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Anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party

Jack Hays said:
They were part of the quote.
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So you did bring them into the debate and now that someone has bothered to elaborate on the details you wish to drop the subject................. like I said earlier.
 
oneworld2 said:
So you did bring them into the debate and now that someone has bothered to elaborate on the details you wish to drop the subject................. like I said earlier.
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No. I think they are part of the story. But they were not what led the author to conclude Corbyn is an anti-Semite, which is the point of the discussion.
 
Jack Hays said:
I read it all. It was the basis of my conclusion.
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Really ? So why have you, twice now, referred to things that I haven't stated or even inferred ?

Sorry but I think you deliberately waste peoples time here
 
oneworld2 said:
Really ? So why have you, twice now, referred to things that I haven't stated or even inferred ?

Sorry but I think you deliberately waste peoples time here
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You conveyed your message quite clearly.
 
Jack Hays said:
No. I think they are part of the story. But they were not what led the author to conclude Corbyn is an anti-Semite, which is the point of the discussion.
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In my OP in this thread I stated that part of the witch hunt against Corbyn had taken the form of sharing platforms with associates/members of groups that the West has labelled terrorist groups. He is on record as saying sometimes you share spaces with people whose views and perspectives you utterly reject. I don't see how that view is " proof " of anything other than the pragmatism/realism of Corbyn.

Past UK government leaders/reps shared platforms with Irish terrorist from both sides of the political struggle there that brought about the Good Friday Agreement and are/were lauded as heroes of peace.

The ANC were , at one time , likewise labelled by the UK governments as a terrorist group. Years later , with apartheid gone , Mandella was lauded as a great man of peace , a true visionary for equal rights etc etc with a statue in London to boot.

This is just so obvious and such an obvious perversion so as to attack Corbyn with along with all the others

Why do you appear not to see this ? Is it solely because Corbyn is a Leftist ?
 
oneworld2 said:
In my OP in this thread I stated that part of the witch hunt against Corbyn had taken the form of sharing platforms with associates/members of groups that the West has labelled terrorist groups. He is on record as saying sometimes you share spaces with people whose views and perspectives you utterly reject. I don't see how that view is " proof " of anything other than the pragmatism/realism of Corbyn.

Past UK government leaders/reps shared platforms with Irish terrorist from both sides of the political struggle there that brought about the Good Friday Agreement and are/were lauded as heroes of peace.

The ANC were , at one time , likewise labelled by the UK governments as a terrorist group. Years later , with apartheid gone , Mandella was lauded as a great man of peace , a true visionary for equal rights etc etc with a statue in London to boot.

This is just so obvious and such an obvious perversion so as to attack Corbyn with along with all the others

Why do you appear not to see this ? Is it solely because Corbyn is a Leftist ?
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There is only one OP in any thread and it wasn't yours.

Shared spaces were not the point of the most damning episode. Corbyn's words are what branded him as an anti-Semite.
 
Felis Leo said:
I would say that someone, anyone, who goes out of their way to associate with members and representatives of terrorist organizations with antisemitic charters are either themselves antisemites, or perfectly okay with associating with antisemites. Jeremy Corbyn has certainly done that by associating himself with Hamas and Hezbollah.

Just to drawn the analogy, Donald Trump was very friendly and conciliatory towards white nationalists and the Alt-Right. Something which should be condemned, and one of the reasons I refused to vote for him. However, to his meager credit, Donald Trump did not go and sit down with open members of Neo-Nazi groups, or say "our friends in the KKK."
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You can't make peace by only speaking to one side of an argument. Trump appears to think you can, at least in the context of I/P, but is happy to associate with Putin, an open antisemite, and Kim Jong Un, enthusiastic supporter of Iran's nuclear programme.

Corbyn, as a possible, if not certain future PM of the UK has signalled that he would pursue a radically different foreign policy in the ME, and everywhere else actually. Here is where I think you find the engine room of this ongoing politically-hyped melodrama. It's not about antisemitism in the Labour Party, although where it occurs it's vitally important to root it out and deal with it harshly, now more than ever. No, it's about his political enemies identifying what they believe to be a weak-spot and going in for the kill. In that they are being ably assisted by the Israeli government lobby and the more extreme end of the Zionist movement.
However, all this aside, even if Jeremy Corbyn was an outright Jew-hater, would that really matter to most of British Labour voters? Would they throw their party cards into the bin? I strongly doubt it.
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Why would you think that? Because you believe all Labour supporters are crypto-antisemites? Just a little history: in the 1930s when antisemitism was at levels we cannot imagine today, it was the Labour movement that mobilised the opposition to the Blackshirts. It took the Communists, Labour and Anarchists to cooperate with Jewish community organisations to defeat Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. It was neither the Conservative nor Liberal parties, indeed many of the Tories were well-disposed to the far-right and were themselves fairly hard-core antisemites, Churchill included.

