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Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy
Corbyn
ASA WINSTANLEY
OR Books, 2023

The Jew cries out in pain as he strikes you.
Polish proverb

Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of Britain’s Labour Party prior to the
current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, taking over in 2015 remaining
leader until Labour’s comprehensive defeat in 2019. Despite losing the
snap General Election in 2017, Labour exceeded expectations
electorally, and Corbyn remained at the helm until 2019, when Boris
Johnson’s Tories (in name, at least) won a resounding mandate.
Corbyn’s tenure as leader was particularly tempestuous as he was
fighting not just the old enemy in the form of the Conservative Party,
but another, more shadowy foe:

The most successful attack vector against Corbyn would prove to be the narrative of a ‘crisis’ of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party.

The quote is from Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby
Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn, a book by British journalist, Asa
Winstanley. Anti-Semitism, along with racism, homophobia, Islamophobia
et al, is one of the new occupational hazards, a reboot of the Seven
Deadly Sins for the workplace. An accusation of any one of them can
lose someone their job, and politicians must tread particularly
carefully. But whereas racism and transphobia bring hordes out onto
the streets waving ill-written signs, the Jews are not much given to placardism. Anti-Semitism is a charge more clinically applied, but
equally deadly. Corbyn’s political demise, according to Winstanley,
was “death by a thousand investigations into anti-Semitism”.

The book represents seven-years’ research into Labour’s relationship
with (and attack by) the Jewish lobby by Winstanley and colleagues at
his website, Electronic Intifada. A long-time Labour member himself
before leaving the party in disgust, Winstanley and his site represent
a rare voice, one critical of Jewish presence and influence in British politics. This book shines an unwelcome light into the shadows, as
when the site’s investigations revealed that “the Israeli state is
arming Ukraine’s Azov Battalion—one of the world’s most dangerous Nazi
armed groups.”

As soon as Corbyn took the reins of the Labour Party from the utterly
hopeless Ed Miliband, there were stirrings within the British
establishment the cause of which is the subject of Winstanley’s work
here. Corbyn was correctly seen as a creature of the hard Left, and
his reception was a frigid one. Media coverage and interviews were
hostile and provocative, an ex-British Army General said that there
would be mass resignations should Corbyn become Prime Minister, and
both MI5 and MI6 invited the new Labour leader to “let’s get
acquainted” meetings which gave him the sense there was an éminence
grise working behind the scenes.

The media were cautious about Corbyn’s accession to the Labour
leadership, although impressed by the party’s showing in the 2017
election. Already, though, the expected chorus warning of anti-Jew
enmity had begun to build:

Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard had to face up to the reality
of Corbyn’s achievements, admitting that ‘Like most pundits, I called
the election completely wrongly.’ But he went on to write that the
12.8 million people who had voted for Labour ‘scare me’, implying that
they were all anti-Semitic, or at least willing to tolerate
Jew-hatred.

But the opposition to Corbyn, and the complex and determined campaign
to depose him, had as its center of gravity the Labour leader’s lack
of vocal support for Israel. It is not sufficient in British politics
to pay lip-service to Israel. You must support Zionism, at least
tacitly. And so Corbyn was painted into a corner before he had even
begun his run at the premiership:

No matter how much Corbyn tried to pander, the Israel lobby always
refused to take yes for an answer.

The ultimate aim of the Israeli lobby was to keep a genuinely
Socialist Prime Minister out of 10 Downing Street, and Corbyn alarmed
them: “probably more than anything else, Corbyn was known among
activists for his involvement in the Palestine solidarity movement.”
In fact, Winstanley’s tenacious research shows that the lobby did not
suddenly turn their fire on the Labour leader once he had won the
leadership contest:

Israel’s security services had set their sights on the MP at least
five years before he became Labour leader and long before
anti-Semitism in Labour became a newsworthy issue.

Anti-Semitism was not something that British newspapers such as The
Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News suddenly discovered in the Labour
Party, but rather something they at best exaggerated and at worst
confected.

Much of the war over perceived racism of any kind is waged on the
battlefield of language, and now that social media has amplified
political commentary, use of language, vocabulary, and rhetoric is
forensically examined by those who wish to use it to serve their
political purposes. Winstanley is in no doubt in his choice of
equivalence:

‘Do you agree that’ a certain quote, social media posting, or
unfortunate turn of phrase ‘is anti-Semitic?’ became the new ‘Are you
now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?’.

The term “trope” is always in play for the Jewish lobby. Their Islamic
and Black counterparts tend not to use it, Muslims perhaps because its provenance is Ancient Greek (and thus a relic from the jahiliyya, the
time before Islam), Blacks because they can’t find it in their slim,
one-volume dictionary of Ebonics. Thus, when Al Jazeera’s media arm
produced a revealing series called The Lobby, which involved
undercover reporting and recording, the response of Labour Friends of
Israel (LFI) was typical:

LFI [called] Al Jazeera’s series ‘a combination of lies, insinuations,
and distortions’ that ‘attempted to construct a vast conspiracy
involving hidden power, money and improper influence — typical
anti-Semitic tropes’.

Well, sure. All Jew-critical observers understand that “hidden power,
money and improper influence” are the reasons they are Jew-critical
observers in the first place. It’s a little like saying that poisonous
snakes possess deadly agility, sharp, canalised teeth, and lethal
venom, and that these are “typical, anti-snake tropes”. If a “trope”
is simply a feature, it loses its sinister overtones. It too must be weaponized. One prominent member of LFI related with pride that her
son had recently got a very good job by virtue of having worked for
the Labour faction. When a journalist implied that LFI might have
access to some serious funding from the Jewish lobby, “She instantly
lashed out: ‘It’s anti-Semitic. It is. It’s a trope. It’s about
conspiracy theorists!’.”

