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To get this straight, it is a moral disgrace for Jeremy Corbyn to write a foreword to book by the liberal J.A.Hobson - my newspaper's former South Africa correspondent - but not for Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and countless other Labour figures to approvingly cite him.
Antisemitism was rampant in pre-war Britain. I'm afraid to report Labour's first leader Keir Hardie expressed the same antisemitic gibberish as J.A.Hobson, and the Webbs - the driving forces of the Fabian Society - spoke of Jews as a "constant influence for degradation".
Do we denounce anyone who praised George Bernard Shaw who disgustingly said "The Jews are worse than my own people. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race...can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings"
A random list of British public figures who expressed antisemitism: John Maynard Keynes, Ramsay MacDonald, Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, Aldous Huxley. Is anyone who praised or celebrated their work also tainted with antisemitism?
If Gordon Brown can write an approving foreword for Adam Smith's gratuitously racism Wealth of Nations and that isn't scandalous, why is it so for Corbyn writing a foreword for liberal icon J.A. Hobson?
If it indeed is now a rule that anyone who celebrates 19th and 20th century figures becomes tainted with their racism - or perhaps their homophobia, which I'm afraid means virtually all of them - fine, let's establish that rule. But in that case, perhaps apply it consistently?
I missed Roald Dahl off this list, who was an absolutely gratuitous antisemite.
