Speaking to the left-leaning magazine the New Statesman, Lord Sacks, former Chief Rabbi, called Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite.
That’s stating the blindingly obvious, but no one can make startlingly original observations all the time. Repetition, after all, is the mother of all learning, and it’s about time people learned what a hideous creature the Trotskyist Labour leader is.
But then Lord Sacks undid his good work by equating Corbyn’s disgusting, spittle-spitting harangue with Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech.
Characteristically, Lord Sacks followed the good leftie tradition of referring to that oration as the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.
Powell spoke of the dangerously divisive potential of mass immigration of cultural aliens. Being a classically educated man, he quoted a passage from the Aeneid in which Virgil prophesied a civil war and “the river Tiber foaming with blood”.
Of course, the left throughout the West sees itself as a sort of foster father who owes unlimited loving care to his ward, the whole Third World. The underlying emotion isn’t so much affection for other civilisations as detestation of their own.
It’s the wolf of hatred in the sheep’s clothing of love.
They usually express that animus as opposition to ‘the establishment’, refusing to acknowledge that it’s they themselves who’ve become the establishment. Iconoclasm lives long after all icons have been smashed.
What the lefties see in their crosshairs is traditional Western civilisation, and they correctly sense that a huge influx of people at best indifferent to it can be the bullet that brings the enemy down.
Like all destructive leftie ideas, this one has been elevated to the level of a piety. Those who disagree are thus seen not as interlocutors, nor even as opponents in a debate, but as infidels and therefore foes.
Powell was the first prominent politician who refused to profess that faith. Instead he showed it for the awful cult it really is, which earned him the undying hatred of true believers, of whom Lord Sacks is evidently one. This is what he said:
“The recently disclosed remarks by Jeremy Corbyn are the most offensive statement made by a senior British politician since Enoch Powell’s 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. It was divisive, hateful and like Powell’s speech it undermines the existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting them as essentially alien.”
With all respect due His Lordship, he’s talking through his hat, and I take pride in using the more polite version of this idiom.
Corbyn, who has never seen a Muslim terrorist he couldn’t love, nor an Israeli he couldn’t hate, has made dozens of statements that even his close allies construe as anti-Semitic.
Simply criticising Israel doesn’t earn that distinction by itself: as all political entities, Israel is open even to bitter criticism. I know quite a few Jews, and gentiles who don’t have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies, who have severe reservations about some of Israel’s policies.
But they understand and carefully observe the distinction between Israelis, Zionists and Jews. People who, like Corbyn, see those words as fully synonymous are always, without a single exception, anti-Semites.
The specific remarks that angered Lord Sacks this time were patently ridiculous and demonstrably untrue. Jews, said Corbyn, may be born in Britain and yet fail to understand British irony.
Anyone who has ever talked to a British (or just about any other) Jew for five minutes will know that Corbyn’s statement has no basis in fact. Hence it was dictated by blind hatred, or some other equally despicable emotion.
For the comparison between Corbyn’s invective and Powell’s speech to mean anything other than reaffirmation of a piety, Lord Sacks ought to be able to show that now, 50 years after the Virgil quote, there exists no group of British citizens that is “essentially alien”.
Alas, he won’t be able to do that. Whole Muslim communities in most British cities, especially up North, aren’t just ‘essentially alien’ but aggressively hostile to Britain.
When on 7 July, 2005, Muslim suicide bombers targeted the London transport system for attacks in which 58 people were killed and more than 700 injured, thousands of British Muslims, most of them born in this country, danced in the streets with unbridled joy.
To give them credit, they eschew parochialism and react with the same exuberance to similar atrocities committed in France, the US or elsewhere in the West.
To give them even more credit, many of them practise what they preach by themselves becoming suicide bombers or, if they fancy marginally longer careers, ISIS militants.
Whole areas of Britain are governed by Sharia law; children – native-born Britons! – go to Islamic schools, where they are taught that all whites are racists.
Many of them don’t ever realise that Britain isn’t a Muslim country quite yet. All they know is Islam, and they have no white friends or classmates.
They go with their parents to mosques and Islamic Centres, where they are indoctrinated in the jihadist, which is to say anti-British, ideology – with no cultural counterweight on offer.
Therefore, while Corbyn’s musings were nothing but a vile diatribe, Powell’s speech was prophecy. Moreover, it was a prophecy that has come true already or at least shows every sign of doing so in the near future.
True, the River Thames isn’t yet foaming with blood, but one has to be an inveterate optimist to deny that such a development is possible.
When millions of people hate the country of their birth and are prepared to undermine it by every means possible, a civil war isn’t just possible but likely. All it takes is for the concentration of aliens to reach a certain critical mass, beyond which an explosion is unavoidable.
Oh well, there I go again, arguing with lefties against my better judgement. That never works: one does all the thinking, and they make all the noise.