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13 tweets,
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Adam, you know. And you've known for a while. Not sure what evidence is missing.
The first step is to stop speaking about Corbyn’s antisemitism as some sort of moral failure deep in his heart. It’s not like we’re talking about someone’s nan using a no-longer-politically-correct term for an immigrant group.
We are talking about a comprehensive worldview that puts a kind of transnational conspiratorial power keeping good people down at its centre.
If it were just a moral failure, it could have been fixed a long time ago. If it were just a few rogue elements, then tighter disciplinary procedures would have taken care of it.
If it were a question of policing the boundary between “criticism of Israel” and antisemitism, that too would have happened.
There is this fantasy that we can accept the obsessive and pathological hatred of Israel which is so central to the parts of the Left which Corbyn represents and just cleanse it of its bigotry. We should instead be interrogating that very pathology.
When you can’t frame your objections to Israel without resorting to the antisemites triangle of Conspiracy (1), Blood (2), and Money (3), you’re not actually making a “criticism of government policy,” are you?
And to respond that concerns about antisemitism are nothing more than a (1) disingenuous coordinated effort to silence any exposure of the (2) inherent blood-lust and child-killing essence of your people backed up (3) by wads of shady cash is to give the game away.
Anti-racists would quickly give up their racism if it was easy. If they just needed to use a different term or pronoun or remember a certain holiday or discipline a certain rogue, they would do it!
And they do do it in other cases where the racism they are being asked to abjure isn’t so central to their whole ideological project.
At some point, we’ll have to stop talking about inopportune tweets or rude comments and deal seriously with the pathological obsessive hatred of Israel in left-wing British public life ...
... and its almost comically transparent theological underpinnings (one people alone bear the sins of horrible past deeds and are all implicated in it generation after generation).
Transparent, but most definitely not invisible.
