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”
Jen The Blue
Well we can all waste our time trawling the internet for evidence that support our own case.
My points have to be supported by “peer reviewed” papers despite the fact the peer review process has failed completely with the religion of global warming……whereas you just state your “facts”.
Yes, I know all about alleged positive feedback loop, that is why all the mathematical models show the temperature shooting off the scale and why each one has proven useless.
Yes, I can look at your evidence, I can point you to people who will refute it. But then you’d just shout BP so what is the point?
The reflection of the ice-caps was just an example of how comlex a system the climate is
But you stick with your religious beliefs – the weather outside will be the same as it always is.
Daz K
It’s quite simple that by the way of playing apologist and not standing up for liberal humanist principles, you create a fertile ground for Islamism to flourish, and it’s critics are silenced as bigots with catch-all terms like ‘islamophobia’.
In the case of Owen Jones, I think this one occurrence sums up his major blindside quite well. On the 22nd May 2013, Lee Rigby was beheaded by two Islamist fanatics on the streets of London, immediately, Owen Jones tweeted the following:
“Atrocities like Woolwich sicken anyone with humanity. It’s only the people who plan and execute them responsible. No-one and nothing else.”
Source: https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/337255600595542017
As we can see here, he has instantly leapt to the defence of the ideas which led to this. Nick Cohen also addressed this in this article:
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/nick-cohen/2013/08/richard-dawkins-and-me-a-reply-to-my-many-critics/
Likewise Chomsky often belittles the current orgy of violence we see in the Muslim world by pasting his anti-American, anti-Capitalist ideology onto this phenomenon, for example, him morally comparing Bill Clinton’s attacks on Al-Shifa to 9/11 is extremely worrying. Indeed, Bin Laden himself often quoted Chomsky in his speeches. I find his comparing the ethics of Islamists and groups like Gaza to the ethics of the US or Israel hyperbolic and worrying, there is plenty of criticism to be laid at those nations, but ethically, they are not worse than a group like ISIS.
dcomplex
The Bank of England bought nontraditional assets (i.e. not government bonds) in order to raise the expected rate of inflation. It didn’t just hand out money. That would be pointless. The idea is to move banks up the risk ladder and make loans by decreasing the rate of return on nontraditional “safe” assets and also by convincing the financial sector that it intends to take drastic action in order to reach an inflation target. Mathematically, the expected real rate of return on some fixed-return asset like a security is approximately the nominal rate of return minus the expected rate of inflation, so by pursuing this policy, you can make it so banks either send capital overseas (lowering the value of Sterling and making British exports cheaper) or by investing it in higher-risk investments on the Sceptered Isle (effectively lowering interest rates below zero).
The central bank cannot just print money and hand it out willy-nilly. It needs to be able to eventually sell back those assets if it needs to control inflation in the future.
In the USA, all profit made on the central bank’s investment is taken as money for the Government’s general fund, that is, as revenue.
dcomplex
Yeah but he was reallllly good at it and he realllllly liked getting it on with kids. XD
Duncan_McFarlane
When inflation is zero and deflation is a bigger risk, we could issue money without any problem. There is no evidence that inflation harms economic growth until it’s well into double figures (over 20% from studies cited by nobel prize winning economist Ha Joon Chang).
And inflation should not be the sole target – reducing unemployment and reducing poverty are extremely important. And i can’t see how in hell it can be “silly” to give money to people who actually need it desperately and will immediately spend it, boosting sales of private sector goods and services – and to small and medium sized businesses who will keep new jobs in this country ; but not “silly” to hand it by the hundred billion to the banks and hedge funds who caused the crisis in the first place and already have far more money than they could ever need.