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”
Duncan_McFarlane
More of your bullshit about me supposedly supporting genocide against all Jews, or the destruction of Israel. I don’t and never have. Like half the former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet i support Israel dropping its preconditions and accepting negotiations with the entire elected Palestinian government, including Hamas, in order to get a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel and peace, so no more Palestinians or Israelis are killed.
And the idea that Hamas or even Hamas and every country in the Arab world (if they were its allies – which most of them aren’t) could ever destroy Israel is utterly ludicrous. Israel is the strongest military power in the middle east – bar none. It has the most advanced jet fighter bombers, helicopters, missiles, tanks, APCs, motorised heavy artillery, by the thousand. On top of that it has nuclear weapons and the strongest military power in the world, the US, as its closest ally.
The Arab states couldn’t even defeat Israel when most of them were its enemies in three wars. Israel’s military strength is now immensely greater than it was after the last war in 1973 – and since 1967 the US has been Israel’s close ally.
What has been happening is that Israel has been slowly ethnically cleansing and annexing more of the West Bank’s prime farmland and water supplies and building new settlements and expanding existing ones – i.e Israel is close to wiping out Palestine by force and denying the Palestinians any state of their own alongside Israel. Why are you cheerleading that?
Bayesian_Rationalist
I, too, would like to see you present evidence that Owen Jones has sided with the Islamic far-right, as well as evidence that Noam Chomsky has.
It may have become trendy to make these assertions – it certainly stirs up some emotions when you claim that old allies have betrayed the cause of “freedom” to “Islamofascism”, but the assertions are, as it stands, completely unsubstantiated and like Nick Cohen and Christopher Hitchens, you’ve failed to provide any evidence for them.
Duncan_McFarlane
The government could set up its own banks – or nationalise some of those it bailed out – and issue QE money the way the Bank of England does – but give it to people , businesses and researchers who actually need it and will use it in ways that benefit the whole country, instead of handing it all to banks, hedge funds and pension funds to pad their reserves, as has been done by the Bank of England with the £375 billion of QE money issued so far in the UK.
Duncan_McFarlane
yeah – the Labour party are going to help the Muslams impose their religion on us all? Filed with the 17th to 19th century pamphlets about how Irish immigrants were going to impose Catholicism on us all. Never happened. Nor will it with Muslims.
Bayesian_Rationalist
“Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Barely at the levels it is at.”
Please provide me with a peer-reviewed scientific study supporting this assertion.
“The power of the sun.”
There’s a lot of evidence against this hypothesis. Solar activity has been stagnant since 1970, and there was a solar minimum between 2007-2009. Yet, temperatures have continued to rise.
See this study, for instance: http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/lockwood2007.pdf
“The effects of increased water vapour.”
Water vapour increases when temperatures rise in a positive feedback loop. So, when CO2 levels rise and cause temperatures to rise, it also causes more water vapour to reside in the atmosphere. Essentially, water vapour amplifies the warming effect of CO2.
“The reflection of the ice-caps”
Seeing as the ice caps are melting, I’d hardly say this is a plausible factor. But, again, provide me with a peer-reviewed scientific study demonstrating that this is the case.
“And other factors”
It’s interesting that you think that climate scientists haven’t actually looked at other factors, when they have. Just to add another factor: they’ve looked at galactic cosmic rays, and have concluded that there’s no evidence suggesting that they have contributed to the warming.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/035049/article
“in fact there is evidence it hasn’t warmed at all for 20 odd years.”
I’m afraid it has. Ocean and surface temperatures have risen since 1995, or 1998, or whichever period you want to cherry-pick from. Decade on decade, temperatures have been rising, and this decade already looks like it will be the hottest on record. Last year, 2014, was the warmest on record and the first five months of 2015 have been significantly warmer than the first five months of 2014. 2014, followed by 2010 and 2005, are the warmest years on record.
“The “consensus” is rarely right.”
Firstly, Newton and Einstein are not necessarily the consensus. Einstein, in fact, didn’t like the scientific consensus on quantum mechanics, for example, but he was right when it came to the photoelectric effect, special relativity and general relativity, all of which are the consensus amongst scientists.
If the experts in a field are all saying that something is occurring, it’s very likely that they are correct. A rational person would assign a high probability level to a theory which has the backing of a scientific consensus. A theory which is not backed by the majority of scientists is less likely to be true than a theory which is. Surely you would agree with this?
Nobody seems to wish to challenge the scientific consensus on the germ theory of disease, the general theory of relativity or on quantum mechanics, and most people accept these theories without understanding them precisely because there is a scientific consensus that they are correct.