It is hard to expel junior members for crimes no worse than those committed by the leader of their party.
That two anti-Semitic incidents had occurred at the launch of this whitewash — one from Corbyn himself in which he seemed to compare Israel with ISIS, and another in which a Jewish Labour MP felt bullied into leaving — apparently was just the tip of the problem.
It is finished. The last attempt to instil a portion of decency into the party of the British left is over. The party of the UK left — the Labour party — has now returned to precisely the position it was in before its recent racism row. It has investigated itself, found itself innocent and now reappointed the figure who kicked the whole row off.
Gatestone readers have been able to follow this from the start. After Jeremy Corbyn’s shock election as Labour party leader last year, in November we covered the “new racism” that came — and would increasingly come — from a party that had just elected a man who has called Hamas and Hezbollah ‘friends’ and who has spent a lifetime palling up with the worst anti-Semites and anti-Western bigots on the planet. The election of such a man, we predicted, would have consequences.
Then in February of this year, when the Labour Club at Oxford University turned out to be overrun by barely disguised and largely open anti-Semitism, we suggested that the rot of this party had surely started “from the top.” It is hard to expel junior members for crimes no worse than those committed by the leader of their party.
In March we covered the growing tolerance within the party for the spread of anti-Semitic tropes and the dominance of anti-Semitic types. Parliamentary candidate Vicky Kirby had previously been suspended from the Labour party for tweeting about Jews having “big noses” and about Adolf Hitler being the “Zionist god” and similar less-than-attractive outpourings. Under Mr Corbyn’s leadership, Ms Kirby was reinstated and became the vice-chair of her party’s local chapter.
Then in May came the beginning of the big scandal — the one that looked finally, perhaps, even likely to move Jeremy Corbyn from his position. At the end of April, a string of scandals had occurred all in precisely the same area. Naz Shah — an MP for Bradford — was found to have spread anti-Israel and anti-Semitic messages on Facebook and other social media. These included a suggestion that the Jews of Israel all be forcibly deported and sent to America. At the same time, Labour MP Rupa Huq appeared to try to justify, and then swiftly step back, from endorsing such sentiments and a set of Muslim Labour councillors were suspended for anti-Semitic outbursts.