Terry Glavin: The left confronts its antisemitism

"Queers for Palestine are probably the stupidest people on the planet" - Milo Yiannopoulos

...The Haavara agreement allowed the escape of well-to-do German Jews in exchange for the liquidation of their property and the purchase and export of German goods to break the boycott of Germany’s Nazi-controlled economy. The deal deeply divided Europe’s Jews, but in any case, according to research published by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, at least a third of the 60,000 Jews who fled to Palestine from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 managed to do so by resorting to the Haavara contract’s extortionate arrangements.

The point of rubbing everyone’s noses in the Haavara agreement, whether it’s some neo-Nazi Stormfront yob doing it or Ken Livingstone doing it, is to traffic with impunity in the anti-Israel slander that Adolph Hitler (who made his own belligerent antipathy to Zionism quite clear in his 1925 memoir and manifesto, Mein Kampf) “was supporting Zionism,” as Livingstone explicitly put it. This is a direct equation of Zionism with Nazism, which the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia defines as a clear manifestation of antisemitism disguised as criticism of Israel.

Predictably, unreconstructed Jew-haters joined “anti-Zionists” in the rush to Livingstone’s defence, led by Livingstone’s long-time political ally, the long-disgraced celebrity “anti-war” demagogue George Galloway. Now polling close to zero in his own bid for election as mayor of London, Galloway leaped straight into the muck last Friday on Sky News: “Ken Livingstone said absolutely nothing wrong … Nazism and Zionism were two sides of the same coin.”

The good news is that dozens of Labour MPs have expressed disgust with Livingstone, not least MP John Mann, a founder of an inter-parliamentary committee on antisemitism, who was seen on live television confronting Livingstone on the street and calling him a “Nazi apologist,” a “lying racist” and a “fucking disgrace.” The bad news: by the weekend, several thousand Labour Party members had signed a petition calling for Mann to be disciplined by the party brass.

Only by the skin of its teeth has Canada’s NDP avoided this kind of nauseating spectacle. Anti-Israel histrionics reached a crescendo during Jack Layton’s term as NDP leader, and Layton’s policy was to pretend it wasn’t happening except when it became too obvious to ignore — like when NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis was booed and hissed at an NDP national convention for proposing that an anti-Israel resolution before delegates should at least mention in passing that Hezbollah was a terrorist organization.

By the time Tom Mulcair took the party helm, it had become necessary to quarantine a noisy faction of the NDP nomenklatura that resembles nothing so much as an evangelical cult devoted to the notorious Galloway...