Has Hodge lost the plot over exaggerated claims of Labour anti-Semitism?

Chuka Umuna, Luciana Berger and Tristram Hunt

I wonder what the American playwright Arthur Miller would have made of all this crazy hysteria about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. It certainly has a touch of the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism about it. Apart from the 'Jewish Chronicle', 'Jewish News' and the 'Jewish Telegraph', does anyone seriously believe that a Corbyn-led Labour government, would pose an 'existential threat' to Jews living in Britain?

Although the Labour MP Ruth Smeeth has claimed that under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour was not a "Safe space for British Jews", a group of fifteen Jewish Labour Party supporters recently wrote to the Guardian about the furore over anti-Semitism. They denied that Jewish people were living in fear of an 'existential threat' as some have claimed and pointed out that Jewish people are not threatened with deportation in this country, death in custody, stop and search, or economic discrimination, that many black and Asian people face on a daily basis.

Yet, Dame Margaret Hodge (née Oppenheimer) the Labour MP for Barnet, who slanderously called the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, a ‘fucking, racist, anti-Semite’, recently said in an interview that when she received a letter from the Labour Party saying  she faced a disciplinary investigation for her insulting remarks, it made her think - ‘What it felt like to be a Jew in Germany in the 3os.’ Hodge said she felt that - ‘they were coming for me’ and it reminded her of what her dad used to say to her as a child:

‘You've got to keep a packed suitcase at the door Margaret, in case you ever have to leave in a hurry.’

Have you ever heard anything more bleedin' ridiculous, talk about milking the holocaust! The Irish writer Brendan Behan would have perhaps understood Dame Margaret's persecution mania. He once remarked - "Others have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis." 

Despite the Nazi slur, Hodge was told that if she apologised, no action would be taken against her. Though disciplinary action was dropped against Hodge, who was a one-year-old when WWII ended - and still acts like she's a one-year-old - after  some Labour MPs threatened to leave the party, a Labour Party spokesman said: 

‘The comparison of the party's disciplinary process with Nazi Germany is so extreme and disconnected from reality, it diminishes the seriousness of the issue of anti-Semitism.’

Despite repeated claims that the Corbyn-led Labour Party, is mired in antisemitism, there has been a distinct lack of evidence to support any such claim. When Labour N.E.C. member Peter Willsman suggested that Jewish 'Trump fanatics' were making up allegations of antisemitism in the party and accused some Jews of "making up duff information without any evidence at all", Jewish community leaders reacted furiously, accusing Willsman of a disgusting rant against the Jewish community. The Board of Deputies, called for Willsman to be expelled from the Labour Party for his "Slur against the Jewish community." To ask where is the evidence? hardly seems, to most reasonable people, to suggest anti-Semitism or a slur on the Jewish community.

While anti-Semitism can be defined as "hostility to Jews as Jews", the term is being used in the most arbitrary of ways to silence critics and political opponents and free-speech. Jackie Walker who is Jewish and was Vice Chair of Momentum, was suspended twice for anti-Semitism, when she claimed that  many Jews including her own ancestors, were the chief financiers of the sugar and slave trade. Ken Livingstone, was suspended from the Labour Party and denounced by some as an anti-Semite, when he suggested that Hitler supported Zionism with the 'Haavara Agreement', signed in August 1933.


Corbyn has said that he's aghast at the spread of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and would "not for one moment accept that a Labour government would represent any kind of threat" to Jewish life in Britain.


What seems to unite many of those who claim that Labour is mired in anti-Semitism, is they are, by and large, anti-Corbyn. They are horrified  at the very thought of a Corbyn-led  socialist Labour government and would prefer almost anything, even a Tory government. The Board of Deputies of British Jews have criticised Corbyn's links with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and they believe that to de-legitimise the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.


Chuka Umunna, (pictured above), the grandson of High Court Judge, Sir Helenus Milmo, has accused Labour of 'institutional racism'. But he's been criticised for using the anti-Semitism row, to justify his plans for founding a breakaway political party. His former girl friend, Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree (also pictured), is a former Director of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). She once claimed that she had been spat on at a student conference for being Jewish. Ruth Smeeth, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent North and Kidsgrove, since 2015, is a former employee for the pro-Israel lobby group, 'Britain Israel Communications Centre' (BICOM).

According to WikiLeaks, Smeeth was identified by a U.S. embassy diplomatic cable as a "strictly protect" U.S. informant. Her husband Michael Smeeth, was a member of the 'British American Project' (BAP). In June 2016, Smeeth resigned her position in Corbyn's shadow cabinet. Her resignation coincided with 60 co-ordinated resignations by plotters aimed at forcing Corbyn to resign.


In 2004, the Guardian reported that BAP (possibly CIA funded), was essential in the formation of Tony Blair's 'New Labour' and described it as a Trojan horse for U.S. foreign policy. Two years ago (July 2016), Robert Stevens writing on the 'World Socialist Website', claimed that right-wing supporters of Tony Blair were spearheading an attempt to remove Jeremy Corbyn and to set up a new right-wing party in "intimate collusion" with the security services in Britain and the U.S. Stevens claimed that the plotters wanted to reverse the referendum result and re-fashion the Labour Party as a tool to carry this out.


Corbyn and his supporters, such as the union leader Len McCluskey, think that by Labour adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism, they can draw a line under the anti-Semitism row. This is highly unlikely and will probably result in even more accusations of anti-Semitism.

Despite denials that the IHRA definition does not conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, this is disputed by  Stephen Sedley, a former appeal court judge. In May 2017, (London Review of books), Sedley wrote that the definition failed the first test of any definition because "it is indefinite", and posed a threat to free speech. And to talk about anti-Semitism as solely a matter of perception, is according to Sedley, likely raise more questions than it answers.


In his article Sedley wrote that policy was not law and that "criticism (and equally defence) of Israel or of Zionism is not only generally lawful: it is affirmatively protected by law."

He added:
‘Endeavour to conflate the two by characterising everything other than anodyne criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic are not new. What is new is the adoption by the UK government (and the Labour Party) of a definition of anti-Semitism which endorses the conflation.’

The Corbyn witch-hunt is not likely to end with any adoption of a new definition of anti-Semitism and only a fool would think otherwise.

See also:    www,greenswipe.blogspot.com 

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