Mr. Corbyn himself appears bemused. The mantra he repeats — that he is opposed to racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (he rarely speaks solely of … - Dave Richardson
" "Mr. Corbyn himself appears bemused. The mantra he repeats — that he is opposed to racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (he rarely speaks solely of anti-Semitism) — suggests that he is wedded to the idea that anti-Semitism is chiefly a right-wing phenomenon. It is true that Mr. Corbyn's predecessor as Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was the target of some thinly veiled anti-Semitic slurs from Britain's tabloid newspapers. But the notion that well-meaning people on the left might also harbor bias against Jews seems to pass him by.
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About Dave Richardson
Dave Rich is Head of Policy at the Community Security Trust. He is an associate research fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (part of Birkbeck, University of London), where he completed his PhD, after graduating from the London School of Economics with a degree in history and politics. Rich's first book The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism (2016), began as his doctoral dissertation. Everyday Hate: How antisemitism is built into our world was published in 2023.
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Additional quotes by Dave Richardson
A year into Mr. Corbyn's tenure, there is no trust and precious little dialogue between the Labour leader and Britain’s Jews. The country’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has spoken of Labour’s "severe" problem of anti-Semitism — a problem that Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community’s leading representative body, says Mr. Corbyn is loath to tackle.
[On joining the Community Security Trust in 1994 as a researcher] When I joined, the BNP had just won their first ever council seat in east London and Combat 18 were running riot [...] There were car bombs at Balfour House. These things are always there. It can be pushed right to the margins and have no impact on daily Jewish life — which is where we want it to be — but it's still there somewhere, and it rises and falls depending on what is going on in the rest of the world.
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For example, in the Labour code it is no longer likely to be antisemitic "to accuse Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations". The code simply says this is "wrong", as if imprecise or uncivil language is the problem, rather than the prevalence of antisemitic attitudes. Yet this charge, that Jews cannot be trusted or must always be suspected of having a hidden agenda, is central to the old-fashioned, rightwing antisemitism that the Labour party claims to oppose.
Similarly, the IHRA definition says it is antisemitic to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, but Labour's code says this is only the case if there is "evidence of antisemitic intent": a caveat it attaches to all "contentious views" relating to Israel.
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