Diane Abbott

Haven’t RTWT but perhaps she’s just remembered that her constituency has a sizeable Jewish population.

I'm in exactly the same boat on this. It's almost like she's lost her marbles.

The argument that Jewish people don't suffer 'racism' is making a distinction without a difference.

1970 pre EU populationfigures, Britain and Ireland once had similar populations prior to genocide.

Britain 55,660,000
Ireland 02,908,421

My position too, except that we have no plans to leave the country. Never voted Tory in my life, not going to start now. I ought to be a natural Labour voter, but they don't seem competent or intelligent enough to govern. The present government doesn't either. The Greens and LibDems are a laughing stock. Things could only be worse if I lived in Scotland, given the state of the SNP, but as the rest of my birth family are in Scotland, I can't just block it all out.

It's all so dismal.

So if being Jewish is not a race, why does it show up in my DNA on my Ancestry results? Why are some genetic diseases more prevalent among Jewish people?

It's certainly not because of a religious belief. 🙄

What does that mean?

@Coffeeandbourbons and @Florissant

I think both have you have misunderstood the holocaust. Spectacularly.

That 12 million figure is a myth that has been repeated by a number of influential sources over the decades: Jimmy Carter, the Trump administration, even the Israeli Defense Forces. The problem is that the 12 million figure actually has no basis in reality.

Let’s get one thing clear: though the Nazis persecuted a bunch of different groups, the Holocaust refers exclusively to the genocide of 6 million Jews and about 1-1.5 million Roma (while the most often cited number for Roma victims is 250,000-500,000, Roma historians believe the figure is much higher, as Roma deaths weren’t as meticulously recorded as Jewish deaths for a number of reasons). This is because the Nazis only adopted a genocidal program — with the intent of complete extermination — for these two groups. The persecution of other groups, such as communists and gay men, for example, was also rooted in antisemitism, as the Nazis believed that Jews were to blame for the existence of those groups.

But is it specifically racismor something else?

If the "something else" is getting you beaten on the streets of London, or murdered in your millions, it's extremely offensive to claim that whatever it is can't possibly be racism, or as bad as racism. Because genocide is as bad as it gets.

I agree with that. I've had a lot of respect over the years for her and she's been subjected to appalling racism but no way should she have written that. The Labour Party has quite rightly acted swiftly.

This vile claptrap is why I no longer vote Labour. I left the party and joined JLM to offer solidarity. Hateful. Unspeakably hateful. Grrrr.

But they were considered to be a lower race, far down the scale from Aryans. And there are ethnic differences in Romani people to others. As I said my late husband was Romani and it was clear by looking at him that he wasn't white British.
The fact that other 'undesirables' were also murdered doesn't take away from the fact that Romani were murdered solely on account of their ethnicity. There is a very long history of ill treatment towards the Romani in the whole of Europe with legislation specifically being made to ensure that they had no rights under the law. There is still a huge amount of prejudice in many countries with Romani/Gypsies being denied rights that are taken for granted by others. Please try to research what actually happened.

Of course they are. But is it specifically racism or something else? That’s the question, not whether they face bigotry and persecution or not - I don’t doubt that at all.

We are in a continent which has a very recent history of targeting populations of Jews and Roma settled for centuries and generations for mass murder and crimes against humanity.

In UK black people were not sat at back of buses that much more a USA thing - we had things like the Bristol bus boycott of 1963 were ethnic minorities weren't allowed to work on Bristol's buses.

We have our own history our own problems we can and should confront - the Metropolitan Police very recent conduct shows we still have massive problems.

Diane Abbott as a black woman has faced prejudice but I really think she miswrote here and frankly given the recent rows with antisemitism in Labour party it's bad politics as well.

Why? I’m genuinely confused about why my clarification of language and terminology is appalling? Either something fits a definition or it doesn’t. Doesn’t mean I have anything whatsoever against Jewish people. You started the thread and should be able to engage with these points.

So how can they experience racism? Or do you believe Jewish people are a race?

Again, they are an ethnic group, or more accurately will belong to one of three main ethnic groups.
And minority ethnic groups are frequently vulnerable to persecution and genocide, plenty of examples like the Kurds and the Armenians for instance.

David Baddiel's clip posted above is very interesting.
https://twitter.com/JonnyGeller/status/1488837963945582593

He makes some good points about confusion of terminology - some people seeing racism as only being about colour of skin, some people seeing anti-semitism as religious intolerance not racism, and the problem in some far left quarters of association of Jews with white power and privilege.

Diane Abbott wrote "They undoubtedly experience prejudice.This is similar to racism and the two words are often used as if they are interchangeable."

It's not a healthy place if language is imprecise and any kind of offence or failure causes immediate cancellation and shut down because it will result in people being scared to discuss important issues or even mention them - and most seriously racism and discrimination becoming even more concealed when it needs to be exposed and rooted out.

@ZeroWorshipHere What about people that have dual heritage? You think a person of dual heritage like Mariah Carey has had the same experiences as a dark skinned Black woman? Or that the experiences of many mixed heritage people with fetishization makes their treatment on par with mono-racial Black people? This thread is a bin fire.

that's not what i said, is it.

What she said is appalling and people are rightly angry with her.
But i don't see the same anger directed at people who are racist to her. They go on their merry way, racially abusing her and sending threats.

Divide and conquer indeed.

"You’re all confusing what a race is. It isn’t ‘anyone persecuted by Hitler’. Hitler also persecuted homosexuals and the disabled. Doesn’t mean they’re races."

Thanks for educating me on my own racial origins. You're entirely wrong but I'm enjoying you displaying your repeated ignorance

This isn't a clumsily worded reply in an interview, this is a letter she wrote by choice. I just don't understand what she was trying to achieve. Why do we need a hierarchy of prejudice, can't we just condemn it all?

I was just coming on to say that Diane Abbott’s constituency includes Stamford Hill which is one of the largest Hasidic jewish communities in the UK. I’m glad to see Bergmum beat me to it. I lived there for about 10 years, although I’m not Jewish myself. It was a great place to be, I have wholly happy memories, and I looked it up last year as I still have friends there and found that antisemitic hate crimes have been surging. In 2023 alone kids have been grabbed by the throat and tossed off buses. A couple of years ago, a pregnant woman was attacked (pillowcase over her head and punched repeatedly). An elderly Rabbi (from memory one who had survived the Holocaust as a child) was “beaten bloody” walking past a library. This, this is Abbott’s constituency. How dare she have written that letter.

Hang on. So if the Nazi-propagated view that there is such a thing as a ‘Jewish race’ is incorrect, that means Jewish aren’t a race. So how can they experience racism? Or do you believe Jewish people are a race?

I agree.

All prejudice is horrible, but no-one has attempted to systematically and brutally eradicate all black people from all nations the way Hitler attempted to eradicate Jewish people.

And he persecuted Catholics, Slavs and trade unionists to name a few other groups.

Twelve million people died in concentration - not six million.