FAMED FRONT PAGE: The London Jewish Chronicle, which once featured the Zionist prophet Theodor Herzl on its front page, has just joined with two other leading Jewish newspapers to warn that a government led by the Labor Party’s Jeremy Corbyn would confront British Jewry with an “existential threat.” (Image via Wikipedia)

The leader of Britain’s Labor Party, Jeremy Corbyn, is attempting to scramble to high ground in the face of protests against the anti-Semitism coursing through what could become the country’s ruling party. In an op-ed column in today’s Guardian, Mr. Corbyn acknowledges the problem his party faces. The man who could yet become Prime Minister insists: “I will root antisemites out of Labor — they do not speak for me.”

We don’t believe him for a nanosecond. We don’t believe he will root anti-Semites out of Labor. Neither do we believe the anti-Semites don’t speak for him. If either of those two vows had been bankable, Mr. Corbyn would have risen to the occasion long ago. Instead, he has been the cause, even the inspiriter, of the anti-Semitism that has become one of Labor’s defining features.

This is underlined in an astonishing demarche by the three leading Jewish newspapers in Britain, the London Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish News, and the Jewish Telegraph. They each gave over their front pages last week to the same editorial — a blunt, and all the more eloquent, warning that a Corbyn-led government would present Jewish life in Britain with an “existential threat.”

The three papers said they took the step because Labor, which they deemed the “natural home” for the Jewish community — much, we’d add, like the Democrats once were here at America — “has seen its values and integrity eroded by Corbynite contempt for Jews and Israel.” It said the “stain and shame of antisemitism” had “coursed through Her Majesty’s Opposition” since Mr. Corbyn became leader.

That was in 2015. Since then there has been a string of outrages from Labor. The Guardian went so far as to publish a timeline of what it called Labor’s “antisemitism row.” The incidents feature no less a figure than the former mayor of London, Kenneth Livingston, claiming that Hitler supported Zionism. He finally quit the party after being suspended from it. Not that the party learned anything.

The most telling moment came last week, when Labor refused to adopt the definition of antisemitism codified by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The definition is accepted by the government and more than 130 local councils, the Jewish newspapers noted. Yet, the papers said, labor had “diluted” the IHRA definition, deleting and amending four examples relating to Israel.

“Under its adapted guidelines,” the newspapers editorialized, “a Labour Party member is free to claim Israel’s existence is a racist endeavour and compare Israeli policies to those of Nazi Germany, unless ‘intent’ — whatever that means — can be proved.” They went on to pose this question: “‘Dirty Jew’ is wrong, ‘Zionist bitch’ fair game?”

Labor, the Jewish newspapers said, “makes a distinction between racial antisemitism targeting Jews (unacceptable) and political antisemitism targeting Israel (acceptable).” They see a clear reason for all this. Had the “full IHRA definition with examples relating to Israel been approved,” the newspapers reckon, “hundreds, if not thousands” of members of Labor and its socialist ally Momentum “would need to be expelled.”

The Jewish newspapers reckon that disarray in the government over Brexit spells a “clear and present danger” that Mr. Corbyn could be the next premier. The Jewish newspapers note that on September 5, Labor MPs will vote an emergency motion calling on the party to adopt the full definition of anti-Semitism. Otherwise, they reckon, Labor will “be seen by all decent people as an institutionally racist, antisemitic party.”

Our London journalistic confreres always were given to understatement. The next big question is whether British Labor will prove to be a bellwether for America’s Democratic Party, which between President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, Senator Bernard Sanders, and most recently Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been shedding its pro-Israel bona fides. It will be telling to see who fetches up in support of the British Jewry in its existential struggle.