By John Fund
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Socialist Jeremy Corbyn’s victory to become the new
leader of Britain’s Labour party doesn’t have an exact parallel in the Unites
States.
But just imagine if the nominee of the Democratic party
was selected by a vote of party members. Say that Bernie Sanders decided to
run, but he needed the backing of 35 of his fellow Democrats in Congress to be
considered. He was so extreme, though, that he didn’t have their support. Then
14 Democrats — either out of pity or a desire to broaden the debate — “lent”
him their names so he could get on the ballot. Sanders then shocks everyone by
riding — all the way to victory — the surge of new, left-wing members. A raft
of moderate party officials then refuse to work with him, and the threat of
civil war suddenly hangs over the party.
That’s what just happened in Britain. After Labour’s
stunning defeat at the hands of the Conservatives last May, many Labour
supporters came to the conclusion they hadn’t been left-wing enough. They
pointed to Scotland, where Labour was wiped out by the Scottish National party,
a group of nationalists even more left-wing than them. So why not go with
Corbyn? After all, many of his Labour supporters actually make the argument
that none of his opponents for the leadership could have won the next general
election in 2020 anyway.
We are witnessing the mass suicide of a major Western
political party, and that isn’t a good thing. The anti-free-market fervor and
louche attitudes toward totalitarianism that Corbyn’s Labour party now
expresses are a danger signal for all democracies. One of the jobs of an
opposition party is to be responsible, and from Spain to France to Italy there
are signs that the opposition is shirking this duty.
Many left-wingers are appalled at Corbyn’s victory. Under
Corbyn, Labour will, in the words of one anti-Corbyn Labour member of
parliament, become a “1980s Trotskyist tribute act.” Corbyn would nationalize
Britain’s utilities and wants the Bank of England to print money to fund
massive infrastructure projects regardless of the effect on inflation.
Then there is foreign policy. He wants to leave NATO, has
provided frequent excuses for Vladimir Putin’s excesses, opposes Britain’s
nuclear deterrent, and supports unlimited migration by refugees into Britain.
“There are certain . . . issues with Corbyn and the company he keeps,”
left-wing writer Taylor Parkes recently noted. “He doesn’t just have skeletons
in his closet; he hangs up his shirts in an ossuary. . . . He’s courted and
supported all kinds of anti-Semitic nutbags and babbling enthusiasts for jihad,
then defended them in robust terms when asked what the hell he was doing.”
Indeed, Corbyn is easily flustered by questions about the
kind of people he hangs out with. Last month, Channel 4 News asked him about
having referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.” Corbyn said he had
used the term in a “collective way” and then exploded at the interviewer,
accusing him of “tabloid journalism.”
It gets worse. Britain’s oldest Jewish newspaper,
the Jewish Chronicle, has accused Corbyn of associating with “Holocaust
deniers, terrorists, and some outright anti-Semites.” The Chronicle claimed
that Corbyn donated to a group run by the Holocaust denier Paul Eisen, who
claimed in a blog post that Corbyn was a “long-standing associate” who attended
his group’s commemorations. Corbyn’s advisers responded that Corbyn rejected
anti-Semitism, and they dismissed Eisen by saying that “anyone can call
themselves a ‘long-time associate’ when in fact that is not the case.”
There is no dispute that Corbyn has participated in
events with Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese militant who rails against
“Jew-worship” and calls gays “AIDS-spreading faggots.” Corbyn also argued
against the expulsion from Britain of Raed Saleh, a leader of the Islamic
Movement in Israel, who claims Jews were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Saleh “is far from a dangerous man,” Corbyn said in 2012 as he invited him to
tea on the terrace of Parliament. “He’s a very honoured citizen; he represents
his people extremely well.”
Howard Jacobsen, a columnist for Britain’s Independent
newspaper, has noted Corbyn’s long history of being “in places where bombers
and fanatics are bound to congregate.” Corbyn meets frequently with terrorists,
while at the same time he demonstrates against the presence of Israel’s soccer
team on British soil. Jacobson summed up this approach as “to terrorists we
speak, to footballers we don’t.”
On even his worst days, Bernie Sanders has never engaged
in the Loony Left behavior of Jeremy Corbyn, even though Sanders’s taking his
1988 honeymoon in the Soviet Union does raise eyebrows. Corbyn is highly
unlikely to ever be trusted with power in Britain, but it is genuinely
disturbing that a major Western political party has gone so far off the rails
as to make him their Dear Leader.
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