A couple of years ago, I went to a birthday party. A convivial Sunday afternoon involving cake, fizzy wine, old and new faces, gossip — and a pleasant conversation in the buffet queue with a middle-aged woman who chatted enthusiastically about black and white movies that we both liked. Hitchcock. Ealing comedies. It might have been on the way home that I received her Facebook friend request, and with that, opened a little window into one of the most painful political controversies of recent years.
Her posts indicated that she was a Labour Party member whose status was suspended. She was also signed up to an online group “created to defend the integrity and objectives of the Labour Party.” Its name, however, conveyed a different impression. ‘Truthers Against Zionist Lobbies’ used a photograph of the Labour leader as its masthead, above the words: “We support Jeremy Corbyn, not Labour Friends of Israel.”
Its timeline was a cascade of grotesque memes. A monstrous octopus, emblazoned with the Star of David, slithering over Capitol Hill; a Photoshopped image of a group of people urinating against the Wailing Wall; a villain in a yarmulke, tapping his temple, with the caption: “Can’t betray a country that you had no allegiance to in the first place.”
Facebook removed the page in December 2019 after the Countdown presenter Rachel Riley presented the company with a dossier of such material. But it had received and dismissed at least one complaint already. I know because I made it.
The journal Political Quarterly has just published the first academic study of Labour’s anti-Semitism crisis. Its authors are the sociologists Ben Gidley and Brendan McGeever, and the historian David Feldman — all attached to the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck University of London.
Their purpose is not juridical. They are not, like the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, investigating whether unlawful acts have been committed by the party or its employees or agents. Instead, they have crunched data on the views of Labour and Conservative supporters, and examined the language with which the arguments of the crisis were advanced, by those who believe Jeremy Corbyn to be a conscious, unconscious or perhaps semi-conscious anti-Semite, to those who regard the whole business as a smear campaign calculated to damage his electoral prospects.
Their conclusions will comfort few. Conservative voters, the data suggests, are more likely to assent to an anti-Semitic proposition than their Labour equivalents. These numbers are alarmingly large: added together, they work out as about 30% of the population.
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