Jeremy Corbyn

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
of course rdr, you're absolutely right and if tea thinks anti semitism isn't rife in the conservative party he's kidding himself.

When did I ever say that? The hard Right isn't limited to the BNP and UKIP, there are still plenty of nutters in the Tory party.

Nonetheless, these kinds of overt displays of anti-Semitism do seem to be a Labour speciality at the moment. The Right is, on the whole, far more concerned about Muslims.

Edit: oh great, here's a Sam Kriss article to clear everything up for us, lol.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't mean the tory hard right I.mean the establishment

OK but whatever they may think, do they make public pronouncements of this kind? I mean, maybe they do and the media just don't pick up on it, I dunno. Are there any recent examples of Tory MPs saying stuff like this and getting away with it? Honest question there.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Who's 'getting away with it'

OK, I probably didn't explain very well. You said the mainstream Tory party - not 'fringe nutters' or anything like that - contains loads of anti-Semites, yet it's the Labour party that has the perennial problem of being called anti-Semitic. So either these Tory Jew-haters are keeping their thoughts to themselves, or they're broadcasting them for all to see but no-one is picking up on it and giving them a hard time about it.

I mean, I certainly had the impression the Tory party was overwhelmingly pro-Israel (e.g. the law banning the boycotting of Israeli businesses) and therefore presumably has a generally favourable disposition to Jews generally.
 

luka

Well-known member
I wouldnt conflate support for Israel with philosemitism, there all sorts of other factors involved as you must know. I don't think the establishment is full of rabid nazis either just that a kind of reflex distrust of Jews is to be expected across all sections of British society not least amongst our betters.
 

droid

Well-known member
'ship muslims in england back to pakistan and save money!'

I know you're not making a direct comparison, but the statements are not equivalent.

Which of these statements are Islamophobic/anti-Semitic, and which are political criticisms of a state?

Pakistan is a rogue state which should be sanctioned.
British Muslims are terrorists who should be sent back to Pakistan.

It makes more sense for Israel to be located in the US than the middle East
British Jews control Britain and they should be sent to Israel.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It makes more sense for Israel to be located in the US than the middle East

Weasel words. 'Makes more sense' - to whom? Some hypothetical perfectly impartial arbiter? A British Muslim with a very obvious antipathy towards Israel as it exists today? The Israeli-in-the-street? Any given American, who may love Jews, hate them or be totally indifferent to them?

I agree that it would have made far more sense (edit: objectively benefited more people, and objectively harmed far fewer) for a Jewish homeland to have been established in the USA after WWII. But the past cannot be undone.
 
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droid

Well-known member
Youre accusing her of anti-semitism based on that image she posted. Youre saying she wants to round up Jews and deport them, when all the image says is that it makes more sense for Israel to be located in the US, which is true, in principle.

Or are you still accusing her of anti-semitism or now just 'antipathy towards Israel'? Do you accept that the image she posted is, in isolation, as I said, not anti-semitic but a criticism of Israel?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Youre accusing her of anti-semitism based on that image she posted. Youre saying she wants to round up Jews and deport them, when all the image says is that it makes more sense for Israel to be located in the US, which is true, in principle.

Or are you still accusing her of anti-semitism or now just 'antipathy towards Israel'? Do you accept that the image she posted is, in isolation, as I said, not anti-semitic but a criticism of Israel?

If you're saying "Israel should be formally abolished", what you mean is, there should no longer be a Jewish state in the Levant. The land should be given back to the Palestinians, is the implication. (Never mind for now the Jews who were living in the territory that became Israel well before 1947, the non-Palestinian Arabs, Samaritans, various Christian groups, Druze and whoever else.) You're talking about removing Jews - only Jews - from the territory that currently forms modern Israel. It's hard to argue that that isn't anti-Semitic, I think.

You can, of course, argue that it was 'racist' to set up a country for a specific ethnic group in the first place, but if that was so, then to forcibly disperse those same people - or rather, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who didn't choose to be born there - from that country is surely also racist.

Really, whether the tweet was formally anti-Semitic according to some forensic definition of the term is less important than the fact that it was just bloody stupid. Obviously Israel is not going to be erased from the Levant and re-established somewhere in America. It's just a way of saying "I am strongly hostile to Israel" - which is fine, there are loads of perfectly good reason for being hostile to Israel, so she could have just made that statement and then backed it up with a bunch of cast-iron (or Cast Lead, rather) facts and figures like a boring, professional, grown-up politician. But instead she posted a "joke" infographic about the abolition of the Jewish state, which is precisely not what you'd do if you were serious about tackling your party's reputation for anti-Semitism.
 
