Instead of crying smear tactics Labour must ruthlessly confront claims of anti-Jewish prejudice – as Iain Duncan Smith did when Tory leaderThe late Christopher Hitchens observed in his 2010 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture that antisemitism is often a “main symptom” of “schizophrenia and paranoia”. It is,whether you will, a sign of sickness, or personal or institutional. And this is the broader significance of the collective crisis into which Labour has plunged in the past week: the party is sick.
Let us first acknowledge that antisemitism is not by any reckoning a moral stain exclusive to the left. In a diary entry for December 1987,Alan Clark describes a dinner of senior Tories at the Savoy in which the rumour that Nigel Lawson may become foreign secretary is discussed: “This seems a pretty tall order to me … we couldn’t quite swallow it.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com