Guardian op-ed: ‘false’ antisemitism charges against Corbyn used to stifle debate

For an op-ed to suggest - in late 2019 – that the chrages of antisemitism against Corbyn were "manufactured", after years of revelations attesting to his long and well-documented record of supporting anti-Semites who call for the mass murder of Jews, in the context of polls showing 87% of British Jewish believe he’s personally antisemitic, and in the midst of an EHRC investigation into whether the party has become institutionally antisemitic on his watch – is obscene.

A Guardian op-ed defending Bernie Sanders from charges that he’s abetted antisemitism, “Accusing Bernie Sanders of antisemitism? That’s a new low”, Dec. 18, by Kate Aronoff, contributing writer to The Intercept, includes the following claim:

For [those] on the right that have jumped on the [Sanders is antisemitic] bandwagon, though, details don’t really matter. Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, simply belongs to an opposing political camp with opposing values. Like the attacks against Corbyn abroad and Ilhan Omar at home, those now being lobbed at Sanders aren’t about defeating antisemitism so much as using it as a narrative device to undermine a worldview that offends them. Sanders’s solidarity with Palestinians suffering under occupation is not an affront to Jews but to the right’s propaganda that looking out for their best interest means a blanket, unquestioning support for whatever the Israeli government happens to be doing, which at the moment includes maintaining a brutal apartheid state.

It should be noted that, earlier in the year, the writer was quite clear about her views on antisemitism ‘charges’ against Corbyn.

If the claim that accusations of antisemitism against Corbyn were bogus – and used as a “narrative device” to stifle debate – was made in 2015, in the early days of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership, it would be more defensible. 

However, to make this argument in late 2019 – after years of revelations attesting to his long and well-documented record of supporting anti-Semites who call for the mass murder of Jews, in the context of polls showing 87% of British Jewish believe he’s personally antisemitic, and in the midst of an EHRC investigation into whether the party has become institutionally antisemitic on his watch – is obscene.

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