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droid

Well-known member
I wont get into your first paragraph, though there is much I would take issue with. All you need to do is look at the statements of early zionists who were fully aware that the imposition of zionism on Palestine was essentially an alien invasion and displacement of the native inhabitants, who were predominantly Palestinian Arabs - but regardless.

The definition, technical or otherwise is important, and Im glad youve essentially rolled back on it. Stupidity is not the same as racism, and in fact is a defining characteristic of most politicians.

Decent article here about attempts to define anti-semitism, BDS, Israel and the conservatives and Labour smears.

http://www.alternet.org/enemies-corbyns-progressive-labour-party-push-israels-anti-semitism-smears

...On February 15, the co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) resigned his position, in response to OULC deciding to endorse Israeli Apartheid Week (a telling trigger). Shortly afterwards, and for a period of roughly a month, the media reported a number of cases where Labour members were alleged to have been guilty of antisemitic remarks, predominantly on social media.

Corbyn’s political opponents and their friends in the media, saw an opportunity: the Daily Mail declared Corbyn to be “a long-standing supporter of the terrorist organisation Hamas”, while Boris Johnson urged Londoners to vote Tory in the mayoral contest, citing Labour’s antisemitism “cancer.” In mid-March, The Jewish Chronicle declared that Labour “attracts antisemites like flies to a cesspit.”

The Labour Party has more than 400 MPs and peers at Westminster, in addition to almost 7,000 local government officials and some 390,000 members. The antisemitism ‘crisis’ has involved half a dozen individuals, most of whom have either never held, or no longer hold elected office. Corbyn himself has repeatedly condemned antisemitism since becoming leader, while according to Party General Secretary Iain McNicol, everyone reported for antisemitism has been suspended or excluded.

Getting a problem in perspective is not the same as denying that any problem exists (by definition). As Richard Kuper, spokesperson of Jews for Justice for Palestinians tells me, “there is some antisemitism in and around the Labour party – as there is in the wider society in Britain”, a problem made worse by “increased use of social media.”

However, Kuper said, “there is clearly also a coordinated, willed and malign campaign to exaggerate the nature and extent of antisemitism as a stick to beat the Labour party” under Corbyn. Ian Saville, a founder of the ‘Jews for Jeremy’ Facebook page, agrees, saying he is “disturbed” by the way antisemitism has “been taken up as a proxy with which to attack the left in the Labour Party.”

As Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, member of Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG), tells me: “This is not about whether we should be dealing firmly with antisemitism - of course we should - but how antisemitism is defined.” This politicised redefining of antisemitism should worry us all: it dehumanises Palestinians and delegitimises solidarity, imperils the fight against real antisemitism, and constitutes a much broader attack on our democracy and political freedoms
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
All you need to do is look at the statements of early zionists who were fully aware that the imposition of zionism on Palestine was essentially an alien invasion and displacement of the native inhabitants, who were predominantly Palestinian Arabs

I wouldn't quibble with that, but it's not 1946, is it? That was 70 years ago and Israel's Jewish population, despite high levels of immigration, consists mainly of people who were born there. If you're talking about the forced removal of a group of people from the land where they were born on the basis solely of their ethnicity, I think that meets a pretty standard definition of racism.

But really, this just illustrates part of the wider problem. Left-wing white people are, on the whole, highly sensitive to anything that could be taken to indicate, no matter how indirectly, prejudice against black people or Muslims - to the point where anyone asking whether the prejudice is really there will likely be accused of racism themselves - whereas suggestions of anti-Semitism are usually subjected to this kind of intense nit-pickery or even outright dismissal.

And it hardly needs to be said that something can be both racist and stupid, indeed the two usually go hand in hand.

I notice the piece you've quoted talks about a "campaign to exaggerate the nature and extent of antisemitism". I daresay this is the case. But 'exaggerate' implies there is something there to be exaggerated, rather than invented from nothing, contra Corbyn and Livingstone, who maintain the line that it's a formal logical fallacy for a Labour politician to have any kind of racial prejudice.
 

droid

Well-known member
I wouldn't quibble with that, but it's not 1946, is it? That was 70 years ago and Israel's Jewish population, despite high levels of immigration, consists mainly of people who were born there. If you're talking about the forced removal of a group of people from the land where they were born on the basis solely of their ethnicity, I think that meets a pretty standard definition of racism.

:slanted: Once again, what the image is saying is that, in principle that it makes more sense or Israel to be located in the US. It is not saying that Jews should be rounded up and forcibly deported, it is not saying that ONLY Jews should be deported, it is making an essentially abstract political point and attack on the state of Israel itself. Your various other inventions there are increasingly tenuous projections.

