What is the purpose of
Momentum if, during a political crisis, it remains silent?

Was the most recent false-antisemitism crisis really caused by an erased 6 year old mural?

Blumenthall
gives a good background to what is happening at the current moment.  The right-wing of Labour, led by Chuka
Ummuna, Wes Streeting and other nonentities, is determined that Corbyn must be
ousted.  The only quandary they face is
how and when.

Under attack

Momentum’s leader Jon Lansman

An article I wrote at the time of the last anti-Corbyn coup

Lansman entirely at home (for once)

Labour’s ghost from the past

Joan Ryan – who claimed the maximum expenses in 2006/7 and was runner up in 2005/6

Jonathan Cook – married to a non-Jew

Last week, Corbyn was a Soviet spy. This week we’re in more
familiar territory, even if it has a new twist: Corbyn is not only a friend to
anti-semites, it seems, but now he has been outed as a closet one himself.

In short, the Blairites in the parliamentary party are
stepping up their game. Corbyn’s social justice agenda, his repudiation of
neoconservative wars of aggression masquerading as “humanitarianism” – lining
the coffers of the west’s military-industrial elites – is a genuine threat to
those who run our societies from the shadows.

The knife of choice for the Labour backstabbers this time
is a wall mural removed from East London in 2012. At that time, before he
became Labour leader, Corbyn expressed support on Facebook for the artist,
Kalen Ockerman, known as Mear One. Corbyn observed that a famous
anti-capitalist mural by the left-wing Mexican artist Diego Rivera was
similarly removed from Manhattan’s Rockefeller Centre in 1934.

Interestingly, the issue of Corbyn’s support for the mural
– or at least the artist – originally flared in late 2015, when the Jewish Chronicle
unearthed his Facebook post. Two things were noticeably different about the
coverage then.

First, on that occasion, no one apart from the Jewish
Chronicle appeared to show much interest in the issue. Its “scoop” was not
followed up by the rest of the media. What is now supposedly a major scandal,
one that raises questions about Corbyn’s fitness to be Labour leader, was a
non-issue two years ago, when it first became known.

Second, the Jewish Chronicle, usually so ready to get
exercised at the smallest possible sign of anti-semitism, wasn’t entirely
convinced back in 2015 that the mural was anti-semitic. In fact, it suggested
only that the mural might have “antisemitic
undertones” – and attributed even that claim to Corbyn’s critics.

And rather than claiming, as the entire corporate media is
now, that the mural depicted a cabal of Jewish bankers, the Chronicle then
described the scene as “a group of
businessmen and bankers sitting around a Monopoly-style board and counting
money”. By contrast, the Guardian abandoned normal reporting conventions yesterday to state in its news –
rather than comment – pages unequivocally that the mural was “obviously antisemitic”.

Not that anyone is listening now, but the artist himself,
Kalen Ockerman, has said that the group in his mural comprised historical
figures closely associated with banking. His mural, he says, was about “class
and privilege”, and the figures depicted included both “Jewish and white Anglos”. The fact that
he included famous bankers like the Rothschilds (Jewish) and the Rockefellers
(not Jewish) does not, on the face of it, seem to confirm anti-semitism. They
are simply the most prominent of the banking dynasties most people, myself
included, could name. These families are about as closely identified with
capitalism as it is possible to be.

There is an argument to be had about the responsibilities
of artists – even street artists – to be careful in their visual
representations. But Ockerman’s message was not a subtle or nuanced one. He was
depicting class war, the war the capitalist class wages every day on the weak
and poor. If Ockerman’s message is inflammatory, it is much less so than the
reality of how our societies have been built on the backs and the suffering of
the majority.

Corbyn has bowed to his critics – a mix of the Blairites
within his party and Israel’s cheerleaders – and apologised for offering
support to Ockerman, just as he has caved in to pressure each time the
anti-semitism card has been played against him.

This may look like wise, or safe, politics to his advisers.
But these critics have only two possible outcomes that will satisfy
them. Either Corbyn is harried from the party leadership, or he is
intimidated into diluting his platform into irrelevance – he becomes just
another compromised politician catering to the interests of the 1 per cent.

The sharks circling around him will not ignore the scent of
his bloodied wounds; rather, it will send them into a feeding frenzy. As hard
as it is to do when the elites so clearly want him destroyed, Corbyn must find
his backbone and start to stand his ground.

UPDATE:

This piece in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz by
their senior columnnist Anshel Pfeffer sums up a lot of the sophistry
(intentional or otherwise) underscoring the conflation of leftwing critiques of
neoliberalism and globalism with rightwing ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism.
Pfeffer writes:

Notice the problem here. If you are a radical leftist who
believes, as generations of leftists before you have done, that military,
political, media, and financial elites operate in the shadows to promote their
interests, to wage class war, then not only are you a conspiracy theorist,
according to Pfeffer, but you are by definition anti-semitic as well. If you
believe that an Establishment or a Deep State exists to advance its interests
against the great majority, you must hate Jews.

The logic of Corbyn’s critics has rarely been articulated
so forthrightly and so preposterously as it is here by Pfeffer. But make no
mistake, this is the logic of his critics.