Leading the campaign against Loach and Rosen were the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Labour Movement two groups that many on the left are already familiar with.
They previously worked from within and without the Labour party to help undermine Jeremy Corbyn, its elected leader. Corbyn stepped down this month to be replaced by Keir Starmer, his former Brexit minister, after losing a general election in December to the ruling Conservative party.
Long-running and covert efforts by the Jewish Labour Movement to unseat Corbyn were exposed two years ago in an undercover investigation filmed by Al-Jazeera.
The JLM is a small, highly partisan pro-Israel lobby group affiliated to the Labour party, while the Board of Deputies falsely claims to represent Britain's Jewish community, when in fact it serves as a lobby for the most conservative elements of it.
Echoing their latest campaign, against Loach, the two groups regularly accused Corbyn of antisemitism, and of presiding over what they termed an "institutionally antisemitic" Labour party. Despite attracting much uncritical media attention for their claims, neither organisation produced any evidence beyond the anecdotal.
The reason for these vilification campaigns has been barely concealed. Loach and Corbyn have shared a long history as passionate defenders of Palestinian rights, at a time when Israel is intensifying efforts to extinguish any hope of the Palestinians ever gaining statehood or a right to self-determination.
In recent years, the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement have adopted the tactics of a US-style lobby determined to scrub criticism of Israel from the public sphere. Not coincidentally, the worse Israel's abuse of the Palestinians has grown, the harder these groups have made it to talk about justice for Palestinians.
Starmer, Corbyn's successor, went out of his way to placate the lobby during last month's Labour leadership election campaign, happily conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism to avoid a similar confrontation. His victory was welcomed by both the Board and the JLM.
Character assassinationBut Ken Loach's treatment shows that the weaponisation of antisemitism is far from over, and will continue to be used against prominent critics of Israel. It is a sword hanging over future Labour leaders, forcing them to root out party members who persist in highlighting either Israel's intensifying abuse of the Palestinians or the nefarious role of pro-Israel lobby groups like the Board and the JLM.
The basis for the accusations against Loach were flimsy at best rooted in a circular logic that has become the norm of late when judging supposed examples of antisemitism.
Loach's offence, according to the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement, was the fact that he has denied in line with all the data that Labour is institutionally antisemitic.
The demand for evidence to support claims made by these two bodies that Labour has an antisemitism crisis is now itself treated as proof of antisemitism, transforming it into the equivalent of Holocaust denial.
But when Show Racism the Red Card initially stood their ground against the smears, the Board and Jewish Labour Movement produced a follow-up allegation. The anti-racism charity appeared to use this as a pretext for extracting itself from the mounting trouble associated with supporting Loach.
The new claim against Loach consisted not so much of character assassination as of character assassination by tenuous association.
The Board and Jewish Labour Movement raised the unremarkable fact that a year ago Loach responded to an email from a member of the GMB union who had been expelled.
Peter Gregson sought Loach's professional assessment of a video in which he accused the union of victimising him over his opposition to a new advisory definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which openly conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
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