Jeremy Corbyn appears to believe that the most extreme sectarians are the true representatives of their communities. As a socialist, he's always been on the hard Trotskyist left - well, Stalinist nowadays to be strictly accurate - and his Muslim friends tend to the extreme Islamist variety. And Jews? Yep - still applies:
Jeremy Corbyn has been criticised by Jewish Labour campaigners after meeting controversial Charedi activist Shraga Stern for lunch in Westminster.
The Labour leader and his wife Laura Alvarez were seen in conversation with Mr Stern -who has aggressively opposed changes to government policy on the teaching of LGBT issues in schools – on Wednesday.
Dan Carden, Labour’s shadow international development secretary was also at the meeting.
A Jewish Labour Movement spokesperson said: “It’s a shame that the only representatives of any part of the Jewish community that Corbyn is prepared to listen to are those from its most reactionary sections."
More from Nick Cohen:
No “progressive” would be seen with such a man. Corbyn does so because the Satmar sect is anti-Zionist, but not for reasons that any progressive could support. Believers don’t give a damn about the treatment of Palestinians. Instead they worry that the existence of a Jewish state before the arrival of the messiah is blasphemous; the more so when that Jewish state is not a theocracy, or perhaps I should say is not a theocracy yet. As a recent Satmar news release put it, Israeli ministers are “uprooters of Torah and haters of religion”.
Last week, Labour party workers voted overwhelmingly to protest against the “cancer of antisemitism” which Corbyn has tolerated. (The ballot was secret, incidentally, because GMB union members feared retaliation by Labour’s leadership if they expressed public dissent.)
Listen, if you still have the ability to listen, to the men and women who work for the workers’ party and maybe you will understand how deep the rot has penetrated. “Those who speak out against antisemitism are forced on sick leave and out of the building,” they said. “We won’t stay quiet on antisemitism or tolerate this pernicious culture any more.”
How convenient for Corbyn to have Stern pop up and imply to those among his supporters who are beyond shame that charges of racism have been “weaponised” by the enemies of socialism.
A deeper malice is at work. The Labour leadership’s embrace of reactionary elements provides cover for the racism of the white right. It ignores Jews and Muslims who want to live ordinary lives without experiencing prejudice. For what thrills do such “normies” offer? Better to latch on to the exotic “other” and treat them as modern versions of Rousseau’s noble savage. Hence Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah, who will slaughter for their beliefs, are preferred to Arab liberals and socialists, the Muslim Brotherhood to tolerant British Muslims, and reactionary Jews to the mass of British Jewry whose main struggle with the post-Enlightenment world is with the racists who harry them.
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