Corbyn in 2009 ahead of demonstrations across Britain against Israeli military action on Gaza
With no degree and two rotten A-levels, when it came to hunting for his first real job, Corbyn aimed low.
An ad placed by the National Union of Tailors and Garment Workers for an assistant in its research department attracted just one reply – Corbyn’s – and he got the job.
Intriguingly, given the torrent of anti-Semitism claims the Labour leader faces today, this was the post that gave him his first encounter with Jews.
Corbyn’s boss was Alec Smith, who in 1973 was negotiating with employers at the Retail Bespoke Tailoring Wages Council. Working under Smith was Mick Mindel, a Jewish communist who articulated his members’ passionate support for Israel.
Most of their employers were also Left-wing Jews – like Mindel, they looked to communism to abolish injustice and prejudice, including anti-Semitism.
Corbyn has boasted of how, although only an assistant in the research department, he personally challenged employers to recover members’ unpaid wages after their bosses ‘had mysteriously gone bankrupt just before Christmas, owing their workers a lot of wages’.
‘Scumbags, actually. Crooks’ was how Corbyn described the bosses. ‘My job was to try and chase these people through Companies House and so on.’
According to Corbyn, he examined the companies’ accounts in order to verify phoney bankruptcies. But that notion is contradicted by his old boss, Alec Smith, and also by the union’s well catalogued records, which do not reveal any issues about ‘unscrupulous employers’, or refer to any member complaining about being unpaid.
Smith is certain that Corbyn ‘never had any contact with our members. He just sat in at meetings passing me information’.
Corbyn, not for the first time reshaping the truth to improve his self-image, conjured a tale of a brave personal fight against exploitative Jewish employers of sweatshop labour. Parochialism and fantasy led to him forming his views about the malign collective power of Jews.
Thirty years later he boasted how, at the end of one Wages Council meeting, a Jewish tailor had offered to make him a suit if he provided the cloth. Corbyn had spurned the offer. ‘Imagine trying to bribe a union official,’ he laughed.
'Freedom for Humanity' - a street art graffiti work by artist Mear One on Hanbury Street near Brick Lane. It was removed as the characters depicted as bankers have faces that look Jewish. In March 2018, the issue of the mural resurfaced as Corbyn, in a Facebook post in 2012, asked Mear One why the mural was to be buffed and likened its removal to Nelson Rockefeller's destruction of Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads fresco in 1934
Immersed in an alien world, the young Corbyn had no time for those seeking self-improvement – to fulfil the dream of moving from East End slums to North London’s suburbs.
Since he disdained materialism, culture and anything spiritual, he was an empty vessel, uneasy with a race complicated by its history of survival over 2,000 years of persecution.
Jews in London were the victims of discrimination by all classes, including the working class – a truth that did not quite fit Corbyn’s Marxist theory of history.
Few Labour MPs were more troubled by Jeremy Corbyn than Louise Ellman, elected in 1997 for Liverpool Riverside. A soft-spoken mother-of-two, she had joined the party at 18.
For years, it was seldom mentioned that Ellman was Jewish: at Westminster and in her constituency, her religion was irrelevant. That changed after Corbyn’s election in September 2015.
The membership of her constituency soared from 500 to 2,700, and at meetings the Corbynistas harangued her about Israel and Zionism. Older party members were disgusted by the anti-Semitic abuse. ‘It’s pretty nasty,’ Ellman reported to party headquarters in London. She blamed the revived Militant faction, now reincarnated as Momentum, for plotting to deselect her. No one at headquarters acknowledged her concern, which did not surprise her.
Few Labour MPs were more troubled by Corbyn than Louise Ellman (pictured), elected in 1997 for Liverpool Riverside. A soft-spoken mother-of-two, she had joined the party at 18. For years, it was seldom mentioned that Ellman was Jewish. That changed after Corbyn’s election in September 2015. The membership of her constituency soared from 500 to 2,700, and at meetings the Corbynistas harangued her about Israel and Zionism
Ellman’s predicament had begun soon after the creation of the Stop The War Coalition in 2001. She was among the first to protest against its anti-Semitism.
The criticism of Israel and Zionism was couched in language markedly similar to the myths parroted over the previous 2,000 years about Jewish wealth dominating the world.
