THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Neither side grasps the real character of the new form of anti-Semitism that has emerged in Britain over the past decade or so. It is a peculiar amalgam of identity politics and an affinity with Islamism as a political movement.

Advocates of identity politics tend to see society in terms of racial groups, with privileged whites supposedly oppressing groups of people with darker skin. Moral virtue is then accorded to the racial victims of whiteness.

According to this simplistic worldview, Jews are generally seen as a privileged racial group, since in the overwhelming majority of cases they are white. Indeed, the fact that Jews are often prosperous has led some identitarians to call Jews 'hyper-white'. Some even argue that Jews weren't always white, but have become white by becoming better off.

Most proponents of identity politics would accept that Jews were victims of the Nazi Holocaust. In that narrow sense, identitarian activists are, for the most part, genuinely opposed to anti-Semitism. But all too often, their conception of anti-Semitism ends there. They cannot see that anti-Semitism can and does exist in many varied forms, including outside of the far right.

This one-sidedness helps explain how Corbyn can insist he is not anti-Semitic, while unthinkingly endorsing the expression of anti-Semitic tropes. Infamously, in 2012, Corbyn gave his approval to an anti-Semitic mural by Los Angeles-based street artist Mear One. Freedom for Humanity showed several apparently Jewish bankers playing a game of Monopoly on a tabletop supported on the naked backs of workers. Corbyn did later release a statement saying he regretted he had not looked more closely at the image. And it is easy to see how he made such a mistake. Presumably, at first glance, he saw a picture he considered anti-capitalist without noticing its anti-Semitic implications.

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