If, as August Bebel, the 19th-century German leftist, warned, antisemitism is the “socialism of fools”, then it is becoming ever more pressing to ask whether the man who fancies himself our next prime minister might be rather foolish. Jeremy Corbyn’s gift for empathy does much to explain his remarkable electoral performance last June. But his wholly inadequate response to the Tower Hamlets mural controversy suggests that this gift may have clear – and alarming – limits.

To recap: in 2012, a wall painting by the street artist Mear One in east London was designated for removal by the local authority. Using grotesquely antisemitic imagery, it depicted Jewish financiers playing a Monopoly-style board game on the backs of naked people. On the artist’s Facebook page, Corbyn posted the following response to this decision: “Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [Rivera’s] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”

In the great discourse of left identity politics, Jews were now definitively on the wrong side of the line

Last week, Luciana Berger, the Labour MP for Liverpool Wavertree, asked the leader’s office for an explanation. The initial statement read as follows: “In 2012, Jeremy was responding to concerns about the removal of public art on grounds of freedom of speech. However, the mural was offensive, used antisemitic imagery, which has no place in our society, and it is right that it was removed.”

This made no sense, since the point of Corbyn’s original post was that the removal of the mural was unjustified. A second statement was issued, in which the Labour leader declared: “I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on.” Again, this fell far short of what was required. “Regret” is the word politicians use when they wish to avoid apologising. And how “closely” did Corbyn have to look at the mural, which resembled a homage to the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, to spot its vicious hostility to Jews?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn during the Holocaust Memorial Day service, London, 2017. Photograph: Dinendra Haria/REX/Shutterstock

At this stage of the argument, Corbyn’s supporters object in two ways. The first is to engage in furious “whataboutery”: what about racism on the right? What about Conservative prejudice? To which I reply: having spent 20 years calling out Tory xenophobia and (more recently) Brexiteer bigotry, I don’t need permission to question Labour’s attitude to antisemitism.

Second, it is customary to dismiss questions about the leadership’s response to antisemitism as wilful distraction or even a means of sabotaging Corbyn’s position and plans. Last September, Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, described previous allegations of antisemitism as “mood music that was created by people who were trying to undermine Jeremy Corbyn”. The film director Ken Loach put it no less pithily: “It’s funny these stories suddenly appeared when Jeremy Corbyn became leader, isn’t it?”

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The real question is otherwise: why does Corbyn – admirably proactive in tackling other forms of prejudice – seem to squirm and dither when confronted with allegations of antisemitism? As Richard Gold, a party member active in the anti-racist Engage campaign, put it in his submission to Shami Chakrabarti’s inquiry into Labour antisemitism: “[It is] as though being unpleasant to Jews … should be excused or minimised, treated merely as rudeness or bad manners, rather than racist behaviour.”

In his recent book, Contemporary Left Antisemitism, David Hirsh argued that the problem was turbo-charged by three events in 2001: the collapse of the Middle East peace process, the anti-imperialist rhetoric that followed 9/11 and the UN conference in Durban at which “Zionism” was designated a form of white racism. This set the stage for, in Hirsh’s words, “an antisemitism which positions Jews themselves as ‘oppressors’ and … those who develop hostile narratives about Jews as ‘oppressed’.” In the great discourse of left identity politics, Jews were now definitively on the wrong side of the line: powerful, white, aligned with imperialism.

According to this twisted logic, Mear One’s mural could not, axiomatically, be judged racist – any more than Ken Livingstone’s outbursts, the antisemitic content posted on social media by the Labour MP Naz Shah, or the alleged hostility to Jews at the Oxford University Labour Club. The leadership might be forced by media or political pressure to take action against such conduct. But it manifestly did so with an eye to optics rather than as a matter of principle.

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Antisemitism is on the rise all over the world. According to the Community Security Trust, a record number of antisemitic incidents were reported in the UK last year. Why does this bother Corbyn as little as it seems to? Does he believe in universal rights and equality of worth, or not? The fact that the Labour leader appears to regard allegations of antisemitism as an irritant rather than a fundamental issue says nothing good about him. In this respect, at least, the writing is upon the wall.