By Stuart Littlewood

The mainstream media failed to make the connection between Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’s brazen intervention to damage Jeremy Corbyn’s election chances and the Shai Masot affair three years ago. And, indeed, all the other orchestrated media smears against the Labour Party leader since then.

So who is this interfering rabbi? Mirvis came to the UK via South Africa, Israel and Ireland and succeeded Jonathan Sacks (bizarrely elevated to the House of Lords) as Chief Rabbi in 2013. Now Mirvis puts the boot in – right in the middle of the general election campaign – with a stinging outburst in The Times.

As I don’t subscribe to The Times I’ll quote from the Jewish Chronicle report:

… the Chief Rabbi said: “The claims by leadership figures in the Labour Party that it is ‘doing everything’ it reasonably can to tackle the scourge of anti-Jewish racism and that it has ‘investigated every single case’ are a mendacious fiction.”

Without referring to Mr Corbyn by name, Rabbi Mirvis asks: “How complicit in prejudice would a leader of Her Majesty’s opposition have to be in order to be considered unfit for high office?”

He then adds: “Would associations with those who have openly incited hatred against Jews be enough?

Rabbi Mirvis insists he decided to speak out on behalf of the Jewish community.

He says: “The Jewish community has endured the deep discomfort of being at the centre of national political attention for nearly four years.

“We have been treated by many as an irritant, as opposed to a minority community with genuine concerns.”

In a sustained attack on Mr Corbyn’s party, he writes: “The party leadership have never understood that their failure is not just one of procedure, which can be remedied with additional staff or new processes.

“It is a failure to see this as a human problem rather than a political one. It is a failure of culture.

“It is a failure of leadership. A new poison – sanctioned from the very top – has taken root in the Labour Party.”

“A failure of culture” (er, whose culture)?

“A new poison”?

“Openly inciting hatred”?  

Mirvis is reported to have accompanied Sacks on the annual Jerusalem Day March of the Flags in 2017. Israeli newspaper Haaretz correspondent Bradley Burston describes it as

an annual, gender-segregated, extreme-right, pro-occupation religious carnival of hatred, marking the anniversary of Israel’s capture of Jerusalem by humiliating the city’s Palestinian Muslims. We knew what was coming from previous years, in which marchers have vandalised shops in Jerusalem’s Muslim Quarter, chanted: “Death to Arabs” and “The (Jewish) temple will be built, the (Al-Aqsa) Mosque will be burned down,” shattered windows and door locks and poured glue into the locks of shops forced to close for fear of further damage.

And in 2015 Burston wrote:

The Flag Parade, and with it, Jerusalem Day, has come to symbolise the worst in us. Arrogance, xenophobia, brute dominance, racist hatred. A march of, by, and for, the worst of our worst.

So we don’t need lectures on culture, poison or racial hatred from people who hobnob with the worst of Israel’s worst.

People in stained-glass houses shouldn’t throw stones

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, tweeted: “That the chief rabbi should be compelled to make such an unprecedented statement at this time ought to alert us to the deep sense of insecurity and fear felt by many British Jews.” As a result of which a leading campaigner against racism immediately resigned from a Church of England advisory body in protest. Gus John, a respected author and academic, said: “As a matter of principle, I cannot continue to work with the Anglican church… after the Archbishop of Canterbury’s disgraceful endorsement of the Chief Rabbi’s unjust condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn and the entire Labour Party.” He wrote to the Church of England’s national adviser on minority ethnic issues: “Those who occupy houses clad with stained glass should perhaps be a trifle more careful when they join others in throwing stones.”

Ever since Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, the pro-Israel lobby have been terrified by the possibility that, if he becomes prime minister, Britain’s supine tolerance of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and other Arab neighbours will end, and so will trade and arms deals.

Over two years ago Israeli insider Miko Peled, a former Israeli soldier and the son of an Israeli general, warned that Israel was going to “pull all the stops, they are going to smear, they are going to try anything they can to stop Corbyn” and the reason anti-Semitism is used is because they have no other argument.

And his prediction was spot-on.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism “is not fit for purpose”, “is open to manipulation”, “has no legal effect”, “should not be adopted”.

Since then we’ve had a queue of high profile Labourites and others sticking the knife into Corbyn, including Zionist extremist Sacks and ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a dedicated pimp for Israel and dyed-in-the-wool Zionist. Brown insisted that the IHRA definition “is something we should support unanimously, unequivocally and immediately”. He urged Corbyn to remove the “stain” of prejudice from Labour by writing the definition and all of its examples into the party’s new Code of Conduct.

He obviously wasn’t paying attention to the Home Office Select Committee, which had recommended two caveats, or to eminent legal minds Hugh Tomlinson QC and Sir Stephen Sedley who explained how the IHRA’s diktat is trumped by our right to free expression, which is part of UK domestic law by virtue of the Human Rights Act (something every Labour member ought to know and uphold) and other conventions. Added to which Geoffrey Robertson QC warned that the IHRA definition is “not fit for any purpose that seeks to use it as an adjudicative standard. It is imprecise, confusing and open to misinterpretation and even manipulation.”

