The Crucible re-staged
The
Chief Rabbi says Jeremy Corbyn ‘is not fit for high office’, but
Boris Johnson is. A Tory says I am a Tory and it’s news?
Arthur
Miller’s play, The
Crucible,
takes
place in 1692 during the Salem witch trials. The play tells the story
of a group of young hysterical
women
who falsely accuse other villagers of witchcraft. The
play
was written as an allegory during
the
McCarthy years
and the House of Un-American Activities trials
in
the 1950s.
To be accused of being a member of the Communist Party then
ensured
that
jobs,
reputations
and,
for some, their
lives, were
lost.
It
mattered little whether the accusations
were
true or not. It
mattered even less that membership of the CP at that time was
evidence of radical
political
consciousness and not criminal inclination.
In
the UK today the accusation of anti-semitism
is being used against
those
who are
not
anti-semitic.
Most
of those
accused have
spent
their lives fighting anti-semitism and racism.
Heading
the list of
the “guilty” is
Jeremy Corbyn,
many
Jews and anti-racists. It
is surprising
that
the
self-imposed
media
inquisition
has
not yet used
the words,
paraphrased
from
the McCarthy hearings,
“Are you now, or have you ever been, anti-semitic?”
Our
Salem trials
are
an attempt
to
prevent
Jeremy Corbyn from becoming Prime Minister and to
cow
the rest of us into silence about Boris Johnson’s
racism and the real anti-semitism that has always been at the heart
of the British
political
Establishment.
On
26 November
2019
the
Daily
Mail
declared that Jeremy Corbyn ‘dodged apologising over Labour’s
ant-semitism crisis.’ That is their
version of, ‘Are you now or have you ever been….’ This statement is rich coming
from a newspaper which, under ownership of
the same family that
owned it eighty years ago, supported Hitler and Mussolini. Corbyn
has not apologised because
he has nothing to apologise
for.
My
anti-fascism was born when I discovered photos of Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp inmates in my
father’s
desk. He was
one of the
first Allied medics to
enter
the camp when
it was
liberated.
It
haunted him for the rest of his life, as
it also
haunted me. Seeing
those walking skeletons was my
political awakening which later
led
me
to be beaten up by Nazi thugs from the British Movement when
selling Peace
News.
Corbyn has a similar history—his mother fought
alongside other Socialists
and Jews at the 1936
Battle
of Cable Street.
It
is an insult to
anti-fascists
to bring false
accusations into
this election. As
Arthur Miller wrote in The
Crucible,
“now
the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and
common vengeance writes the law!”
We
have to take away the
keys
from those children.
The following are articles I have written about anti-semitism and a short video of Miriam Margolyes speaking truth about Israel
My father in RAMC uniform at the time he went to Bergen-Belsen
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