Another SNP member having to resign due to ‘antisemitism’

If it’s caught up with the Israel/Palestine conflict then i remember a distinctly pro Palestine stance back in the 80’s when i was a teenager and first becoming aware of the situation. It seems to have regressed with Hamas and Netanyahu elected and of course Gaza shut off.

If there are any posters who are Scottish and Jewish please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong but antisemitism in Scotland seems to me to be a recent phenomenon.

That's pretty worrying.

What is this "State of Israel" everyone wants to criticise? Who wants to criticise the "State of China," the PRC, or the State of anywhere except Israel?

Back to Entebbe, we have recently had to endure the disgusting new film on the topic which says it was all Israel's fault retrospectively. Worth recalling that Kuhlmann, the German terrorist, separated the "Israelis" among the passengers, missing a few, but including several Belgian and French jews who she assumed were Secret Israelis. One passgenger showed her compatriot Bose the death camp tattoo on his arm and aksed about the irony of this, what with them being German and all, and he replied, "I am no Nazi. I am an idealist."

I mean on this thread people are saying oh but people need to be able to criticise the actions of Israeli govt.

How anyone sees that as a sensible response to what she wrote is beyond me.

I think there's a lot of anti semitism in society in general and the left is not immune.

What has changed seems to be
People who might have though better of expressing their views a few years back seem to feel its OK to say this stuff
With labour (know this thread is snp) the utter inability to condemn, deal with it.

In a way its good we're finding out these people think like this rather than it being hidden. Otoh if people start feeling it's OK to say anti semitic stuff does that encourage it?

Certainly it was correct this woman was booted.

Anti-Semitism on the Left goes back to propaganda about Jewish bankers etc. Then in the seventies you have the nexus between Palestinian terror groups and the likes of Baader-Meinhof who were behind the Entebbe hijack in 1976, and the Japanese Red Army Faction who carried out the Massacre at Tel Aviv Airport in 1972. All this at a time when Israel had a Labour govt.

Israel just seals the deal and provides a target to use as a shield.

This.

I've been pro-Palestinian and on the left my entire adult life, and this.

I'm always very sceptical of the self- congratulatory myth peddled by the SNP about how welcoming and tolerant Scotland is of all ethnicities but the bizarre and depressing fact would seem to be that Scotland did not have a history of antisemitism until fairly recently.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Scotland

I’ve always presumed any anti semitism from the left has been due to their anger and disgust of Israel and it’s treatment of Palestinians- which then spreads to UK jews as deep down many will to some extent support and feel attached in some way to Israel/the jewish state. Lately I’ve also been wondering if anti semitism has always been there, even possibly unconscious for some - and Israel just seals the deal and provides a target to use as a shield.

The long history of european antisemitism that allowed the Holocaust was never dealt with.

Indeed. Which should give people pause for thought if they think it is the actions of Israel which turns people into antisemites. Why is it that there is rabid obsession with Israel when there are plenty of other horrors going on around the world, human rights abuses, attempts at genocide, concentration camps? Why is it particularly the cause of the Palestinians that stirs the soul of the English guy ranting on twitter late into the night at British Jews who have nothing to do with it?

Is it because the antisemitism came first? In fact was always there? And this is the new excuse that people use to try to justify it?

Given the long and awful history of Jewish persecution, including in England from which they were expelled for over 350 years (they were only allowed back in 1657), without the existence of Israel, this is something that really needs consideration.

A lot of this arguement goes to the acceptance or not of the IHRA definistions of anti semitism.

And whether the campaign to make this the official guide was to stop criticism of Israel and Zionsim.

What is so strange in picking up people in this country who say you shouldn't use the word Nazi in relation to Israel is that papers in Israel regularly use this eg www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-contract-on-corbyn-1.8192769/.premium-the-contract-on-corbyn-1.8192769

Unfortunately this is never a straight foward discussion which we should be able to have, not helped that the media loved whipping up the level of feeling because it was a way to attack Corbyn. Please note I am not a Corbyn supporter but when the British media only every reports one side of an arguement common sense makes you think, what's going on here?

Added to which some of the people who were involved in originally drafting it have also said it is being misused by conflating anti semitism with anti Zionism.

And why are so many people in the UK invested in the issue.

Because the British were the colonialists who gave away land that wasn't theirs to give away at the expense of the existing inhabitants, ie the Palestinians.

The long history of european antisemitism that allowed the Holocaust was never dealt with. Rather the europeans thought lets export our problem and let another group of people who weren't part of it, pay the price.

The era when the British (along with the French) carved up the Middle East is the root cause of many of the tensions there. We were arrogant enough to think we could create false nations eg Saudi Arabia to have client states in the region. But equally think who cares about the Kurds lets just draw a line/s through their region and parcel them out to other groups to rule over.

There are nearly 5 million Palestinian refugees who dont have any rights to their home land whilst Europeans and Americans with a homeland are allowed to move and take up residence in the area.

