This Land by Owen Jones

Author:Owen Jones [Jones, Owen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141994406
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Antisemitism Crisis

Six greedy capitalists with large noses sit around a Monopoly board counting money. The board rests not on a table, but on the backs of subjugated, slave-like human beings. Behind them is suspended a pyramid and all-seeing eye, a symbol often signifying Freemasonry; to the left, a protesting youth, fist raised, clutches a banner emblazoned with ‘THE NEW WORLD ORDER IS THE ENEMY OF HUMANITY’. In 2012 this scene was graffitied in dazzling technicolour on the wall of a property off Brick Lane in London’s East End by US artist Mear One. It was denounced by the borough mayor, Lutfur Rahman. ‘The images of the bankers,’ he said, ‘perpetuate antisemitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial institutions,’ declaring that it would be removed. When Mear One posted an image of the graffiti on Facebook, decrying the mayor’s decision (it was, the artist protested, not antisemitic), then backbencher Jeremy Corbyn was tagged in. Corbyn got involved, on the artist’s side: ‘Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.’

When Corbyn became Labour leader three years later, he refused to deactivate his Facebook account despite the pleadings of his social media manager, Jack Bond, who predicted that his entire back catalogue of comments would be scoured through by hungry journalists. Sure enough, in November 2015, the Jewish Chronicle published a piece headlined ‘Did Jeremy Corbyn back artist whose mural was condemned as antisemitic?’ Corbyn’s then head of media, Kevin Slocombe, did not respond to requests from the newspapers for comment, and the matter seemed to end there.

But the Mear One controversy resurfaced over two years later, in March 2018, at a time when Corbyn’s post-2017 election honeymoon had already dissipated. On the 23rd of that month, the prominent Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger sent a volley of incensed text messages to members of the leader’s office demanding an explanation for Corbyn’s response, and highlighted the episode on Twitter. Berger herself had been systematically harassed by antisemites, predominantly on the far right – some of whom had gone to prison for making death threats – but was also targeted by some claiming to be on the left.

That morning, when Corbyn’s stakeholder manager, Laura Murray, logged on to Twitter, she was shocked. ‘I just couldn’t believe it,’ she tells me. ‘It was the first time I felt really embarrassed of Jeremy and of working for him.’ The timing could not have been worse. That afternoon, Murray was due to attend a bi-monthly meeting with the Jewish Labour Movement, Labour’s only affiliated Jewish organization, a long-standing relationship which had begun – in its earlier incarnation of Poale Zion (Workers of Zion) – in 1920. Not untypically, Executive Director of Comms Seumas Milne could not be found; his number two, James Schneider, was off sick. Eventually, Murray managed to get both on a call, but struggling to get a clear line on the issue from them, she turned up to the meeting,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.