The Swedish Vänsterpartiet (‘Left Party’: formerly Communist but no longer) is currently being attacked on exactly the same specious grounds as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was a few years ago. (See Asa Winstanley, Weaponising Anti-Semitism, OR Books, New York, 2023.) Here’s an English-language account of the Swedish controversy: https://www.jns.org/eja-calls-for-swedish-mp-to-apologize-or-be-expelled-for-sharing-antisemitic-image/.
Of course the image referred to there – originally published on social media (only), and attributed to one ‘Mohamed Hadid’ – picturing an Israeli hand ‘controlling the world’, clearly reflects a common anti-semitic trope from the past; and whether or not it was intended to be directed against Jews as a people should clearly not have been used. It’s also apparent from her written comment that Lorena Delgado Varas, the Vänster MP held to be responsible for republishing it, was not thereby endorsing it; although it would obviously have been wiser if she had put a little more distance between the anti-Semitism it implies, and her own point of view.
What was depressing to me, after my British experience of Labour under Corbyn, was to see the same ‘weapon’ being employed here in Sweden, against a party that has historically been more anti-racist and supportive of Jewish causes than most, just as the British Labour Party was. I happen to be a (quite recent and very inactive) member of the ‘V’s, which I suppose gives me an interest in this; and am pretty sure that the slur against us is totally unjustified. Personally I’m a philo-semite rather than the reverse, albeit struggling these days within myself to resist the anti-Jewish prejudices that both this ‘weaponising’ of anti-Semitism, and of course Netanyahu’s cruel and disproportionate onslaught on Gaza, must be arousing elsewhere.
Porter’s Pensées 
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There’s a very acute bit of psychology in the film The Exorcist:
“He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful.”
One of the most powerful and effective ways of attacking someone is to charge them with something appalling and produce what purports to be evidence, some of which is true. Anyone who’s reasonably honest and well-intentioned – a category which I believe includes most people, certainly most Left-wing activists – will immediately tie themselves in knots explaining how they said this but they didn’t in fact say that, and when they said this it didn’t mean that, and if someone genuinely believed they meant that then they’re very sorry for saying this and certainly won’t do it again… What generally happens at this point is that the people attacking them pick over this statement and find – horrors! – another example of that kind of thing, and the merry-go-round starts again.
I’m bitter about this on a personal level, not – thankfully – because I’ve had this treatment myself, but because I know how much head-space combatting it can take up. I was thinking the other day about the opportunities the Left had missed during the Corbyn period, and wondered idly if my own blog would give me some idea of what we were all doing instead. I found that I’d written a lot about election campaigining, a lot about Brexit… and a lot about anti-Zionism and anti-semitism, the difference between them, why people might be genuinely mistaken about it, why people on the Left might confirm this error by careless use of language, and so on. A complete waste of time; the whole thing could have been dealt with by Corbyn and a couple of other people simply saying “I am aware that many people, particularly in the Jewish community, have difficulty with my stance in support of Palestinian rights, but I make no apology for it”. That being what it was about, to the extent that it was about anything (and wasn’t simply an exercise in throwing a ball and getting the Left to run after it).
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