Here we are, with another General Election and another seemingly coordinated round of allegations to smear Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party.
Labour has found it almost impossible during this election campaign to actually talk about its policies.
Every time it launches a new one, the journalists just want to talk about the specter of anti-Semitism.
This is despite the lack of evidence that anti-Semitism is any more of a problem in the Labour Party than in any other sector of British society.
In fact, all available polling and statistical data shows quite the opposite.
The claims that there is a particular “problem” of anti-Semitism, or a “crisis”, in the party are a complete and utter fabrication.
For the past four and a half years, these claims have all been driven along by the same political forces: the dying right-wing of the Labour Party, the British establishment in general and the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian lobby.
However, the problem is worse than that.
Even Corbyn himself has given into these smears, constantly apologizing for and condemning anti-Semitism, even when he has done nothing wrong.
This has been his approach all along, especially since the smear campaign against him really took off in the spring of 2016.
At that time, Corbyn condemned Ken Livingstone – who was being viciously attacked by the press and the Labour right at the time – and allowed the party bureaucracy to suspend the former Mayor of London, a giant of Labour’s genuinely anti-racist left.
Nothing Livingstone said was anti-Semitic, but ever since that early mistake was made, it has been the same pattern of capitulation all along by Corbyn and Labour.
So far, there has been no coming back from it, and it may well be too late now.
This smear campaign could well cost Labour the election.
Today the campaign is transatlantic.
The US and Canada are also in the grip of the “left-wing anti-Semitism” specter.
It hasn’t reached the same national proportions yet in the US, but if Corbyn is defeated in this election, you can expect “Labour anti-Semitism” to cross the ocean and become “Democrat anti-Semitism” in swift order just in time for the presidential campaign next year.
In fact, as we’ve seen, this process has already begun, with the utterly mendacious and invented attacks against left-wing Democrat lawmakers like Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.
Such attacks have become prominent on a national scale in Britain, and to a lesser extent in the US, precisely because they have unified the pro-Israel lobby with its allies on the liberal wing of the political establishment — the Labour right, the Democratic Party apparatus — and with the wider neoliberal political establishment, including the corporate media.
The pro-Israel lobby’s usual lying smear campaigns against Palestinians and their supporters have thus reached wider audiences than usual.
This is a transatlantic – indeed, a global – campaign against the movement for justice in Palestine.
*(Top image: Jeremy Corbyn in Liverpool. Credit: Jeremy Corbyn/ Flickr)