Weaponizing antisemitism
By Andrew Barr, Guest Writer
On 7th December last year, the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Andrew Bridgen asked the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a question about COVID vaccines during Prime Minister’s Question Time, a weekly event that is attended by the vast majority of the 650 members of the House of Commons. The government body in charge of regulating medicines had just approved the extension of COVID vaccines to children as young as six months old. Bridgen asked Sunak whether, in the light of the many reports of deaths and adverse effects caused by the vaccines, he would overturn this recommendation. Sunak replied that he would not, since the vaccines were ‘safe and effective’.
This was not the first time that vaccine harms had been mentioned in Parliament, but it was a subject the government had gone out of its way to avoid discussing.
Bridgen followed up a week later by organizing his own parliamentary debate on the subject of vaccine damage, which was attended by maybe half a dozen other MPs. Bridgen made a lengthy speech in which he called for the immediate suspension of the vaccination program. He offered a good deal of evidence to support his case. Replying on behalf of the government, the junior health minister Maria Caulfield did not address the substance of any of Bridgen’s arguments but instead accused him of “deriding doctors, scientists and nurses.” She not only insisted that the vaccines were “safe and effective” but also claimed (without providing any evidence for her assertion) that they had “saved thousands of lives”.
By his insistence on talking about vaccine harms, Bridgen was posing a major inconvenience to the government of which he was still nominally a member. He followed up his speech in Parliament with interviews on several alternative media podcasts. Asked in one of them (by James Delingpole) why he had not spoken out about vaccine damage before now, Bridgen explained, “I guess I didn’t want to believe that we were all being lied to; it does change your perspective on the world.” Also, he said he could no longer remain silent now that they had decided to extend the vaccines to babies. He told another interviewer (the Rev. Jamie Franklin) that he believed that he would not be allowed to remain in Parliament much longer, that some means would be found to get rid of him well before the next general election.
After the break for Christmas and New Year, on 11th January Bridgen tweeted that an (unnamed) consultant cardiologist had described the COVID vaccine program as “the biggest crime against humanity since the Holocaust.” By lunchtime that day the Conservative Party had responded to Bridgen’s remarks by “removing the whip," which meant that he was now an independent MP and no longer a representative of the Conservative Party. At Prime Minister’s Question Time, Matt Hancock, who had been Health Secretary during the COVID panic and had been personally in charge of the vaccination campaign, asked the Prime Minister about Bridgen’s “disgusting, antisemitic, anti-vax conspiracy theories” which he claimed were “not only deeply offensive but anti-scientific.” Prime Minister Sunak agreed, adding — in an apparent non sequitur — that he was “determined that the scourge of antisemitism is eradicated; it has absolutely no place in our society.” It appeared from their comments that Hancock and Sunak were seeking to conflate antisemitism with criticism of the vaccine programme.
As did spokespeople for other political parties. For example, Daisy Cooper, who speaks on health matters for the Liberal Democratic Party, described Bridgen’s comments as "truly revolting" and “dangerous misinformation. Wild conspiracy theories and incredibly offensive comparisons to the Holocaust have no place in British society.”
As did spokespeople for Jewish organizations. Karen Pollock, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, stated that she found it “appalling . . . for these horrors to be co-opted by anti-vaxxers.” Mark Gardner, Chief Executive of the Community Security Trust said that Bridgen’s remarks were a “repulsive, hurtful and idiotic comparison to make.”
Yet Bridgen had not in fact compared vaccine harms with the Holocaust; what he said was that the vaccination campaign was the biggest crime since the Holocaust. He held up the Holocaust as the ultimate example of the worst crimes perpetrated in the last eighty years. Furthermore, in making his statement Bridgen was quoting the words of an (unnamed) “consultant cardiologist,” and referencing the academic research of a social scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem called Josh Guetzkow — an Israeli Jew. Asked about Bridgen’s comments by the Daily Sceptic, Guetzkow replied that he was “surprised” by the outcry, because “there is nothing at all antisemitic about his statement.”
One could argue that Bridgen was foolish ever to have mentioned the Holocaust, because it gave his enemies the ammunition with which to shoot him. But it is clear that the accusations of antisemitism were made specifically in order to silence someone who was asking awkward questions about the vaccine program, and to send a message to any other MP who might be thinking of following suit that he too would be smeared and cast out as Bridgen had been.