One little detail that has been conveniently forgotten in this whole controversy over the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is that while the Liberal and Labour parties have adopted it, now with all the examples accepted, there is one UK political party that HASN'T adopted it: the Conservative Party. Theresa May claimed that they had included it in their Code of Conduct, but it doesn't take much to find that code and see that there is not a single mention of antisemtism, nor indeed a single mention of Islamaphobia either. So, we can see that Corbyn adopts it in whole and gets accused of antisemitism, Theresa May rejects it and lies about doing so, and it's the Labour Party with the antisemitism problem?
 
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Andalublue said:
You can't make peace by only speaking to one side of an argument. Trump appears to think you can, at least in the context of I/P, but is happy to associate with Putin, an open antisemite, and Kim Jong Un, enthusiastic supporter of Iran's nuclear programme.

Corbyn, as a possible, if not certain future PM of the UK has signalled that he would pursue a radically different foreign policy in the ME, and everywhere else actually. Here is where I think you find the engine room of this ongoing politically-hyped melodrama. It's not about antisemitism in the Labour Party, although where it occurs it's vitally important to root it out and deal with it harshly, now more than ever. No, it's about his political enemies identifying what they believe to be a weak-spot and going in for the kill. In that they are being ably assisted by the Israeli government lobby and the more extreme end of the Zionist movement.
Why would you think that? Because you believe all Labour supporters are crypto-antisemites? Just a little history: in the 1930s when antisemitism was at levels we cannot imagine today, it was the Labour movement that mobilised the opposition to the Blackshirts. It took the Communists, Labour and Anarchists to cooperate with Jewish community organisations to defeat Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. It was neither the Conservative nor Liberal parties, indeed many of the Tories were well-disposed to the far-right and were themselves fairly hard-core antisemites, Churchill included.

One little detail that has been conveniently forgotten in this whole controversy over the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is that while the Liberal and Labour parties have adopted it, now with all the examples accepted, there is one UK political party that HASN'T adopted it: the Conservative Party. Theresa May claimed that they had included it in their Code of Conduct, but it doesn't take much to find that code and see that there is not a single mention of antisemtism, nor indeed a single mention of Islamaphobia either. So, we can see that Corbyn adopts it in whole and gets accused of antisemitism, Theresa May rejects it and lies about doing so, and it's the Labour Party with the antisemitism problem?
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Corbyn's anti-Semitism quoted in #12 remains unanswered by you.
 
The Labour party has a loyalty problem, not antisemitism. (any mpre thsn is tio be found in the population) and one of the major ones is Corbyn's main attacker. Hodge. The Express is anything but a leftist paper. However...

" ...It’s difficult to imagine a more blatant, shameful and utterly contemptible piece of two-faced hypocrisy than the behaviour of Margaret Hodge that has been revealed this week. Mrs Hodge, you may recall, was chair of the Public Accounts Committee in the last parliament, when she was Labour MP for Barking. ...."

https://www.express.co.uk/comment/e...PHEN-POLLARD-Lichtenstein-Disclosure-Facility
 
Andalublue said:
You can't make peace by only speaking to one side of an argument. Trump appears to think you can, at least in the context of I/P, but is happy to associate with Putin, an open antisemite, and Kim Jong Un, enthusiastic supporter of Iran's nuclear programme.
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Hence the reason I am not a Trump supporter.

Andalublue said:
Corbyn, as a possible, if not certain future PM of the UK has signalled that he would pursue a radically different foreign policy in the ME, and everywhere else actually. Here is where I think you find the engine room of this ongoing politically-hyped melodrama. It's not about antisemitism in the Labour Party, although where it occurs it's vitally important to root it out and deal with it harshly, now more than ever. No, it's about his political enemies identifying what they believe to be a weak-spot and going in for the kill. In that they are being ably assisted by the Israeli government lobby and the more extreme end of the Zionist movement.
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I see nothing wrong with people in Britain who are pro-Israel, non-anti-semitic or simply pro-existence-of-Israel wanting to keep Corbyn from ultimate power over British foreign policy. When someone calls Hamas or Hezbollah their friends, organizations who make the destruction of Israel and the extermination of its Jewish population their key goals, that does indeed indicate where Corbyn wants British Middle Eastern policy to turn. And I do not think it is a positive direction.

