Ian Buruma has an article linked over at Project Syndicate about the recent anti-Semitic incidents in the British Labour Party.  His provides a historical survey to show that contrary to the contention of Labourites, the left wing is not immune to anti-Semitism.  He writes:

This makes it easy to forget that a streak of anti-Semitism has always tainted the left as well. Stalin was of course notorious for persecuting Jews, or “rootless cosmopolitans” as he called them, whom he regarded as natural agents of capitalism and traitors to the Soviet Union. But well before Stalin, Karl Marx himself, although Jewish by birth, set the tone for a vicious type of anti-Semitism that infected the left, especially in France.

It was Marx who wrote, “Money is the jealous God of Israel,” and that Hebrew was “the muse of stock exchange quotations.” Marx was not oblivious to the dangers of anti-Semitism. He simply thought they would go away once the worker’s paradise had been established. In this, he was clearly mistaken.

This can be countered that the Old Left may have been anti-Semitic, but the New Left cannot possibly be.  Except that:

Things began to change in the early 1970s, after the occupation of the West Bank and other Arab territories. Two intifadas later, the Israeli left finally lost its grip, and the right took over. Israel became increasingly associated with the very things leftists had always opposed: colonialism, oppression of a minority, militarism, and chauvinism. For some people, it was perhaps a relief that they could hate Jews again, this time under the guise of high-minded principles.

What Buruma neglects is the connection to international terrorism in the 1970s.

1. As a way of raising funds, the PLO brought in and trained European Left Wing terrorists. European left wing terrorists even collaborated with the PLO in the highjacking of the Air France jet on 27 June 1976 that diverted the flight to Entebbe, Uganda.
2. The massacre at the Munich Olympics was a propaganda coup for the PLO. It raised the consciousness of the world to the plight of the Palestinians. Within a few years the PLO had more diplomatic recognition than the Jewish State!

This is all detailed in Bruce Hoffman’s Inside Terrorism, the standard text on the subject.

Labourites may tell themselves that they aren’t anti-Semitic, but only anti-Zionist, but at least certain Labourites, like Ken Livingstone and Naseem Shah, actually are anti-Semites. They may not hate individual Jewish persons but hate Jews in the collective.