The Bridgen story has been widely reported. As yet, no commentator appears to have noticed, or at least to have mentioned, a very close parallel with the recent history of Britain’s other main political party, the Labour Party, and its suspension of its two most prominent left-wing MPs, Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn.
In 2015, the Labour Party had lost a general election to the Conservatives. Labour had been led into the election by Ed Milliband, a non-practicing Jew, who resigned following the defeat. In the leadership election that followed, the party chose a previously obscure left-wing “backbench” MP, Jeremy Corbyn. This choice surprised a great many people, including Corbyn himself.
Corbyn, who might reasonably be described as an “old-school socialist,” became the most left-wing leader of the Labour Party since the Second World War. His election to the leadership caused a great deal of consternation among the mainstream “Blairite” wing of the party. When Tony Blair had been elected Labour leader in 1994 he created a “New Labour” movement explicitly in opposition to Corbyn’s style of old-fashioned socialism that had contributed to Labour’s failure to win a general election for twenty years. “New Labour” was conceived as a kind of Labour-lite that would not scare the middle classes and thus render the party electable. It worked. Under Blair’s leadership, Labour won three successive elections by a large margin.
Now in 2015, with the election of Jeremy Corbyn, the socialists had taken back control. Having spent many years struggling to eliminate the “hard left” from the party, the Blairites were not prepared to take this result lying down. They looked for weaknesses that they might be able to exploit.
One potential area of weakness was the obsession of many of Corbyn’s supporters on the “hard left” with the cause of the Palestinian people and their opposition to the State of Israel. The advocacy of many Labour left-wingers for the Palestinians, over and above all other marginalized peoples worldwide, was considered by many Jews to be antisemitic, since one definition of “antisemitism” is to hold the State of Israel to higher standards than other countries, to single it out for criticism that is not levied against anyone else.
Furthermore, hostility among Labour left-wingers to the State of Israel has spilled over in some cases into hostility towards Jews in general. There is no doubt that many British Jews felt uncomfortable about Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, and that some Jewish MPs suffered antisemitic abuse from party members.
Corbyn himself had been careless in the manner in which he had expressed his support for the Palestinian cause, to the extent of having described as his “friends” the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah — both of which had officially been designated as “terrorist organizations”.
Here was a weapon the Blairites could use against Corbyn and his allies.
In the spring of 2016, the well-known left-wing Labour MP Ken Livingstone, former Mayor of London, and a long-term associate of Corbyn, appeared on the BBC to defend another MP (Naz Shah) who has been suspended from the Labour Party on account of some remarks she had made about Israel two years earlier, before she became an MP. As part of his defence of Shah, Livingstone claimed that Adolf Hitler had supported Zionism before he “went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.” The suggestion that Hitler had originally supported Zionism is a theory that has found support among a few historians; I would not personally agree with it, but I do not see how it is antisemitic. Nevertheless, Livingstone was asked by the party hierarchy to apologise for his remarks. He refused, saying he was “not sorry for telling the truth.” Livingstone was therefore suspended from the Labour Party. He remained unrepentant. “If you look at what this is all about,” he said, “it is not about antisemitism in the Labour Party. . . . What this is all about is actually the struggle of the embittered old Blairite MPs to try to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn.” Two years later, still under threat of expulsion, Livingstone decided instead to resign from the party of which he had been a member for half a century.
Under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party performed much better in the 2017 general election than had been expected. This may well have displeased the Blairites. Until now they had merely been concerned that the party was moving back towards socialism; this might have threatened their control of the organization, but they had no reason to suppose that a campaign on this platform would ever win an election. But now there was the genuine possibility of a Corbyn-led government. Many Blairites felt more threatened by the prospect of a socialist government than by the prospect of a Conservative one. Even more reason to seek to smear Corbyn and his supporters as “antisemites”.
In an interview with the left-wing Labour website The Canary, the American Jewish academic Norman Finkelstein (author of The Holocaust Industry) claimed that there was a “criminal cabal trying to oust the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party. . . . The whole British elite has decided that they’re going to use this antisemitism card to stop Jeremy Corbyn and the political insurgency he represents. . . . The problem is, even when you win, you lose. Even if you can prove everything is a lie, there’s always the assumption “where there’s smoke, there must be fire.” But that’s not the bigger problem. The bigger problem is that it’s sucking so much energy from the Corbyn campaign that he can’t talk about his platform. All the headlines are about the antisemitism issue.”
