To understand the smears on today’s pro-Palestine protesters calling them antisemitic, it’s helpful to go back to nearly a decade ago, when socialist Jeremy Corbyn was unexpectedly propelled to the British Labour Party’s leadership. The army of corporate-friendly conservatives who felt the party they had controlled for decades suddenly slipping from their grasp hatched an appalling but ingenious plan to take it back. Corbyn was easy for them to ridicule but hard to demonize.

He had stubbornly held to his humanistic principles even as the party and the politics around him lurched rightward. He was a lonely voice opposing disasters like the Iraq War that the rest of his colleagues giddily marched into and consistently advocated diplomatic solutions over military ones. He actually walked the talk when it came to his anti-racism, organizing against the National Front as its members planned to march down North London and campaigning hard against South African apartheid. He was a nice man who didn’t eat meat and rode his bike to work.

Worse, it wasn’t just him. Corbyn had inspired an entire generation of idealistic, energetic young people aligned with his politics who flooded the Labour Party’s membership rolls and threatened to permanently take it over. How could you beat something like this?