[Referring to Jeremy Corbyn, M]any Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to o… - Jonathan Freedland

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[Referring to Jeremy Corbyn, M]any Jews do worry that his past instinct, when faced with potential allies whom he deemed sound on Palestine, was to overlook whatever nastiness they might have uttered about Jews, even when that extended to Holocaust denial or the blood libel – the medieval calumny that Jews baked bread using the blood of gentile children. (To be specific: Corbyn was a long-time backer of a pro-Palestinian group [Deir Yassin Remembered] founded by Paul Eisen, attending its 2013 event even after Eisen had outed himself as a Holocaust denier years earlier. Similarly, Corbyn praised Islamist leader Sheikh Raed Salah even though, as a British court confirmed, Salah had deployed the blood libel.)

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About Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Saul Freedland (born 25 February 1967) is a British journalist, broadcaster and weekly columnist for The Guardian. He presents BBC Radio 4's contemporary history series The Long View. Freedland also writes thrillers, mainly under the pseudonym Sam Bourne, and has written a play, Jews. In Their Own Words, performed in 2022 at the Royal Court Theatre, London

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Alternative Names: Jonathan Saul Freedland Sam Bourne
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Additional quotes by Jonathan Freedland

Yes, some in Hamas say they want political negotiations, but past experience suggests if there's a chance of an agreement that entails any outcome other than the annihilation of Israel, then the maximalists of Hamas will veto it with violence.
Israel has its own saboteurs, its own maximalists. Several of them are inside Netanyahu's ultra-right government, ministers sharing their macabre fantasies of a flattened Gaza on social media, the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, men apparently determined to deepen the current violence by ensuring it spreads to the West Bank and inside Israel itself.

[On his play Jews. In Their Own Words compiled from the testimonies of 12 people] The result is, I hope, a mix of stories and perspectives that will never have been heard before on the London stage. Among them is the first-hand testimony of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jew, recalling the day he was violently beaten on an English street. Or the odyssey of Edwin Shuker, who fled to this country in 1971 as a refugee from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Or the former MP Luciana Berger giving the most complete account yet of the journey she made from young Labour idealist to the target of a daily onslaught of racist, misogynistic and mortally threatening abuse, before losing the job she "lived and breathed and loved". ...
The 12 conversations yielded all kinds of surprises. I did not ask every interviewee the same questions, except one. I wanted each of them to tell me where their grandparents or great-grandparents came from. The answers – Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Holland, Russia, Iraq and more – confirmed how much British Jewry remains a community of immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. When I put that question to [Margaret] Hodge, it elicited a family story that forms what might be one of the most moving passages in the play. After you have heard it, you will understand why Hodge’s father advised her always to keep a packed suitcase by the front door – and you might shudder when you remember the way that formative experience of hers was mocked when she recalled it during an especially rancorous phase in Labour’s civil war.

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[Concerning a 2011 reissue of J. A. Hobson's 1902 work, Imperialism: A Study.] The foreword was written by Jeremy Corbyn in 2011. Across eight pages, the then Labour backbencher lavishes praise on the book. ... The trouble is, Hobson was not just an accomplished analyst of international politics – for the Manchester Guardian, as it happens – but an egregious anti-Jewish racist. ... And yet across the eight pages Corbyn wrote, there is not so much as an acknowledgment of the racism within that text.
On the contrary, the bit Corbyn praised as "correct and prescient" was, in his words, "Hobson’s railing against the commercial interests that fuel the role of the popular press," which appears squarely in the section where Hobson’s target is "this little group of financial kings", these "cosmopolitan" men who he had already identified as Jews. (The chapter, incidentally, is called "Economic Parasites of Imperialism," with "parasites" an image recurrent in anti-Jewish propaganda.) This is not a mere aside by Hobson that might accidentally be overlooked in a skim-read by a busy politician. There are pages and pages of it.
No one is arguing that Corbyn was obliged to denounce the whole book. He could simply have nodded to the problem with a tiny caveat: something like, "Despite some passages that read uncomfortably to the modern ear ..." But there is nothing like that. ... A Labour spokesman has said that: "Jeremy completely rejects the antisemitic elements of [Hobson’s] analysis." But if that’s true, why did he not say so when he wrote about it?

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