Britain's New Racism

by Douglas Murray • November 4, 2015 at 5:00 am

The most predictable and worrying result of Jeremy Corbyn's election was always the effect it was going to have on the growing anti-Semitism and anti-Israel activism in the UK.
For someone such as Jeremy Corbyn, an elevation to a position of leadership is a vindication of those years in the wilderness, not an opportunity to find an ideological replacement.
One of the reasons Hamas supporters spend so much time speaking to university students is because they hope such students will demonstrate a naïveté about them and their goals that might be unusual elsewhere in society.
What happens when a pro-Hamas speaker is confronted by an anti-Hamas speaker? The anti-Hamas speaker may rightly say that Hamas is an extremist organisation. The pro-Hamas speaker or naïve student might easily come back by asking how an organization can be deemed extreme if the leader of Her Majesty's opposition is a friend and supporter of the group. This certainly makes it easier to depict its terrorists as tolerable and its racism as acceptable.
The British left, under Corbyn's leadership, now harbour the proponents of the greatest racism of our time.

In 2009, Jeremy Corbyn (left) said: "It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well." Pictured in the middle is Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Pictured at right is Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.

It was never hard to predict the effects of the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour party. Although some people wondered whether the candidate of the far-left might soften some of his opinions once in power, most observers never doubted that someone who had cherished such opinions almost alone on the backbenches for three decades was hardly going to change them overnight just because he had become party leader. For someone such as Corbyn, an elevation to a position of leadership is a vindication of those years in the wilderness, not an opportunity to find an ideological replacement.