When you write about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, inevitably, some of the responses are racist: in my inbox, in my Twitter feed and on Facebook. The antisemitic ones have a wide range of themes: from accusing me of being in the pay of Israel to attacking my own Jewish roots. But they have an Islamophobic cousin that is growing in its frequency and has just one theme: that the real reason for the Labour Party’s anti-Semitism crisis is its Muslim voters. The calculation that Labour has made, or so the argument runs, is that losing support among the United Kingdom’s small Jewish population – which numbers around 300,000 – is a price worth paying for winning over British Muslims, who made up 4.8 per cent of the population (2.7 million) at the time of the last census.
I don’t like to respond to hate speech on Twitter, as exposing fringe ideas tends to boost them as much as to debunk them, particularly as every study has found that fact-checking is largely ineffective. However, the idea has now been given sympathetic houseroom in a variety of mainstream right-wing outlets, in addition to the Economist and the Observer, so an explanation as to why this is false is clearly overdue.
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