It’s also interesting to note the name of LFI’s savior in the Labour
Party when they fell on hard times:

The decline of LFI’s membership led its director, in an internal
report, to write that 1992 ‘came near to seeing the end of LFI as an
active body.’ Its fortunes were revived when Tony Blair took over in
1994. Blair called it ‘one of the most important organizations within
the Labour movement’.

The Jewish lobby’s concerted and ultimately successful attempt to
bring down Corbyn was no mere whispering campaign among Zionists.
“Israeli officials often described their campaign against
‘delegitimisation’ using military language”, Winstanley writes:

According to Israeli journalist Barak Ravid, there was even a ‘war
room’ at the Israeli embassy in London. Describing a map of Britain
hanging on the wall, … Ravid wrote that it was like something from ‘a
brigade on the Lebanese border.’ The map showed ‘the front’ (Britain’s universities) as well as ‘the deployment of pro-Israel activists and
the location of ‘enemy forces’. The aim was to sabotage and divide the
left in order to promote Zionist ideology, and to block the rise of
democratic socialist governments overseas that would be more likely to
loosen ties with Israel.

Corbyn was not the only Labour Party member to be targeted and
ultimately defenestrated by the Jewish lobby, nor even the most
high-profile. When Corbyn won the leadership contest, no one outside
the Westminster bubble had even heard of him. Ken Livingstone, on the
other hand, was a household name. The two-term London Mayor
affectionately known as “Red Ken” was effectively brought down by
forces using anti-Semitism as their field artillery, and two names
which are never far from the Jewish lobby’s lexicon: Hitler and the
Holocaust.

In an interview, Livingstone mentioned the fact that Hitler, in the
early 1930s, announced his plan for Germany’s Jews, which did not
involve gas chambers, but instead mass deportation to Israel. Even
Reinhard Heydrich, known as the “architect of the Holocaust”, approved
of Zionism (although Livingstone was not so foolish as to mention
that). The interview was a classic stitch-up:

In the days, months and years to follow, Livingstone would be
incessantly berated with the allegation that he had brought the Nazis
into the conversation out the blue, even of being ‘obsessed’ by
Hitler. But examination of the transcript shows that, in fact, it had
been [the interviewer] who had raised the issue of the Nazis.

The interview was followed a familiar maneuver by the Jewish lobby:
Get the interviewee onto Hitler territory and then watch closely for
any slip-up. When Corbyn tried to defend Livingstone’s comments, the
Jewish media pounced with trademark hyperbole. Former chief rabbi
Jonathan Sacks accused Corbyn of “the most offensive statement made by
a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of
Blood’ speech”. Powell, of course, never mentioned any “Rivers of
blood” but rather, as a classics expert, was making an allusion to
Virgil. This regular misquotation has passed into the currency both of
the Left and the Jewish lobby. It has become, as our Jewish friends
might say, a trope. Concerning Corbyn’s apparent defense of
Livingstone, Jewish journalist Simon Heffer announced on live radio
that Corbyn “wanted to re-open Auschwitz”. This is a willful and
absurd misinterpretation of the situation, but it helped to put Corbyn
on the defensive. Once a prominent personality is forced to start
saying things like, “I’m not a racist” or, “I don’t have an
anti-Semitic bone in my body”, the struggle is already slipping away
from them.

Winstanley and his research team were also affected by Labour’s
desperate purge of anything that even remotely resembled
anti-Semitism:

At the Electronic Intifada, we saw signs of this early on, as Labour
Party bureaucrats implemented what was in effect a stealth ban on
party members sharing our stories.

Published in 2023, Winstanley’s book almost bring us up to the present
day (in which it is possible for the staunchest Tory to feel nostalgic
about Corbyn) and extends to Starmer’s accession as Party leader, as
well as the clarity of his attitude towards Israel and its ever-busy
lobbyists:

[Starmer’s] first act as ‘Labour’ leader was not to address the
material conditions of the working classes or (with the looming threat
of millions of newly unemployed) lay out his plans to combat COVID-19.
Rather his top priority was assuring the Israel lobby that they were
back in the driver’s seat.

The return of Israeli influence was confirmed with the first of
Starmer’s minor scandals: Inviting an Israeli spy to take over as head
of “social listening”, a euphemism for the surveillance of citizens on
social media. “Israel and its lobby no longer needed to infiltrate the
Labour Party”, writes Winstanley. “Starmer had invited them into
headquarters”.

Starmer now has to serve two masters, the Jewish lobby and the Muslim
Council of Britain. It seems at first glance that the mass importation
of Muslims into Europe represents what people have taken to calling an “existential threat” to Europe’s Jews. An alternative view is that it
is the Israel lobby which is orchestrating this invasion, and a few hospitalized Jews and damaged synagogues are collateral damage. It is
even whispered that the Jewish Board of Deputies is an arm of the
Muslim Brotherhood. But that is a tale for another day.

Winstanley’s book is both highly competent, responsible journalism,
and a reminder that, for the Israeli lobby, the only thing worse than anti-Semitism is no anti-Semitism, nothing with which to gain
political purchase and leverage. “Israel and its lobby”, Winstanley
writes, “have always used anti-Semitism as a political weapon.”

We hear much, at least from our own quarter, about the influence of
Jews at a global level and too little about the small maneuvers—the
grassroots plots and plans, the targeting of individuals. The strategy
used by the Jewish lobby is simple but, as the case of Jeremy Corbyn
shows, devastatingly effective. One leading Jewish lobbyist explains
the methods used to control both the narrative and even an entire
political party:

[We] built a robust political discourse, rooted in the politics of the
left, and deployed it in their own backyard.

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