July 22, 2019
THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:
Poll: Corbyn loses ground as Labour members see anti-Semitism as 'genuine' issue (Times of Israel, 7/22/19)
Support for British Labour head Jeremy Corbyn has fallen significantly among party members, many of whom are dissatisfied with his leadership in the face of Brexit and a growing anti-Semitism crisis that has developed under his leadership, a new poll conducted on behalf of the Times of London has found.According to survey, which was carried out by pollster YouGov, two fifths of Labour members want Corbyn, who has led the party since 2015, to resign before the next general election while fully a quarter demand that he step down immediately.Over half disapprove of Corbyn's approach to Brexit and 48 percent have stated that he has handled anti-Semitism either fairly or very badly.
Defenders of a Racist President Use Jews as Human Shields (Michelle Goldberg (July 19, 2019, NY Times)
Sebastian Gorka, a onetime adviser to Donald Trump, wore a medal from the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group historically aligned with Nazism, to one of Trump's inaugural balls. Gorka was reportedly a member of the group, whose founder, the Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, once said, "For all my life, I have been an anti-Semite."Max Berger is a Jewish social justice activist who has long been deeply involved in Jewish communal life. He's the co-founder of IfNotNow, a group of American Jews devoted to ending Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory, and recently joined Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign.In a tweet this month, one of these men tarred the other as an anti-Semite. If you've been following the increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken, you can probably guess which one.That's right, it was Gorka who called Berger an anti-Semite, for having once joined in an internet in-joke about a nonexistent group called "Friends of Hamas." (Gorka's tweet appears to have since been deleted.) It wasn't the only time this month that Gorka accused a Jew of Jew-hating; he's also charged the anti-Trump conservative writer Anne Applebaum with "standing with the anti-Semites," demanding that she explain "how you justify this to the community."
If this were just Gorka, you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 22, 2019 12:00 AM