Ken Livingstone and antisemitism

[Flashbangandgone]

Aibu to not understand why KL's comments that Hitler was a Zionist in the early 30s mean KL is racist? Surely he was referring to the Haavara Agreement that encouraged Jews to move to Palestine to create their own community leaving Europe 'ethnically cleansed'.

I can't see how referring to this fact of history makes someone racist and antisemitic?!?

It seems as though the Labour Party, understandably hyper-sensitive about any whiff of antisemitism, and not knowing the history of the early Nazi state, and interpreted KLs comments as pro-Hitler, which i just don't see. It all appears to be a knee jerk hysterical reaction to me and unfair on KL... Or have I missed something?

Maybe KL was wrong to brand Hitler a Zionist, but this just makes him wrong, not racist.

I'm not sure how different those two are these days Shoesie. I like the term 'regressive left' but they seem to think they're the liberals.

and to bring this in to excuse Naz Shah (who had already, by that point, graciously apologised and admitted her error

I am in two minds about how seriously I take what I am about to write, but I think on balance it is probably correct.

The argument runs that Naz Shah is not a career politician. She is 42, but has spent most of those years in a cultural bubble in which anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not only conflated, but are acceptable (ie, people who might claim anti-Zionism in public, but are actually unashamedly anti-Semitic). Cartoons circulating in some middle-Eastern circles are directly from Der Stuermer, hook noses and rat-like features and all, and if you are raised and educated in that milieux and convince yourself that it is all part of "liberation" issues for Palestine, your sense for anti-Semitic tropes will necessarily be blunted.

Ken Livingstone, on the other hand, has spent nearly fifty years in the British hard left. Palestine may be an issue for the hard left today, but it simply wasn't when Ken was younger. The circles in which Ken moves are sharply alert to language, tropes and implications of racism, and Socialist Action cadre like Lee Jasper can spot anti-black racism in an empty room. "Check your privilege" is new language, but the basic idea was common currency amongst national hard-left organisations thirty years ago, and in more diverse London based hard-left organisations all the more so. So Livingstone does not have "culture" or "ignorance" on his side: he should know what racism looks like.

Hence, it is reasonable to cut Naz Shah some slack. She comes from a context in which crude anti-Semitic tropes are a commonplace, and she may simply not have realised the resonances. As an MP she should, but her contrition and desire to do better should be taken seriously (I think, on balance, etc). Livingstone should know that what he said is foul, and probably did it deliberately

Moving on, I made the point upthread about Ken being an auto-didact and not very bright. It looks like he now plans to commit intellectual suicide. He has said to Sky that "Everything I said yesterday was true and I will be presenting the academic book about that to the Labour Party inquiry.".

The speculation is that this "academic book" is 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis by Lenni Brenner. This is an academic book in the sense that Eric von Daniken is an academic, and you can get a general sense of the author's academic credentials from this article by him, from the alternative reality that is Counterpunch. Academic papers don't contain lines like Indeed, unless the Queen was sick on the crapper, every politically or theatrically interested person in Britain watched us win, thanks to director Ken Loach’s strategic instructions. And academic books are not normally sold with the rubric A check to me, for $22.00 + $1.84 media mail postage, gets a signed book back, anywhere in the US. Folks in other countries, and people wanting rates for bulk orders, should also write....

The 51 documents in question include Adolf Eichmann's memoir, written in South America after the war. We can all pause for a moment while I gather the strength to write what follows: the Labour Party (you can imagine Kinnock at this point, making that speech, the Labour Party) is going to have a disciplinary process in which a senior member of the Labour NEC and former both MP and London Mayor is going to adduce the self-serving post-war memoirs of SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, main logistic manager of the extermination camps at the heart of the holocaust, to prove that he isn't anti-Semitic. "Look, I'm not anti-Semitic, and here's Adolf Eichmann agreeing with me!" You would laugh, if you weren't crying at the debasement of a once-great political party.

I don't know whether KL is anti-semitic or not, but I don't think it matters. What he said was anti-semitic. He might not have meant it that way, and his subsequent interviews talk about Hitler's policies at the time rather than saying he was a Zionist (which he clearly wasn't and is a disgusting thing to say).

Note that he also said this:

I think blurring these two things undermines the importance of antisemitism because a real antisemite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbours in Golders Green or Stoke Newington, it’s a physical loathing.

Now I'm sure he would argue that when he said "Jews in Israel" he actually meant the state of Israel but really, having already got into such a shitstorm you've got to be pretty fucking stupid to then go on and say that.

He may or may not be an anti-semite. Best case is he's a stupid idiot. He needs to go in any case.

to bring this in to excuse Naz Shah (who had already, by that point, graciously apologised and admitted her error

Naz Shah did not make 'an error'. She made a series of racist messages on social media which clearly showed her offensive attitude. When these came to light after being elected she then had to make the apology. I don't believe she can have suddenly changed her whole philosophy.

a real antisemite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel, they hate their Jewish neighbours in Golders Green or Stoke Newington, it’s a physical loathing.