Whatever Europeans owe Jewish people for the horrors of the Nazi regime, it is not clear that by making another group of people pay the price has resolved anything.

The British Empire is constantly being called into account by countries colonised by us. Some people think we should take responsibility for the division and unfairness we created.

folk don’t seem to have the imagination to realize the extent that trauma and legitimate threat has played in creating the Israeli mindset...

I think one candidate has been deselected for saying something I have said in seminars, that Israel is an abused child that grew up to be an abuser.

I do not think there is anything wrong with this statement. The problem for the candidate seems to be that some people hear 'child abuse' and think sexual abuse. Anyone who's done the tickbox safeguarding training knows that not to be the case.

What Ritascornershop said

For all the people bleating that they should be able to criticize Israel without being called anti-semitic, I’d ask you to consider why you’re so emotionally invested in what goes on in Israel/Gaza/the West Bank. Do you spend as much time fretting about any other foreign country? And how would you expect your government to react to kite bombs, rockets landing on homes and kindergartens? We know how the U.K. responds to terrorist incidents and, like the Israeli government, it’s not with flowers and a box of chocolates.

folk don’t seem to have the imagination to realize the extent that trauma and legitimate threat has played in creating the Israeli mindset - seeing your whole family wiped out - having the legitimate paranoia of being surrounded by neighbours who hate you and want to wipe you and your children out, neighbours who raise their children to hate you and want you wipe you out. Most folk in the UK have never faced or had to deal with this level of threat.

This. And then listen to the international community saying 'We are the world's police, we will take care of you. You should wait for us to do sanctions and shit and not go off half cocked'. And then remember what happened to great aunt x and uncle y. And then look at Rwanda and Srebrenica. And then listen to some arsehole wondering 'why the Jews never really had a major uprising in the 1940s' and then conclude that this time you are going to take care of this yourselves because what happened last time was unconscionable.

I don't agree that criticising the Israeli state is necessarily anti-semitic

Fucksake. No one, not one person, has said that simply criticising the Israeli state is antisemitic. So who are you disagreeing with?

You’ve quoted me talking about how comparisons to the Nazis is antisemitic.

'That doesn't make them automatically right. I don't agree that criticising the Israeli state is necessarily anti-semitic. I don't agree that not agreeing with Zionism makes someone anti-semitic either.'

Wow.

Case in point.

What the woman said was appalling and its right she's been booted.

The amount of people making excuses / m trying to misdirect in mind boggling.

I think a lot of people never stopped being racist / anti semitic etc and now they feel able to talk openly again. In a way that's good rather than it being underground. But also shocking.

And here we go again. No one is saying that you can’t criticise the state of Israel. No one.

What we are pointing out is that you can’t call them Nazis as that is anti Semitic.

It’s really not difficult.

" the IHRA definition of antisemitism thinks it is, and I suspect that the people who came up with that definition know a lot more about antisemitism and antisemites than you."

That doesn't make them automatically right. I don't agree that criticising the Israeli state is necessarily anti-semitic. I don't agree that not agreeing with Zionism makes someone anti-semitic either.

Even if this conspiracy theory is true it does not make it wrong to boot out candidates who are antisemitic- which these 2 clearly are. Cherry and Macalpine won't be booted out for that reason because they aren't antisemitic.

For those of you who support the SNP you might want to have a wee think about why you support a party , which according to the apologists on here for Findlay and the other one, tolerates antisemitism as long as it isn't combined with being gender critical. It's not an attractive look.

Article in today's Times:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-members-victims-of-lgbt-campaign-dl5pbc2mk?shareToken=bfd09fbadbedd773a8c6b9f81066634b

I'm not comfortable with making a very hard line around the definition of state and particular governments, the word state can be used in a way that's very close to the sense of government and quite different from the idea of a people. You have to look at context to know what people mean. And for that matter there are Israelis and people who are very pro-Israel who will talk about it in terms that conflate those two things as well.

I would think it would be obviously quite insensitive to throw around the word Nazi to describe Israeli policy or any of the ideologies that lie behind those policies. I would tend to compare something to Naziism when I thought it was really very similar in ideology, but many people seem to use it to describe ideas they think are oppressive which is not helpful. However, I suspect that when some say this, they feel that certain Zionist ideologies have a view of the person that is similar to facist ideas. I would not like to throw such terms around but in a serious discussion or political analysis I don't think it's anti-Semitic to ask questions about things like that.

Thank you to all the non anti-Semites on this thread!

It is a relief to see that there are still decent, normal people who haven't fallen into a woke pit of nonsense and festering racism.

It doesn't make the daily grind in encountering endless low-level anti-Semitism any better or make the feeling in the pit of my stomach go away, but it does make it all a bit more bearable.

Parts of Scottish society. Not all. Pro SNP, Labour and Celtic supporting. The Unionist supporters less so.

It’s not an SNP problem - it’s a common view held by many scottish people who are pretty black and white on the subject as shown by the reaction of scottish football fans here supporting Palestine. m.youtube.com/watch?v=HlvEros0ML4