But really, this just illustrates part of the wider problem. Left-wing white people are, on the whole, highly sensitive to anything that could be taken to indicate, no matter how indirectly, prejudice against black people or Muslims - to the point where anyone asking whether the prejudice is really there will likely be accused of racism themselves - whereas suggestions of anti-Semitism are usually subjected to this kind of intense nit-pickery or even outright dismissal.

:rolleyes: Yes, this is the wider problem, not the decades long campaign to de-legitimise criticism of Israel and the recent development of a British ADL style coalition with the main aim of stymieing political opposition to Israeli policies.

I notice the piece you've quoted talks about a "campaign to exaggerate the nature and extent of antisemitism". I daresay this is the case. But 'exaggerate' implies there is something there to be exaggerated, rather than invented from nothing, contra Corbyn and Livingstone, who maintain the line that it's a formal logical fallacy for a Labour politician to have any kind of racial prejudice.

Right, except for the fact that Corbyn has instituted a policy of suspension or expulsion for any any member proven to have made anti-semitic remarks, has condemned anti semitism on television and in public on numerous occasions including an interview on newsnight when he said that anti-semitism will be punished by 'auto-exclusion', has allowed prominent party figures like Iain McNicol and John McDonnell to say that anti-semitism is grounds for 'expulsion for life', and these policies have even reached the point where committed Labour opponents of anti-semitism like Tony Greenstein have been suspended despite the lack of substance to allegations against them.
 

droid

Well-known member
Your beloved Sam kriss with another actually very pertinent article:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/how-to-criticise-israel-without-being-a-dick

Right now, there are a lot of people policing the boundaries of anti-Semitism. And there should be – but they have a tendency to stray out of their jurisdiction. As the ongoing crisis in the Labour party has shown, it can be hard to criticise Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. Case in point: Ken Livingstone, who went on the BBC's Daily Politics show to defend his party members from accusations that they're anti-Semites, and in the process got himself suspended from the party. Watch the video – at no point does he ever actually voice a personal hatred towards Jewish people, but even if he had it's hard to see how he could have made things worse...
 

droid

Well-known member
NARRATIVE: Labor under Corbyn has become an unchecked cess-pit of anti-semitism. Promulgated by tories, anti-Corbyn Labourites and a media openly hostile to Corbyn

COUNTER NARRATIVE: A loose coalition of Pro-Israel conservatives, media figures & Blairite labourites are attempting to smear Corbyn using a tried and tested technique.

Fact-checking Newsnight:

...Second, the frequency with which new cases of antisemitism have been uncovered in recent weeks more plausibly reflects, not rising antisemitism within the Labour Party, but a—to use Rabbi Neuberger’s word—‘concerted’ effort to uncover and publicise such evidence. As Lord Levy observed on the same programme, Labour is ‘coming very much under the microscope at the moment’; a high-powered microscope at that, able to detect isolated tweets by low-level party members published as far back as 2011. Is it really cause for wonder that, when examined through a microscope, one discovers cases of antisemitism that were previously overlooked?

https://jamiesternweiner.wordpress....ng-newsnight-on-labours-antisemitism-problem/

A comprehensive overview of all accusations to date:

A 2015 survey by Pew found that seven percent of the UK public held “unfavorable” views of Jews. By contrast, about a fifth held negative views of Muslims and almost two-fifths viewed Roma people unfavorably.

There’s no evidence to suggest that such views are any more prevalent in the Labour Party – and the tiny number of anti-Semitism complaints suggests they may well be less so in a movement many of whose activists have been in the frontline of anti-racist struggles.

The staff member said that in the five or so cases that had come to its attention, the party had taken swift action to expel, or suspend the membership of those alleged to have made anti-Semitic comments.

https://electronicintifada.net/cont...d-uk-labour-partys-anti-semitism-crisis/16481
 

luka

Well-known member
seems pretty obvious that that's what's going on. 2 years old facebook posts suddenly under the spotlight. doesn't take a genius to work it out.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
:slanted: Once again, what the image is saying is that, in principle that it makes more sense or Israel to be located in the US.

In principle, it makes more sense for people not to order their lives around some old stories about a man who thought an imaginary entity spoke to him and gave him a bunch of instructions, so why do Muslims insist on doing just this?

Note I'm being not Islamophobic, because I haven't said "Muslims are bad people" - I'm just objectively and logically saying what would make more sense. If you take offence at that, it must be because you're intentionally seeing offence where there is none.
 
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