Robertson added:

The Government’s “adoption” of the definition has no legal effect and does not oblige public bodies to take notice of it. The definition should not be adopted, and certainly should not be applied, by public bodies unless they are clear about Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights which is binding upon them, namely that they cannot ban speech or writing about Israel unless there is a real likelihood it will lead to violence or disorder or race hatred.

Had everyone forgotten that the state of Israel was founded by terror groups like the one that murdered 91 in an attack on the British mandate government in the King David Hotel and carried out the Deir Yassin massacre? Israel is the expert in terror. As Norman Finkelstein remarked, “It is more than a rogue state. It is a lunatic state… The whole world is yearning for peace, and Israel is constantly yearning for war.”

And the Israeli government was described by one of Brown’s own (Jewish) MPs, the late and much respected Sir Gerald Kaufman, as a “gang of amoral thugs”.

Corbyn a loose cannon who had to be “spiked”

Mirvis and others of his ilk fail to understand that the mounting dislike of pro-Israel Jews is due to the failure of people like him to condemn the Israeli regime’s decades-long brutal oppression and foul crimes against our Palestinian friends – Muslim and Christian. Has anyone ever heard Mirvis or Sacks or any of the so-called leaders of the Jewish community here call out Netanyahu and this thugs for their hateful behaviour and inhuman policies?

Corbyn isn’t the problem, Zionists are. Corbyn has a long record of support for the Palestinians and other justice causes. He has spent a lifetime campaigning against racism. He has met and spoken with Israel’s enemies, and so what? They are not our enemies. But it doesn’t sit well with the eminence grise pulling the strings. As a loose cannon in a carefully controlled political battlefield, he has to be “spiked”. The chosen way to do that is to pick off his allies one by one and, with the help of a compliant media, derail his party’s election prospects by weaponising so-called anti-Semitism against Labour’s naive and easily scared troops.

But why would anyone take allegations of anti-Semitism seriously from bully-boys who themselves practise or support racism? It is long past time Labour’s Friends of Israel were questioned about their shameless support for the criminal state and its land-grabbing Zionist project. From the start – before Balfour even – this was unashamedly racist in purpose, as illustrated only last year when Israel enacted Nation State laws that discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens, making them distinctly second-class. There is no place in a socialist organisation, or in British public life at all, for people who cannot bring themselves to condemn a regime that behaves in such an obscene manner towards its neighbours, defies international law, thinks it’s exempt from the norms of decent conduct and shows no remorse. What does aligning with apartheid Israel really say about them?

And, by the way, who said it’s OK to use any British political party as a platform to promote the interests of a foreign military power? If people holding public office put themselves in a position where they are influenced by a foreign power, they flagrantly breach the Principles of Public Life. There are far too many Labour and Conservative MPs and MEPs who fall into that category and get away with it.

Pattern of subversion

The upsurge in carefully orchestrated allegations of anti-Semitism coincided with the arrival of Mark Regev as Israel’s new ambassador in London. Regev is big trouble – an ace propagandist, the mastermind of Israel’s hasbara lie machine and former spokesman for Israel’s extremist prime minister. Shortly after he took up his post came revelations that a senior political officer at the embassy, Shai Masot, had been plotting with stooges among British MPs and other maggots in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures, including Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan.

The Foreign Office and Johnson promptly dismissed the Shai Masot affair, saying: “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed.” The Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, who is Jewish, also declined to investigate.

But Masot was an employee of the Israeli embassy and probably a Mossad agent. His hostile scheming was captured and exposed by an AlJazeera undercover investigation and not, as one would have hoped, by Britain’s own security services and press. And this is when the escalation to destabilise really began. Funny how the mainstream failed to connect Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in September 2015, Regev’s arrival in April 2016 and Masot’s activities later that year. Susbversion peaked again at general election time in 2017 and raises its ugly head yet again at election time right now with Mirvis and the Jewish Labour Movement’s submission of 70 sworn statements by serving and ex-Labour officials to the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s inquiry. The JLM is urging the Commission to make Labour acknowledge that it is “institutionally anti-Semitic”.

OK, so Corbyn isn’t the leader he should be. But who is, in the never-ending parade of élite political screwballs? I have sympathy with Mirvis’s concerns that the party is too lackadaisical over its handling of anti-Semitism complaints, having looked into a couple of them myself. They take an absurdly long time to investigate and lack “due process”.  And I wonder why the party, in a situation like this, is so stupid that it cannot provide a running total of cases outstanding, upheld and rejected.

I’d also like to know what happens to the troublemakers who hurl malicious and baseless accusations. Are they exposed and thrown out of the party too? I don’t suppose so – there’d be even more screams of “anti-Semitism!”