FROM EIR DAILY ALERT
Attacks on Trump and Corbyn—Similar Lies
Sept. 11, 2018 (EIRNS)—Consortium News published a “Letter from Britain: The Real Reason for the ‘Anti-Semite’ Campaign Against Jeremy Corbyn” yesterday that it received from journalist Alexander Mercouris. In explaining campaign against U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to tar him with the “anti-Semitic” brush, Mercouris explains not only the British obsession with lying about Corbyn, but also the true reason for the lunatic assault on U.S. President Donald Trump—that Corbyn and Trump are anti-imperialist. Although Mercouris does not say so, it also explains the longer-lived and more vitriolic attacks against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s earlier target, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
Mercouris first explains that anti-Semitism is a non-issue in Britain and that Jews are fully absorbed into the British establishment. Next, he explains that Corbyn has always been associated with the anti-imperialist left-wing in British politics, dating to his parents’ support for the Soviet-allied Republicans in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The basis for charging Corbyn with anti-Semitism is his support for the Palestinian nationalists against the brutality of the Netanyahu regime in Israel, Mercouris writes. But, he says, the left-wing of the Labour Party and Corbyn have always opposed anti-Semitism for the same reason that Corbyn supports Palestinian rights. Both positions are consistent and rooted in Corbyn’s anti-imperialism. Thirdly, Mercouris points out that Corbyn, first elected to Parliament in 1983, has a long history in British politics and that his views have been consistent and are well known among British subjects, and completely understood by the political leaders and journalists who are spreading the false “anti-Semite” attacks.
Mercouris then points out that Corbyn is “the one British politician who more than any other embodies the threat to the current status quo and to the British establishment’s hold on power.” Like the variety of smears launched against LaRouche and Trump, Corbyn has been attacked as “a Communist, a Russian agent, a terrorist sympathizer, and a traitor.” As with the broad acceptance of anti-Trump and anti-LaRouche in the U.S., Mercouris reminds us that
“the parliamentary Labour Party, the entire Conservative Party and the media (including the BBC and the supposedly left-wing Guardian newspaper) have all embraced it.”
Mercouris indicates that the campaign has increased in venom over the last year because before the June 2017 general election,
“the British establishment did not take Corbyn seriously, since it assumed that the British electorate would reject him in any election which he fought. The horrifying realization following the June 2017 election that the opposite is the case has—not surprisingly—caused panic and has led to the establishment pulling out all the stops.”
The concluding section of the essay compares the universally accepted, but known to be false, anti-Semite smear of Corbyn to Russiagate. First, Britain and the U.S. have been rocked by “popular insurgencies on the right and left and the rise of a seeming outsider.” In both countries the establishment has responded with allegations that “are to anyone with even a basic grasp of reality utterly fantastic,” but, “In neither country does the sheer absurdity of the allegations seem to matter for those who have invested in the campaign.”
The allegations have not affected either target’s base of support, “but, in the meantime, real damage to the political system is being done. Both countries are unable to formulate rational foreign policies.”
In both countries a form of political radicalism is on the rise and is especially popular with youth, especially in Britain. This accounts for the success, so far, of the two targets. Their continuing success will not be determined by the truth of the allegations against them, which are not taken seriously by the general public or the accusers, but by the strength of support for their respective actions on behalf of their constituents.
