Accusations of antisemitism against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn have distracted the media when genuine far-right antisemitism is on the rise in Europe and the US.

Labour Party conference, Liverpool, 26 September 2018 Ian Forsyth · Getty

The controversy about antisemitism in British politics has become an international talking point. A recent article by Patrick Kingsley in the New York Times lumped together allegations of ‘ingrained antisemitism’ in the British Labour Party with the daubing of swastikas on a Jewish cemetery in France as proof that ‘antisemitism has become a section of today’s political Venn diagram where the far right can intersect with parts of the far left, Europe’s radical Islamist fringe, and even politicians from America’s two main parties’.

The US newspaper itself has a woeful track record in reporting on these issues. One NYT article by Howard Jacobson in 2017 on the recent Labour conference claimed that a motion proposed from the conference floor had questioned the truth of the Holocaust. There was no such motion: Jacobson simply made it up.

Such inaccuracies have become routine in the British media, including highly respected outlets like the Guardian and the BBC. Basic fact-checking has been abandoned, and the indictment of Corbyn and his supporters rests on fictions repeated so often that many believe them to be true.

Leftwing politicians elsewhere, who, like Corbyn, have a record of supporting Palestinian rights, are facing similar smears. Kingsley’s article also claimed that Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar had been ‘widely condemned for peddling antisemitic stereotypes about the undue influence of Jewish lobbies over policy’, and linked her with ‘extremist Islamist circles’. She had in fact referred specifically to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), whose influence has been openly discussed in the NYT, and had said nothing about ‘Jewish lobbies’.

‘Institutionally antisemitic’

The accusations against Corbyn and his party need to be stated clearly. Labour MPs or leftwing pundits are often asked whether they agree that Labour has an antisemitism problem, its nature left unspecified. (...)