I’ve written before about the Labour Party’s alleged ‘anti-semitism’:  https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/28/anti-semitism-and-labour/; https://bernardjporter.com/2016/05/04/antisemitism-again/; and https://bernardjporter.com/2017/12/19/more-anti-semitism/. It’s nonsense, of course; relying at best on an unscholarly confusion between Jewry or Judaism and the present Israeli government, and probably just a ruse by ‘New Labourites’ to discredit Corbyn: up there with the ‘Corbyn was a spy’ smear, but intrinsically harder to disprove. I’ve been in the Labour Party (on and off) for 50 years now, in a number of constituencies up and down the country, and alongside many Jewish comrades; and have never heard even the slightest whisper of anti-semitism there, even in coded form: but lots from the Conservative side, which is surely the anti-semites’ natural home. I’m sure we’ve got a sprinkling of members who sometimes let their hostility to capitalism or sympathy with the Palestinians push them close to anti-semitism; but Labour’s core anti-racist principles are a pretty good defence against their crossing that line.

The trouble is – apart from the damage these charges are doing to our cause and its leader – that it might rebound on Jews themselves. There’s nothing more likely to turn people into anti-semites than an anti-anti-semitic witch-hunt. Thank goodness my own love and admiration for Jewish culture renders me immune to this.

There’s a good answer to the anti-anti-semites here: http://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/jvl/a-jvl-statement-on-the-current-attacks-on-jeremy-corbyn/.