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)
Left Foot Forward doesn't have the backing of big business or billionaires. We rely on the kind and generous support of ordinary people like you.
You can support hard-hitting journalism that holds the right to account, provides a forum for debate among progressives, and covers the stories the rest of the media ignore. Donate today.
497 Responses to “An open letter to Jeremy Corbyn”
John Keane
er,.. Bloody Sunday in Derry? Ballymurphy? Give us a break….
Daz K
Do you think Bloody Sunday was a policy of the British Army?
What utter ridiculous hyperbole, we are obliged by the Geneva convention.
Glasgow67
http://www.leftfutures.org/2015/07/reactionary-and-dishonest-a-reply-to-bicoms-alan-johnson-on-jeremy-corbyn/ just going to leave this here 😉
Jack Murray
But Israel is an extreme right wing state that steals land off and murders innocent people? And the U.S. And UK have killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocent Muslims in recent decades, some of which in illegal wars. How is trying to engage in talks with extreme Islamic resistant groups, that have come about as a direct result of the wests war mongering in the Middle East, supporting facism? Jeremy Corbyn stands for equality, peace and justice and if you think as a nation we will ever get that by ignoring the extreme damage we have caused in the Middle East, Muslim world you are completely deluded. This article is one sided and completely misses the point of what people like Jeremy Corbyn are attempting to do by welcoming the likes of Hezbollah in for talks.
Supreme Allied Condista
I too have a critique of Jeremy Corbyn leadership from a left perspective – revolutionary & freedom-fighting republicanism. (You know, with guns and things, not so much the flowers. LOL)
The message that Corbyn’s team are trying to suppress ….
Chilcot Iraq War Inquiry – the biggest damp squib in history.
Jeremy Corbyn and the peaceniks before the Iraq War
“Don’t . . . . attack,
don’t attack Iraq.
Let . . . . . Saddam
Murder who he likes”
Jeremy Corbyn and the peaceniks on extending RAF air-strikes over Syria
“Don’t . . . . attack,
don’t attack Syria.
Let . . . . . ISIS
Murder who they like”
Oh says Jeremy Corbyn, speaking to Newsnight – “I’m not a supporter of military intervention. I’m a supporter of isolating ISIS and bringing about a coalition of the region against them”, says he.
Well the regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the gulf monarchies have been secretly funding ISIS. ISIS are the secret agent proxy terrorist group of Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia denies that and claims it has isolated itself from ISIS. But then they would say that about their secret agents wouldn’t they?
Saudi Arabia are only going to isolate themselves in reality from their own secret agent proxy terrorist groups –
* if and when Saudi Arabia are either sanctioned and bombed into isolating themselves from ISIS, regime-changed even, which takes military intervention, or
* if and when Saudi Arabia have won all their terrorist wars and the whole world lies at their feet surrendering to the Saudis’ every demand – as Jeremy Corbyn would surrender to the Saudis every demand – such as Sharia Law in Britain, chopping heads off people for not converting from Christianity to Islam as dictated from Mecca – only when the Saudis rule the world would they comfortably isolate ISIS by choice, because they would have won and didn’t need ISIS any more
* if and when ISIS is smashed to bits militarily and doesn’t exist for the Saudis to support in secret like they do now.
So really Jeremy Corbyn is completely out of his depth in defence issues and in no way is he a fit person to become Prime Minister. The man is a menace to the security of Britain, our NATO allies and the free world!
Well then Mr Jeremy Corbyn MP, how about suggesting that Britain and its allies in NATO pursue regime-change of “Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, and a number of other places” to whom the UK sells weapons from oppressive, absolute monarchies imposing an oppressive religious police state into into liberal, secular democracies, where an Arabian democratic socialist Labour party, twinned with the British Labour Party, could be elected to government?
Or does the faction of the Labour Party which Mr Corbyn represents not have enough courage of their democratic socialist principles to be prepared to fight a war for them and are they fatally compromised by a pacifist tendency that would never fight for anything?
Hey peaceniks! Get you heads out of the Arabian sand! ISIS will be defeated only by force of arms.
The way to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia is to stop Saudi Arabia buying arms from ANYONE by regime-changing Saudi Arabia.
I DON’T support selling arms to oppressive Middle East regimes but the notion that by Britain stopping selling arms to them and maybe having a conference of others who won’t sell them arms to them is somehow going to stop them buying arms elsewhere and giving them to ISIS – is so stupid that anyone suggesting that as a way to stop ISIS murdering people, should NEVER run for political office, Mr Jeremy Corbyn!
Why is Jeremy Corbyn MP seemingly happy to represent the interests of ISIS to be free to murder anyone including any democratic socialist in Iraq or Syria they don’t like in police custody?
Is it for the same reason Jeremy Corbyn is happy to represent UNISON the trade union for civilian police workers who want their police to be free to arrest or murder in police custody anyone including any democratic socialist in Britain they don’t like?
Does Jeremy really like it when real democratic socialists get murdered because it stops them embarrassing him for never speaking out against police murders in Syria, Iraq or Britain?
The real democratic socialists are those who follow in the tradition of the International Brigade who fought Nazi-backed Franco and his fascists in the Spanish civil war.
http://herefordheckler.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/ib-banner.jpg
Real democratic socialists are warriors.
Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a warrior, he is a peacenik and no doubt he’d have a fine speech ready as and when he allowed us all to be ordered at gun point to our deaths at the hands of the likes of ISIS that he wouldn’t ever fight because he doesn’t fight, he just lets people get massacred.