Activist Tom Baker analyses the impact of the scam and concludes the UK was robbed of an opportunity to reverse the toxic politics of the last 40+ years
As Theodor Adorno noted, a society that ignores thinking and thinkers is one in which reality is obscured by the act of not thinking. It becomes a pseudo reality.
The pseudo reality of the supposed ‘antisemitism crisis’ when Jeremy Corbyn was Leader of the Labour Party was generated by smothering deliberation and debate, and ignoring thinkers like the late David Graeber. Unfortunately (for those that continue to perpetuate the antisemitism scam) having one foot in the realm of the possible does not override the proof that is necessary to place the opposing foot in the realm of the actual.
Jeremy Corbyn never said Jews don’t understand English irony and did not lay a wreath to terrorists; Chris Williamson never said that the Labour Party had been ‘too apologetic’ about antisemitism; Jackie Walker never said that Jewish people controlled the slave trade; the EHRC did not find Labour to be ‘institutionally antisemitic’; Corbyn did not approve of an antisemitic mural and Ruth Smeeth’s allegations of antisemitism against Marc Wadsworth were completely false. (The ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’: 10 obvious frauds. | by Simon Maginn | Medium)
The only thing that the antisemitism scammers got half right was Corbyn referring to Hamas as ‘friends’. But the claim is intentionally misleading because he only did so to be cordial at a meeting. Jeremy Corbyn and Hamas aren’t ‘friends’, whatever that may entail, and his supposed ‘friendship’ with Hamas was based on a passing pleasantry in a formal setting. Had it entailed him getting hold of $15 million in cash, organising for it to be put it in suitcases and getting it delivered to Hamas in taxis, would he have been able to make the case that it was for humanitarian purposes as others have done?
The reality is that, despite losing in 2017, the Labour Party’s socialist manifesto was very popular with the electorate. Theresa May’s majority was taken away when she had expected to increase it and the fleeting possibility of a Corbyn-led Labour government in coalition with the SNP and Plaid Cymru became a serious hypothetical.
This was the moment to build on the success of a socialist manifesto that had delivered the biggest swing to Labour since Clement Atlee. However, the right wing of the Labour Party were not committed to campaigning for the election of a socialist Labour government; in fact it was committed to preventing it.
Between 2017 and 2019, the right wing of Labour invented an ‘antisemitism crisis’ to undermine the left and make a socialist government an impossibility. The antisemitism scam was a “…cold, deliberate, intentional fraud, on a gigantic scale”. As Simon Maginn has brilliantly and forensically shown, when the claims of antisemitism during this period are actually scrutinised, they turn out to be nothing.
Without evidence anything is ‘possible’, and it is therefore presented as ‘possible’ that Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite. However, this evidence-free ‘possibility’ was all the antisemitism scammers required. The vociferous, sustained and false claims of antisemitism only needed to be a) ‘possible’ and b) repeated endlessly by determined liars. When challenged, the liars that supported the antisemitism scam adhered to the following tactics; to present demanding proof as denying the seriousness of the accusations; to discuss the pros and cons of the matter is regarded as ‘downplaying’ the problem (one antisemite is one too many); and to speak the truth about it being a scam is to be maliciously labelled an antisemite.
The consequence of this intentional fraud was that the real economic case for reversing austerity was derailed by the pseudo reality of an ‘antisemitism crisis’, and Corbyn’s Labour Party – and the whole country – was denied the opportunity to reverse the neoliberal political trajectory that had begun in 1979. Jurgen Habermas noted that the priority of communication is not objective truth, but consensus; the objectively false consensus that Jeremy Corbyn was a dangerous antisemite was effectively communicated to the public.
The intention of the Labour right was to lose the 2019 election in the most spectacular fashion possible, install Keir Starmer as Leader, abandon the 2017 manifesto and claim to have transformed the party for the better. The attacks upon Jeremy Corbyn stuck because he naively relied upon the fact that the allegations of antisemitism were false and the assumption that they would not be taken seriously without proof.
But the veracity of the allegations was never the point. The antisemitism scam was a blunt heuristic instrument intended to prevent a socialist Prime Minister – it did not need to be wedded to facts or reality to succeed. Jeremy Corbyn is not an antisemite, therefore the precise details of the allegations became not only secondary to their seriousness, but also to the determined and urgent manner in which they were expressed.
The pseudo-reality of the antisemitism crisis could not escape the absurd conclusion that Britain had narrowly avoided being led by a dangerous antisemite. The reality, with one foot firmly planted in the realm of the possible and the other in the realm of the actual, is that British politics was hijacked by an antisemitism scam designed to change the leadership of the Labour party and shift mainstream politics to the right.
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