In their silence about the abuses of Meyer, Jewdas, Greenstein, Chilson and many others, Freedland and Hodge have shown that they do not really care about the safety or sensitivities of Jews. What they chiefly care about is protecting their chosen cause of Israel, and crippling the chances of a committed supporter of Palestinian rights from ever reaching power. They are prepared to sacrifice other Jews, even victims of the Holocaust, as well as the Labour party itself, for that kind of political gain.
Hodge and Freedland are behaving as though they are decent Jews, the only ones who have the right to a voice and to sensitivities. They are wrong.
They are like the experts I first met in Israel who concealed their racism towards Palestinians by flaunting their self-serving anti-occupation credentials. Under the cover of concerns about anti-semitism, Freedland and Hodge have helped stoke hatred -- either explicitly or through their silence -- towards the "wrong kind of Jews," towards Jews whose critical views of Israel they fear.
It does not have to be this way. Rather than foreclose it, they could allow a debate to flourish within Britain's Jewish community and within the Labour party. They could admit that not only is there no evidence that Corbyn is racist, but that he has clearly been committed to fighting racism all his life.
Don't want to take my word for it? You don't have to. Listen instead to Stephen Oryszczuk, foreign editor of the Corbyn-hating Jewish News. His newspaper was one of three Jewish weeklies that recently published the same front-page editorial claiming that Corbyn was an "existential threat" to British Jews.
Oryszczuk, even if no friend to the Labour leader, deplored the behavior of his own newspaper. In an interview, he observed of this campaign to vilify Corbyn: "It's repulsive. This is a dedicated anti-racist we're trashing. I just don't buy into it at all." He added of Corbyn: "I don't believe he's antisemitic, nor do most reasonable people. He's anti-Israel and that's not the same."
Oryszczuk conceded that some people were weaponizing anti-semitism and that these individuals were "certainly out to get him [Corbyn]." Unlike Freedland and Hodge, he was also prepared to admit that some voices in the Jewish community were being actively silenced: "It's partly our fault, in the mainstream Jewish media. We could -- and arguably should -- have done a better job at giving a voice to Jews who think differently, for which I personally feel a little ashamed. ... On Israel today, what you hear publicly tends to be very uniform."
And that is exactly how Hodge and Freedland would like to keep it -- in the Labour party, in the Jewish community, and in wider British society.
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