If you take Jeremy Corbyn at his word, then the leader of Britain’s Labour Party is no anti-Semite. It’s just that, like the Wild West preacher who keeps accidentally wandering into Fannie Porter’s house of ill repute, Corbyn has an odd knack for stumbling into the arms of the Hebraically disinclined.

Corbyn is facing public protests and scathing criticism again this week after it emerged that in 2012 he had questioned the removal of a London mural by the artist Kalen Ockerman that looks like a scene drawn from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He now claims, unconvincingly, that he regrets not looking “more closely at the image.”

It also turns out that he was a member of several Facebook groups, one of which displayed “postings about the Rothschild banking family, Jews harvesting organs and theories connecting Israel with Islamic State,” according to London’s Jewish Chronicle. “Had I seen” anti-Semitism, Corbyn says, “I would have challenged it straight away.”

This was barely a month after Corbyn issued a Facebook post for Holocaust Memorial Day that included no mention of Jews or anti-Semitism. Following an outcry, Corbyn made public another message, this one mentioning “our Jewish brothers and sisters.”