I have an article up at openDemocracy debunking the ‘antisemitism’ smear campaign against the elected leadership of the UK Labour Party.

Headline after headline in recent weeks has claimed that the party, in whose last-but-one leadership election both front-runners were Jewish, has become infested with antisemitism.  The outbreak has been blamed on the veteran socialist and prominent Palestine solidarity campaigner Jeremy Corbyn, and the mass influx of new members who were inspired by his leadership to join.

These attacks are devoid of factual basis.

Instead, the article argues,

the enraging and – for genuine opponents of antisemitism – dismaying truth is this: a miserable assortment of chancers, cynics and careerists is exploiting Jewish suffering to prosecute petty vendettas, wage factional warfare and discredit legitimate criticism of Israel.  In the process, they are poisoning relations between British Jews and movements for social justice; fomenting antisemitism while claiming to combat it; and libelling the tens of thousands of people, many of them young, idealistic and embarking upon their first foray into politics, who joined Labour in the past year determined to make the world a less cruel and despairing place for the impoverished, the subjugated and the dispossessed.

If Labour has an antisemitism problem, it lies not with Corbyn, but his unprincipled and reckless opponents.

You can read the article in full here.