Take the antisemitic threat seriously

Above: the UK Friends of Standing Together (UKFoST) bloc on the 28 March Together Alliance demonstration. UKFoST has stressed the need to confront antisemitism as part of a consistent confrontation with all forms of far-right bigotry. Some others on the left have been less consistent.

On 29 April a man stabbed two Jews in Golders Green, after first attacking a (Muslim) friend in south London.

That came scarcely a month after an arson attack on Jewish ambulances in Golders Green. Antisemitic incidents at all levels, from verbal abuse upwards, are rising in many countries.

A pro-Iranian group, HAYI, has claimed the two Golders Green attacks. Some say HAYI is an “astroturf” operation of the Iranian regime, set up mainly to claim “credit” for attacks done by isolated individuals, either manipulated by HAYI or operating on their own. We don’t know.

But the decades-long “Death to Israel” sloganeering of the Iranian regime, and its allies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, cannot but be a factor in incubating such attacks. It is an evasion to insist, as Socialist Worker does (25 March), that antisemitism is only “a far right ideology... driven by forces such as the Trump movement in the United States”, and thus to suggest that the Iranian regime, etc., are not “far right”.

Socialist Worker cites as a model its response to the 11 September 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. SW called it horrific, but refused to condemn it. It was “the bitter fruit of US policy”. So as long as you opposed US leaders (Bush, Trump, etc.) and the white-nationalist far right, you were doing all that should be done against antisemitism and political Islamism of the type of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Khamenei.

Similarly with Golders Green. For SW, the thing to worry about is not so much the actual attacks on Jews, as the possibility that “the Labour government sniffs an opportunity” for more bans on protest.

And Iran? Well, SW says it has no “illusions in the Iranian regime as a principled or consistent anti-imperialist force”. Just an inconsistent one, then.

Moreover, “wanting the destruction of the Israeli settler colony” - eight million people, mostly there because they were born there, or because they came there as refugees - “is not antisemitism”.

Antisemitism remains real when dressed up as targeting “Zionists”, i.e., in practice, with those Jewish people (still the majority) who feel some empathy, however critical, with family or friends in Israel. We will beat the far right in all its variants only if our opposition to racism and revanchist prejudice is consistent across the board.