MC on JC - Mel Cooper on Jeremy Corbyn

RABBI EPHRAIM MIRVIS          LABOUR LEADER JEREMY CORBYN

Mel Cooper on Jeremy Corbyn

 MC on JC

I have been watching Jeremy Bore-byn and Andrew Neill. I think that the press is overdoing the Car Crash interpretation of the interview, but I do have my misgivings about it. I can see why he feels he needn’t actually “apologise” to the Jewish Community, at one level. That is the level of not accepting or believing or noticing that the Labour Party has become more overtly anti-Semitic under his leadership which everyone else seems to have spotted.

On the other hand, if EVERYONE is telling him they are worried and alarmed and 87% of Jews don’t trust him, maybe he needs to think about being so scrupulous about insisting he has no need to apologise? Also, he has spent decades talking to people like Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA to name a few, and calling them his “friends”. For Jews, it is very simple: at least some of his most prominent friends insist that they are committed to wiping Israel off the face of the earth and driving all Jews that live there into the Dead Sea. He may argue this is only hyperbole, but it does make this Jew uneasy.

Also he has been invited by the Labour Party of Israel to come and talk to them. He says that he only talks to the others because everyone must talk. And I can understand not wanting to talk to that Brooklyn Thug who runs the country, Benjamin NetanYahoo. But then how does he justify not talking to the left wing people in Israel to get dialogues going? He not only has not accepted their invitation, he has never even answered it. And … How does he justify 3 years of not kicking Ken Livingstone out of the party when the man was interpreting the history of the 1930s in Germany as being essentially supportive of Zionism? That is a pretty weird interpretation, all things considered. And in the end Livingstone was not disciplined by the Labour party itself, instead he resigned to save the Labour Party further embarrassment. There is something there that just doesn’t add up.

My conclusion about Corbyn is that essentially he likes to be a bystander who complains about what everyone he is observing is doing wrong. It is a weird kind of superiority complex. it makes his act calm and avuncular, but I sense some pretty potent hostility in him as well. And ultimately I think the explanation to Corbyn may be a very simple one — he is just not all that smart. He lacks serious, in-depth intelligence. He is, ultimately a lightweight. So though I would agree with people that say that there is a right-wing press unfair attack mode in place against him; that the right-wing press rather overdoes it; I am also seeing some very uneasy-making things about his leadership and his opinions. I find him rather tricky, too.

Finally, he says all the right things to please his constituency, and they happen to be left wing right things. But he does not seem to have a definable position on anything, so it makes me uneasy that he is either without integrity - or that he is hiding his real positions. All in all, I just do not trust him any more than I do Boris Johnson, that other bore. The trouble with Corbyn on Neil’s show last night was also that it was totally predictable. Not one answer that was a surprise, not one reaction that was new or unusual. They called her the Maybot. But Jeremy comes across to me as the Cor-bot a lot of the time, equally with Boris never going off script.

Vote Lib Dem1!!

**********

Dear Mel,

Of course JC is no Jesus Christ, and will save none of us.

 It’s the combination of:

• His personal ineffectiveness - he does really appear to be the  hard-core Labour marionette
• His lack of dynamism and charisma (like him or loathe him, these are not accusations you can level at BJ)
• His inability to hold his party together so as to able to compete effectively in this General Election
• His attitude (wilful or stupidly negligent, there can be other possible explanation) towards antisemitism
• His up-in-the-clouds, though probably well-meaning, set of policies in the Labour Manifesto, several of which hark back to the days of totalitarian communism, which (perhaps he hasn't yet realised) led to tyranny, poverty, colonial expansion and - antisemitism - hm,  I might be going over-the-top on this one
• His unacceptability as a coalition, or less formal, partner in the eyes of the other parties - which has prevented a coordinated campaign to keep BJ out of No 10 (a place that he, BJ, was never elected to except by a few thousand Con members, and whose previous political and personal life make him unfit to inhabit).
• His inability to see that all of the above appear to be handing over the government to the Cons for yet another 5 years.  We know the havoc they will wreak on the country - politically, socially, economically - with the promise of ‘Getting Brexit Done’ as the most shameful lie of all, as it is transpicuous that we will have to wait for perhaps a decade or more for this to happen.

 More in anger than in sorrow,

Brian