Andalublue said:
Why would you think that? Because you believe all Labour supporters are crypto-antisemites? Just a little history: in the 1930s when antisemitism was at levels we cannot imagine today, it was the Labour movement that mobilised the opposition to the Blackshirts. It took the Communists, Labour and Anarchists to cooperate with Jewish community organisations to defeat Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. It was neither the Conservative nor Liberal parties, indeed many of the Tories were well-disposed to the far-right and were themselves fairly hard-core antisemites, Churchill included.
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Here is why I think that. A very, very large contingent of British Labour Party's radical left members who supported revolutionary socialist workers movements around the world, a contingent which includes Corbyn, essentially took their party line from the Soviet Union word for word. And because the Soviet Union was originally pro-Israel when Stalin thought he could create a little Soviet satellite state in the Middle East, but then quickly soured on the idea later and became anti-Israel when Stalin could not control the country, many British Labour Party members mirrored the ideological position of the USSR in turn. Unlike principled leftists like Noam Chomsky, who have solid principles and apply them equally across the board, Corbyn was and still is a supporter of revolutionary socialist movements whether they are in the revolutionary stages or if they have achieved power, so anyone claiming to adopt a revolutionary socialist party-line (or something close to it) has his support come Hell or high water...or until someone actually calling him out on his morally reprehensible positions.

Andalublue said:
One little detail that has been conveniently forgotten in this whole controversy over the adoption of the IHRA working definition of antisemitism is that while the Liberal and Labour parties have adopted it, now with all the examples accepted, there is one UK political party that HASN'T adopted it: the Conservative Party. Theresa May claimed that they had included it in their Code of Conduct, but it doesn't take much to find that code and see that there is not a single mention of antisemtism, nor indeed a single mention of Islamaphobia either. So, we can see that Corbyn adopts it in whole and gets accused of antisemitism, Theresa May rejects it and lies about doing so, and it's the Labour Party with the antisemitism problem?
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I do not care how parties write their charters overmuch, but what they do. For anyone to essentially claim on their behalf "they cannot be antisemitic! Their charter says we cannot be!" is not a particularly impressive defense. is People who go out of their way to associate with openly-racist and/or sectarian criminal terrorist organizations and call them their friends, whatever political side of the aisle they happen to be on, and should bear the consequences.
 
Jack Hays said:
The Boston Globe is a newspaper of national reach and reputation, owned, I believe, by the New York Times. You're the one who pointed to the right as the source of Mr. Corbyn's problems, so it seemed fair to explain that's not the well I'm drawing on. Now, from the Times:

". . . Then, last Thursday, The Daily Mail released a video of Mr. Corbyn speaking at a 2013 conference in London about Britain’s legacy in Palestine. The conference was promoted by the Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas. Other speakers included Stephen Sizer, who has appeared alongside Holocaust deniers at a conference in Iran. So far, so familiar.
What Mr. Corbyn said, however, was different. While bemoaning the activities of a group of Zionists, he identified two problems. “One is that they don’t want to study history, and secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony either,” he said. “I think they need two lessons, which we can help them with.”
There’s been some debate over whether he was berating just that particular group of Zionists or Zionists in general. Mr. Corbyn, in a limp effort at explaining himself, has stated that he “described those pro-Israel activists as Zionists in the accurate political sense, not as a euphemism for the Jewish people.”

This is, to put it in British, utter tosh.
This was classic anti-Semitism. Here were a group of Jews with whom Mr. Corbyn has a political disagreement. And he smeared them not on the basis of that disagreement but on the basis of their ethnicity. He accused them of failing to assimilate English values, of not fitting in, of still being a bit foreign. Had they been Christian Zionists, he could not have insulted them in this way.
The video was a watershed for many. Daniel Finkelstein, a Tory peer and columnist for The Times of London, called the revelation “qualitatively different from anything that has come before.” Ben Judah, a Labour-voting author, said that “the nasty comment from Mr. Corbyn on ‘Zionists’ not getting ‘English irony’ has finally snapped the benefit of the doubt extended by many Jewish progressives.”
A writer for The Guardian, Simon Hattenstone, who has repeatedly defended Jeremy Corbyn against charges of anti-Semitism, called his speech “unquestionably anti-Semitic.” And it wasn’t just the Jews. George Monbiot, a giant of the British left, described the comments as “anti-Semitic and unacceptable.”. . . ."
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I watched the video. Why is it anti-Semitic?
 
zyzygy said:
I watched the video. Why is it anti-Semitic?
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This was classic anti-Semitism. Here were a group of Jews with whom Mr. Corbyn has a political disagreement. And he smeared them not on the basis of that disagreement but on the basis of their ethnicity. He accused them of failing to assimilate English values, of not fitting in, of still being a bit foreign. Had they been Christian Zionists, he could not have insulted them in this way.
 