Corbyn had been seen at Stop The War’s annual Al-Quds (the Arab name for Jerusalem) event opposing Israel’s existence, mingling among Palestinians distributing magazines featuring cartoons portraying Jews with large noses pulling the strings of puppet politicians, media moguls and bankers.
Just before Christmas 2003, Ellman addressed an empty Commons about the ‘rising tide of anti-Semitism’. She named the leaders of the Muslim Association of Britain, all of whom were connected to Hamas or other terrorist organisations, for promoting the image of a Jewish global conspiracy.
The reaction to her speech shocked her: ‘I was regarded as a freak.’ Letters in The Guardian denounced her for identifying Muslims as anti-Semitic. At Westminster, several MPs shunned her. Corbyn was heard by a member of his staff mocking Ellman as ‘the Honourable Member for Tel Aviv’ – an allegation he later denied.
The truth is that Corbyn’s antagonism towards Zionism is one of the most consistent – and toxic – lines of his career. To him, Jews aren’t victims of racism and oppression but rather racist oppressors themselves.
For years, he’d noisily voiced his outrage at the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza at countless public meetings – never drawing a distinction between the terms Jew and Zionist which were interchangeable to many on the Left.
On those occasions he effortlessly lapsed into anti-Semitic language, convinced a backbencher’s prejudice would not attract attention beyond his loyal audience.
And for years it didn’t. Nor did the fact that he consistently invited anti-Zionists to the Commons, without ever offering Jews a similar privilege. Among his most appalling guests was Raed Salah, the leader of the Islamic Movement in Israel, which had described Jews as ‘monkeys’ and ‘bacteria’. Salah had been convicted in Israel for saying that Semites had drunk the blood of non-Jewish babies, and used children’s blood to bake bread.
Once he thrust himself into the national spotlight by standing as Labour leader, Corbyn was shocked and angered by the media’s investigation of his past alliances.
The horrors weren’t hard to find – there were so many they spilled out at regular intervals throughout the first three years of his leadership, each sparking new revulsion.
Anyone who wanted to know how Corbyn thought just needed to examine his words – or look at the company he kept.
On March 3, 2009, he said in a speech: ‘It will be my pleasure and my honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I have also invited our friends from Hamas to come and speak.’
In the lexicon of terrorists, few groups were more medieval than Hamas and Hezbollah and Corbyn later had to apologise for calling them friends.
In August 2015 it was revealed he accepted £2,000 from Ibrahim Hamami, a London GP and a Hamas sympathiser, who applauded the stabbing of Jews. Corbyn registered the donation with the surname wrongly spelt as Hamam – and refused to explain what he did with the money.
Also that year he accepted an invitation from Ibrahim Hewitt, senior editor of a news organisation called Middle East Monitor, to speak at the group’s annual conference. Hewitt, another Hamas supporter, not only approved stoning adulterers to death and lashing gay men, but sharply criticised Jewish influence at Westminster.
At the conference, British Palestinian political activist Dr Azzam Tamimi spoke about suicide bombers as noble martyrs. Hewitt said of Tamimi: ‘I consider him to be a very good friend.’
As the evidence of anti-Semitism among Labour supporters grew, so did public unease. One formidable opponent was Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. ‘Most people in the Jewish community can’t trust Labour,’ he said.
Reluctantly, Corbyn agreed to meet Arkush and the Board of Deputies, complaining to his staff that inviting the ‘bourgeois’ Arkush was ‘unfair’. Josh Simons, a policy adviser in Corbyn’s office, noticed that, as the staff prepared for the meeting, the mood was one of ‘flippant disdain’.
The Board of Deputies’ leaders arrived at Corbyn’s office on April Fool’s Day, 2016. Uncertain how to address them, he relied on a script given to him to read, and thereafter directed their questions to his Marxist spin doctor, Seumas Milne. Ignoring that pass-off, Arkush asked Corbyn: ‘What do you expect the Jewish community to feel when you meet people who are blatantly racist?’
Jews in London were the victims of discrimination by all classes, including the working class – a truth that did not quite fit Corbyn’s Marxist theory of history,
Corbyn hesitated, then finally replied that he would ‘reflect’. But he refused to express any regret about associating with Hamas or Hezbollah. Positioned to one side of the room, Milne was seething.
In the presence of Jews, his body language had visibly changed. His language did not. Replying to the deputies’
