- MELANIE PHILLIPS - APRIL 38, 2023 -
Diane Abbott, who in 1987 became Britain’s first black female member of parliament, caused widespread outrage last weekend when she wrote in TheObserver that Jews, Irish people and travellers don’t face racism but merely suffer the same level of prejudice as people with red hair. The only possible victims of racial prejudice, she suggested, are black people.
For many in the west, Jew-hatred is invisible and grossly misunderstood
A furore over a British Labour Party politician tells us a great deal about the tsunami of Jew-hatred rolling across Britain, America and the west.
Diane Abbott, who in 1987 became Britain’s first black female member of parliament, caused widespread outrage last weekend when she wrote in The Observer that Jews, Irish people and travellers don’t face racism but merely suffer the same level of prejudice as people with red hair. The only possible victims of racial prejudice, she suggested, are black people.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer promptly suspended Abbott from the parliamentary Labour Party. Her comments threatened to derail his strenuous efforts to rid the party of the stain of antisemitism, which under Labour’s previous hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn reached epidemic proportions.
The views held by Abbott, who remains a Corbyn acolyte, inhabit the intersection between Jew-hatred and the “identity politics” that is driving western society off the rails.
Abbott ignored the fact that many Jews are brown or black-skinned. The reason for that omission gets to the heart of the antisemitism of the left.
The left’s dogma of “intersectionality” holds that groups are defined by power and powerlessness. People of colour are said to be powerless because they are oppressed by the west, which is powerful. The west is said to be powerful because it is capitalist, and is therefore deemed innately exploitative and rapacious.
Because the west is a historically white culture, white people are themselves deemed innately exploitative and rapacious and can never be victims of black people. Moreover, like Marx himself, such leftists believe that the Jews control capitalism and manipulate all the levers of global power in their own interests to the disadvantage of everyone else.
So, to them, it follows that Jews are innately exploitative and rapacious. They are therefore deemed guilty of “white privilege” even when they are dark-skinned and they can never be victims, only victimisers.
This is why the “intersectional” left treats Israel with such obsessional hysteria, unremittingly presenting Israeli self-defence as aggression. Israel, which defends itself through military strength, is the antisemites’ nightmare of Jewish power on steroids.
Of course, this is old-style antisemitism sitting bang smack at the heart of the identity politics that currently drives the left.
It is therefore beyond troubling that the Democratic Party in the US and so many liberal American Jews have signed up to identity politics. Worse still, these Jews tell themselves that such ideas are Jewish values. In fact, they negate Jewish values and provide the ideological rocket fuel behind the current onslaught against Judaism, Jewish people and the Jewish state.
At the core of this support lies a Jewish terror of being different from the rest of the world. That fear is inseparable from the contempt for and even fear of unabashed religious belief, a hostility that motivates the western left in general.
The result has been that, for many Jews and non-Jews in the west, Jew-hatred has become largely invisible and hugely misunderstood and devalued.
Among her offensive remarks, Abbott said that in pre-civil rights America only black people were required to “sit at the back of the bus”.