Jack Hays said:
Good for him. That doesn't solved the problem of his anti-Semitism as quoted in #12.
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What he said simply wasn't antisemitic. No matter how often you refer to the lie.


#BorisJohnson
#TommyRobinson
#DonaldTrump
#Tony Blair
#Rees-Mogg
#Netanyahu

One of the above Zionists is Jewish. The other scumbags are not.
 
Jack Hays said:
Corbyn's anti-Semitism quoted in #12 remains unanswered.
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He had a swipe at people who had and have been berating him , wrongly and relentlessly for months , for being a racist. Does that mean he is an antisemite ? Nope it means he's only human. If he truly was an antisemite you wouldn't have been forced , like all of the other groups seeking to derail his leadership of the Labour party , to scrape the barrel for evidence of it

BTW you calling out anyone over alleged racist views is rich............. change Jew to Muslim and ask yourself about the moral integrity in your views and perspectives
 
Manc Skipper said:
What he said simply wasn't antisemitic. No matter how often you refer to the lie.


#BorisJohnson
#TommyRobinson
#DonaldTrump
#Tony Blair
#Rees-Mogg
#Netanyahu

One of the above Zionists is Jewish. The other scumbags are not.
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You are in denial.

"This was classic anti-Semitism. Here were a group of Jews with whom Mr. Corbyn has a political disagreement. And he smeared them not on the basis of that disagreement but on the basis of their ethnicity. He accused them of failing to assimilate English values, of not fitting in, of still being a bit foreign. Had they been Christian Zionists, he could not have insulted them in this way.
The video was a watershed for many. Daniel Finkelstein, a Tory peer and columnist for The Times of London, called the revelation “qualitatively different from anything that has come before.” Ben Judah, a Labour-voting author, said that “the nasty comment from Mr. Corbyn on ‘Zionists’ not getting ‘English irony’ has finally snapped the benefit of the doubt extended by many Jewish progressives.”
A writer for The Guardian, Simon Hattenstone, who has repeatedly defended Jeremy Corbyn against charges of anti-Semitism, called his speech “unquestionably anti-Semitic.” And it wasn’t just the Jews. George Monbiot, a giant of the British left, described the comments as “anti-Semitic and unacceptable.”. . . ."
 
Jack Hays said:
You are in denial.

"This was classic anti-Semitism. Here were a group of Jews with whom Mr. Corbyn has a political disagreement. And he smeared them not on the basis of that disagreement but on the basis of their ethnicity. He accused them of failing to assimilate English values, of not fitting in, of still being a bit foreign. Had they been Christian Zionists, he could not have insulted them in this way.
The video was a watershed for many. Daniel Finkelstein, a Tory peer and columnist for The Times of London, called the revelation “qualitatively different from anything that has come before.” Ben Judah, a Labour-voting author, said that “the nasty comment from Mr. Corbyn on ‘Zionists’ not getting ‘English irony’ has finally snapped the benefit of the doubt extended by many Jewish progressives.”
A writer for The Guardian, Simon Hattenstone, who has repeatedly defended Jeremy Corbyn against charges of anti-Semitism, called his speech “unquestionably anti-Semitic.” And it wasn’t just the Jews. George Monbiot, a giant of the British left, described the comments as “anti-Semitic and unacceptable.”. . . ."
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Not I.

Much is being made of antisemitism in Labour to divert from similar Conservative problems. Corbyn is seen as the only impediment to Labour taking the next Parliament so he is hammered from all rightwing sides inside and outside Labour. Last week there was a claim that half the Labour Party membership is antisemitic. (Including some Jewish members who are obviously the "wrong" kind of Jew!)
Even if the accusation were true, the Labour party membership comes from a British population which itself is half antisemitic, according to this pre-Corbyn poll...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/14/uk-jewish-antisemitism-rise-yougov-poll
 
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