What's Behind the Labour Party's Antisemtism?

Julie Burchill thinks it's a naked bid to pander to Muslim voters. While I certainly agree with her, I think the rot goes a lot deeper than that. So does Nick Cohen, who writes:

Challenging prejudices on the left wing is going to be all the more difficult because, incredibly, the British left in the second decade of the 21st century is led by men steeped in the worst traditions of the 20th. When historians had to explain last week that if Montgomery had not defeated Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt then the German armies would have killed every Jew they could find in Palestine, they were dealing with the conspiracy theory that Hitler was a Zionist, developed by a half-educated American Trotskyist called Lenni Brenner in the 1980s. 

When Jeremy Corbyn defended the Islamist likes of Raed Salah, who say that Jews dine on the blood of Christian children, he was continuing a tradition of communist accommodation with antisemitism that goes back to Stalin’s purges of Soviet Jews in the late 1940s. 

It is astonishing that you have to, but you must learn the worst of leftwing history now. For Labour is not just led by dirty men but by dirty old men, with roots in the contaminated soil of Marxist totalitarianism. If it is to change, its leaders will either have to change their minds or be thrown out of office.

Who says it wants to change? 

Update: Why the Left hates Jews

Update: Labour has secretly suspended 50 members for anti-Semitic and racist comments

I'm surprised it's only 50.