Democrats keep insisting that they don’t have an anti-Semitism problem. Events like this make it clear that they do.
Jeremy Corbyn is the head of the British Labour Party. He’s also an extremely polarizing figure who has met with terrorist supporters and made anti-Semitic remarks about British Jews. The result has been mass protests by Jews and non-Jews in the UK.
Despite that, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez boasted about her chat with Corbyn. And Speaker Pelosi met with Corbyn on her European trip.
Pelosi at least claimed that she had brought up the anti-Semitism issue with Corbyn. Rep. Ocasio Cortez, like the rest of the DSA, is just unashamedly enthusiastic about Corbyn and even more violently anti-Semitic movements.
Now, Corbyn has run into yet another anti-Semitism scandal.
Jeremy Corbyn praised an antisemitic book which says “international capitalism” is “controlled…by men of a single and peculiar race, who have behind them many centuries of financial experience”, describing it as a “great tome” that is “brilliant, and very controversial at the time.”
As uncovered by Daniel Finkelstein in his column for the Times on Tuesday, in 2011 Mr Corbyn was asked to write a foreword for the reprint of Mr Hobson’s book.
Mr Corbyn, in his foreword, directly references Mr Hobson’s discussion of what the now-Labour leader calls “the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press with tales of imperial might”.
Mr Corbyn called the book “correct and prescient”.
The book is Imperialism: A Study by John Hobson. Like many early socialist works, it’s quite anti-Semitic and tries to attack capitalism by conflating Jews with commerce. The book reportedly influenced Vladimir Lenin and remains quite popular with the European Left.
Hobson’s writing was probably linked to the Boer War which many lefties at the time opposed by claiming that it was a Jewish conspiracy.
Writing on the South African war in War in South Africa (1900), he tied the war to “Jew Power” and saw Johannesburg as a “New Jerusalem”. Hobson claimed “Jewish financiers”, whom he saw as “parasites”, manipulated the British government that danced to their “diabolical tune”
This particular theme was fairly commonplace.
As i’ve noted previously, Henry Hyndman, one of the godfathers of the British Labour Party trafficked in it. As did Labour in general.
In 1900, the Trades Union Congress passed a resolution arguing the Second Boer War was being fought “to secure the gold fields of South Africa for cosmopolitan Jews, most of whom had no patriotism and no country.” . . . And when a Labor government took Britain to war in Iraq in 2003, the idea that this was the result of Zionist string-pulling in Washington and London became commonplace across the left.
So there’s nothing new here. A direct line connects Corbyn’s flavor of anti-Semitism to the classic Hobson variety. And that line now extends to the Democrats in America who have yet to clearly reject Corbyn and his anti-Semitism.
When the Democrats were asked to reject Rep. Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism, they claimed that Jews were picking on Muslim women of color.
Jeremy Corbyn is an old white man. Why can’t they reject his hate?
There’s no identity politics to hide behind here. Just hate.
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