Fighting antisemitism

In the run-up to the September 2015 Labour Party leadership election, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people accused of being associated with the far left were summarily expelled from the party, or blocked from joining. Some of those have been reinstated, but there has since been a steady trickle of further expulsions, including, recently, Momentum Steering Committee member Jill Mountford, Solidarity editor Cathy Nugent, and prominent socialist lawyer Nick Wrack. A campaign, “Stop the Labour Purge”, has been launched to resist the expulsions, carried out by the so-called “Compliance Unit”, a...

On 6 November, SNP MSP Sandra White retweeted a particularly vile antisemitic “cartoon” commonly used by US neo-Nazis. The “cartoon” portrayed a pig labelled “Rothschild”. A picture on the pig portrayed Rothschild himself (above a blood-red Star of David), Bush and Obama. On either side of the picture were clawed hands and hooked noses. Such details would not have been apparent in the tweet of the “cartoon”. Even so, the very visible word “Rothschild” showed that this was “classical” 19th/20th century antisemitism. So too did other elements of the “cartoon”, including its headline: “Why...

Around 1.1 millions Jews live in the European Union and 19 million Muslims. It’s obviously very difficult to compare the situation of an ethnic/cultural/religious minority living in Europe for centuries with the situation of religious and/or national minorities whose importance has massively grown after the Second World War, and in some cases only during the last 40 years. Nevertheless, many militants (inspired by left academic researchers) compare anti-Semitism in the 30s to the situation of Muslims in Europe today. This comparison is flawed1, for many reasons, but it remains a fact that the...

A concert by the controversial Israeli-born jazz saxophonist Gilad Atzmon has been cancelled by the Royal Northern College of Music on the spurious grounds of threats to “safety” of the audience. This followed a petition from the North West Friends of Israel calling for cancellation on the basis of Atzmon’s anti-Semitism. This attack on the principle of free expression should be condemned, particularly as it is part of a growing wave of actions by University authorities responding to speakers or acts that may cause controversy or protest by banning them. It also precedes government moves to...

The number of anti-semitic attacks in Britain has spiked to the highest level on record, according to the Community Security Trust. The group reports incidences of threats, property damage and violence towards Jews in the UK have doubled in the last year. The rise in anti-Jewish incidents has been manifested in racist comments online, graffiti on synagogues and Holocaust memorials, as well as physical attacks on individuals. Anti-semitism has been increasing across Europe as a whole. In central and Eastern Europe, right-wing forces such as Jobbik in Hungary and Russian separatists in Ukraine...

Letters, debate and reviews. Notes on Holocaust denial, drugs policy, Catholicism, the national question, William Morris. Download PDF

The political vacuum in Albania (Colin Foster) Levers for the lovers of power (Joan Trevor) Blair wins a place in the Sun (Jim Denham) Glasgow councillors abandon election pledges (Stan Crooke) Tony Blair and the union laws. (Tom Rigby) Letter from prison (Dita Sari) Anti-abortion campaign, a winning scheme? (Helen Rate) Should holocaust denial be a crime? Iranian oil workers dare to fight Obituary: Coin Coyle The left and the election

Émile Zola was one of the foremost novelists of late 19th century France. He was also sympathetic to socialism and a hero in the “Dreyfus Affair” of the 1890s. This interview with him by Max Beer appeared in the Social Democrat (magazine of the Social Democratic Federation, then the main Marxist group in Britain) of October 1902. Beer was the British correspondent of the German socialist paper Vorwärts and author of a History of British Socialism. Jean Jaurès and Jules Guesde, referred to by Zola, led two factions in the French socialist movement; the “Guesdists”, though generally more...

I have just come back (31 August) from attending a large demonstration in central London protesting the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK. The demonstration was organised by a new group called the Campaign Against Antisemitism. It was backed by all the major Jewish organisations in Britain, including the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council, and many others. Nearly a thousand people signed up to attend the demo on Facebook; it looked to me like at least that number there. The crowd seemed overwhelmingly Jewish. Now if this had been a demonstration against racism, organized by the...