The next general election was held in December 2019. It is impossible to say how much effect the question of antisemitism had on the result. But it cannot have helped the Labour Party that several Jewish Labour MPs had resigned before the election because of antisemitism or perceived antisemitism, and were even explicitly encouraging members of the public to vote Conservative. Labour lost by a wide margin. Corbyn announced that he would resign the leadership.
In the spring of 2020 a new Labour leadership election was held, and Corbyn was replaced by the mainstream Keir Starmer. In the autumn, the results of an investigation into antisemitism in the Labour Party were published. Corbyn accepted its finding that there was a problem of antisemitism within the Labour Party, but stated, “The scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party.” Starmer responded that those who believed that the issue of antisemitism had been “exaggerated” or was a “factional attack” were also “part of the problem” and “should be nowhere near the Labour Party.” Corbyn was suspended. The Blairites had won. Jeremy Corbyn, like Andrew Bridgen, now sits in Parliament as an independent MP.
In the cases of Ken Livingstone and Jeremy Corbyn, just like that of Andrew Bridgen, accusations of antisemitism have been used as a weapon in order to get rid of a prominent politician who was embarrassing his political party for another, completely different reason. Antisemitism has been weaponised.
The victims of the weaponization of antisemitism are not limited to politicians whose presence their political parties, or their opponents within these parties, have found to be an inconvenience. The victims also include those Jewish organizations who believe that they are performing a service on behalf of their own community by speaking out to condemn antisemitism wherever they imagine they have found it; who are speaking out against Bridgen, and who spoke out against Corbyn and Livingstone before him. These organizations do not appear to understand that they are being used as patsies by the political establishment. No politician who accuses his rivals of being “antisemitic” has any real interest in combatting antisemitism, in protecting Jewish people from abuse or Jewish communities from threats of violence.
It could also be argued that exploiting in this way the long-standing Jewish fear of persecution is in itself a form of antisemitism, since it makes Jews afraid. Incessant stories in the media during the Corbyn leadership suggesting that the Labour Party was full of their enemies made many Jews so fearful of the prospect of a Labour government that they even started thinking about leaving the country. A poll in the Jewish Chronicle in 2018 found that nearly 40% of British Jews would seriously consider emigrating if Corbyn became Prime Minister.
Among the general public, the effect of bogus accusations of antisemitism may have the opposite effect. The more noise that is made about supposed antisemitism when a big noise is simply not warranted, the more likely it becomes that people will simply stop listening to you, that when a real antisemitic incident occurs, nobody will pay any attention. The principle of the “boy who cried wolf”.
Furthermore, the more that politicians and the mainstream media try to browbeat the public into paying attention to their narrative of antisemitism and “Holocaust denial,” the more members of the public will come to the conclusion that the existence of antisemitism and even the story of the Holocaust are no more than confected narratives, designed for the purpose of silencing debate. In other words, making a noise about antisemitism and Holocaust denial will actually end up by increasing the number of antisemites and Holocaust deniers. I have seen this happen personally, within the “freedom movement”.
Maybe this serves the intention of those propagandists who have weaponized antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Maybe they actually want to increase the spread of antisemitism and Holocaust denial, not least within the freedom movement, because then they can accuse all those people who oppose them of being antisemites and Holocaust deniers. Maybe it is all part of a policy of “divide and rule”.
The propagandists certainly know that most people, and most politicians are in a difficult position politically if they try to counter these accusations, because they then run the risk of being themselves labelled as "antisemites".
Which is where my organization — Jews for Justice — comes into play. We are all Jews, many of whom have lost family members in the Holocaust. Nobody can reasonably accuse us of being antisemitic or denying the Holocaust. We have made it our role to call out fraudulent accusations of antisemitism that seek to exploit the prejudice to which Jews have historically been subjected. It is our job to say, ‘We know what you are up to, and we are not buying it. We will not allow you to hijack our history, and our tragedy, for your own nefarious ends. Not in our name.’
Jews for Justice is a group of British Jews committed to the cause of freedom, who meet in person in North London and also on-line on Telegram. Anyone who is interested in joining is welcome to email Andrew Barr at jewsforjustice@protonmail.com.
Andrew Barr has written books on wine (‘Wine Snobbery’) and on the history of drink (‘Drink: a social history’). He is working on a history of scapegoating, provisionally entitled ‘The Enemy Within’.
