"He was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist"

Today marks something of an epiphany. I had, sort of, assumed that the Labour Party would eventually get round to sorting itself out on the matter of antisemitism. After all, being a Jew is recognised as an ethnic designation - in the words of our equalities laws, a 'protected charcteristic'. This means that language attacking Jewish people on the basis of their Jewish identity is a 'hate crime'.

The revelation that the leader of the Labour Party was a member of a "secret" forum on Facebook that seems to have specialised in antisemitism was pretty shocking. But it is only half as shocking as the reaction of Labour members and supporters to this revelation. With a few notable exceptions, Labour MPs, councillors and activists responded to the existence of this forum and Mr Corbyn's involvement with what amounts to a shrug. If these folk said anything it amounted to "nobody cares" - probably because there are only 300,000 or so Jews in Britain making racism towards them pretty marginal in political terms.

When poked or pushed the typical reaction from Labour members has been to make excuses for Mr Corbyn - like this:

...being a member of a group where obnoxious views are expressed does not mean that you share them. Unless there is clear evidence, such as a racist post or a like of a racist post by an individual it is merely circumstantial, and at worst cause for concern.

So Mr Corbyn is invited to join a group full of racists, chooses to join the group (we'll give him the benefit of the doubt on whether he checked out the group before joining) and remains a member for at least two years. During that period we're expected to believe that Mr Corbyn didn't witness a single antisemitic trope, meme or statement even though he appears to have helped (or so the people involved said) organise a meeting of some sort - here's a letter to Mr Corbyn from Joan Ryan, Labour MP for Enfield North:



It may be - I haven't seen - that Mr Corbyn denies helping organise this meeting or deflects it by passing off the organisational blame onto his office but, for me at least, this shows that he was actively engaged with the people running the group who were (judging from their posts) deeply antisemitic. It's not just a case of being a member and occasionally posting.

Overwhelmingly the membership of the Labour Party is not antisemitic but, when the leader and people around the leader are closely associated with antisemites, you have to ask whether the sort of "Jeremy's not antisemitic he was just on a forum full of antisemites" argument gets thinner and thinner. We've not quite got there yet but it's getting close to the position where the defence is effectively: "he was a member of the BNP but he never said anything racist". And people who remain in the Labour Party without, at the very least, questioning whether the Party has a problem are pretty complicit in perpetuating the too widely held view that being racist to Jews isn't as bad as other forms of racism.

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