term ceasefire with Israel. (They probably tell their own supporters something else – just as Netanyahu told Israelis in a speech in Hebrew during the most recent Gaza “war” that he would never allow a Palestinian state with full sovereignty in the West Bank – and many of his ministers have stated that they would never allow a Palestinian state full state (e.g Naftali Bennet).
You will be aware that the Bush administration, Mubarak and the Israeli government co-operated to arm President Abbas’ Presidential Guard to carry out an attempted military coup to overthrow Hamas as the other half of the elected Palestinian government. That this coup attempt succeeded in the West Bank and failed in Gaza and led to civil war.
And that no new elections can be held without the co-operation of the Israeli government and military as the occupying and blockading power.
Duncan_McFarlane
It was the deregulation policies adopted from the tories under Blair and Brown that led to the banks being able to create all kinds of “innovative” (fraudulent) “financial products” like Collateralised Debt Obligations (thousands of loans packaged together, mostly never going to be repaid, but too many for any buyer to check all the individial credit ratings). When this scam , allowed by deregulation, was uncovered, it led to the banking crisis as the CDO “assets” were revealed as worthless.
Deregulation of the financial sector began under Thatcher with her 1986 ‘Big Bang’ in the City of London financial sector, which her then Chancellor Nigel Lawson has admitted contributed to causing the banking crisis. New Labour continued with the “light touch regulation”/ “self regulation” bullshit the tories had begun.
And the banking crisis destroyed Labour’s popularity – so the real cause of Labour’s decline since the banking crisis was the same adoption of tory policies which Blair and Brown began in the late 90s. Labour aren’t going to win any more elections by being “tory lite” after that.
Jen The Blue
So the police were finally forced into action…..I presume you are not unaware that the police’s initial reaction was “nothing to see here…..move along…..no case to answer.”.
Yes, dozens of Muslims have been arrested……..out of the many thousands of Jihadis and their supporters.
But how did the Rotherham rape scandal occur? (And many other towns too.) Has that “no basis in fact”? You would love to believe that. To absolve your PC language and thought control from any guilt in the rape of 1400+ underage girls.
But that is why the police did nothing, the social workers did nothing, everyone did nothing. Because the perpetrators were Muslim…..not Asian……believers in the Religion of Peace. It is in the Koran…..READ IT!
Duncan_McFarlane
There aren’t many thousands of Jihadis in the UK. And there are plenty of far right extremists in the UK, some of who have killed gay people and ordinary Muslims in terrorist attacks with nail bombs. Yet most far right people in the UK aren’t arrested either. You can only arrest people if they break the law.
In the Rotherham scandal no one was arrested or jailed? Because according to your claims they couldn’t possibly be as Muslims are meant to be “untouchable”, police can’t arrest them etc. Yet plenty of offenders have been arrested, charged and given long jail sentences for it.
Jimmy Saville, Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris and huge numbers of non-celebrity white, male child abusers and rapists got off with it for decades too. How did they manage that? By your reasoning (or lack of it) it would prove that the police are scared to arrest white British men, who are “untouchable” and can’t be arrested, no matter what they do.
You seem to believe all Muslims take the entire Koran and Hadith as applying to the present day. They do not all believe that at all. Plenty of them think large parts of it only apply to the time and place they were written – including marrying young girls. The Koran was written in the 7th Century AD. At that time it was perfectly normal for people of all religions – most definitely including Christian rulers and lords, to marry young girls who were pre-puberty.