Antisemitism

Well over 100 academics and other educators, many of them Jewish, have signed an open letter to vice-chancellors opposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Working Definition of Antisemitism. Renfrey Clarke reports.

The University of Melbourne Student Union recently passed a second motion condemning Israeli apartheid and urging support for the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the “settler colonial apartheid state”, after a first had to be rescinded. Gideon Polya reports.

Gideon Polya writes that free speech faltered and falsehood triumphed at the University of Melbourne, after the student union was forced to withdraw a motion condemning apartheid Israel.

The the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition blurs the distinction between anti-Jewish racism and criticism of Israel, argues Jake Lynch.

A political response is needed to win people away from those peddling conspiracies, or worse, in the growing so-called “freedom” rallies, argues Alex Bainbridge.

Free Palestine rally in Sydney

The insistence on Israel’s “right to exist” is really a demand for the maintenance of a supremacist “Jewish’’ state, in which Palestinians are second-class citizens, argues Sam Wainwright.

It has long been common to falsely label critics of the Israeli government as “antisemitic”. Vivienne Porzsolt argues why this is a problem.

Renown British filmmaker and social activist Ken Loach is the target of a vicious smear campaign by pro-Zionist forces, writes Gavin Lewis.

At the end of October, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from the British Labour Party, writes Jonathan Strauss. What Corbyn does next is a topic of discussion in and outside the party.

The British Labour Party took a radical, anti-austerity manifesto to last year’s general elections and, despite polls and media commentators expecting an unprecedented disaster, came close to winning, denying the ruling Conservatives a majority. Despite this success, attempts to attack and sabotage Labour’s socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn, and the ranks that support his vision, have continued. Michael Calderbank takes a look at what took place and what it means for the party’s future.

The latest campaign against British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn centres around the veteran anti-racist campaigner’s alleged anti-Semitism. Among the ongoing claims, Corbyn is denying allegations he laid a wreath at grave the killers of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

As well as the latest attack on Corbyn, it is clear the allegations are also aimed at demonising all solidarity with Palestine and support for a genuine peace based on justice.

The increasingly strident charges of anti-Semitism within Labour, and the widening circle of targets, have by now departed from all reality.