That's the "some of my best friends are black!" defence turned on its head. So long as you only want to kill many Jews qua Jews, rather than all Jews, you aren't anti-Semitic. Really Ken? Is that how racism works? Do tell more.

I don't believe she can have suddenly changed her whole philosophy.

I don't think she is claiming that she did. She is claiming that (a) since making those postings two years ago she has been on a journey as part of being an MP and (b) she intends now to make that journey a larger part of her life. That may or may not be sincere, but I think she should be given some measure of the benefit of the doubt. It is noticeable that her local synagogue have defended her.

OP, I will apologise for accusing you of being a troll, when you used the words 'zionist' and 'ethnic cleansing' in your OP, I assumed you understood their meaning, therefore I felt you were being disingenuous in asking what was wrong with KL's statements. Clearly you were not and you have taken on board the comments made by others on the thread.

Ken Livingstone is an anti-semite who has repeatedly made inflammatory statements designed to provoke and hurt Jewish people, mostly around trivialising the Holocaust but also deliberately (IMO) conflating Israel, Zionism and Judaism. He also thinks that it is "over the top” to think of anti-Semitism and racism as equal.

Dementia doesn't turn previously nice people into anti-semites by the way.

mishmish

What other people lost such a large proportion of its population in WW2 as European Jewry.

90% of Polish Jews
90% of Jews in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
90% of Jews in Germany and Austria
83% of Slovakian Jews
77% of Greek Jews
75% of Dutch Jews (so much for the Dutch helping them)
70% of Hungarian Jews (mostly in the last year of the war when everyone knew it was lost)
65% of Belarussian Jews
60% of Belgian Jews
60% of Yugoslavian Jews
50% of Romanian Jews

Altogether TWO THIRDS of European Jewry was wipe dout.

FFS, what other population group suffered like that? Of course there was individual suffering. But no other group suffered such intense and ferocious targeted genocide, even at the expense of the war effort. How dare you try to minimise the extent of the devastation of the holocaust of European Jewry? And why? To what purpose does it bother you that the holocaust was singular in WW2?

I totally agree with what pilpiloni said above. It is horrific :(

However I have concerns that Israels current barbaric treatment of Palestinians cannot be commented on due to the fear of being called anti-semitic.

It is a difficult situation, I don't know what the answer is.

oh to be my young DD with a sparkly fairy wand that you can wave & make it all better....

kippery

Anyone is perfectly entitled to criticize the actions of the Israeli government. Israelis themselves do it all the time, it's a democracy!

I repeating what I wrote on another post but two things smack of anti-semitism to me:

1. Constant referral to Jewish history with relation to Israeli (and only Israeli) actions: holocaust, pogroms, ghettos, genocide. None of which apply to the situation in Israel/Palestine. There are sufficient adjectives which can convey the severity of the situation without referring to the mass murder of six million civilians with whom there was no conflict.

2. An obsession with Israel.
   I see it especially among British Muslims, especially of Pakistan origin (exemplified by Naz Shah) and to a certain extent the loony left (exemplified by Ken Livingston and George Galloway). It's all about Israel. You'd think there were no human rights abuses or conflicts anywhere in the world. It's especially ironic given the extreme persecution faced in Pakistan by shi'ite and christian minorities and the apartheid against women there - but comment on that when you actually have conections and could influence change? No, heaven forfend!

I could give a long list of many many worse human rights abusers than Israel (not forgetting that the Palestinians are no angels either). Let's obsess about Israel instead. Why? What's the reason?

Hitler also considered sending European Jew's to Africa. Madagascar specifically.

Zionist? Nah, Hitler just wanted them far from him, and ended up in a frenzy to exterminate them . Ken is a politician who should know how to filter his tongue. If he believed something to be a fact, the next thought should be whether it's appropriate.

TBH I rather think KL enjoys the furore he creates.
I just can;t decide whether he is stupid or insanely egotistical.

Either way he is not doing the Labour Party any favours at all. I doubt though that he gives a toss. Numpty.

I think I agree with Tremolo. When I read the 'a bit mad' comment, I was genuinely shocked.

Oh, I was freeing with Tremolo's first post. Haven't read longer post.

Personally, I think that making light of the Holocaust comment just shocked me utterly. If a public figure does that, it IS creating a climate encouraging anti-semitism. It's appalling.

I really don't want him in the Labour Party.

I think it was right both were suspended from the Labour Party. Of course free speech is important and people are entitled to their own views and in a democratic country that should be the case, the problem is that has not been the case in terms of other religions. If labour wants to remain a credible party then this anti Jewish/Israeli stance needs to be addressed

pilponi - "I could give a long list of many many worse human rights abusers than Israel (not forgetting that the Palestinians are no angels either). Let's obsess about Israel instead. Why? What's the reason?"

The answer lies in the fact that Israel's misdeeds are reported on and analysed far, far more than those of other countries. Understandably, this leads people to imagine that Israel's deeds must therefore be far worse than those of other countries, about whom they hear less.

A journalist who worked for Associated Press has written of his experiences - the stats are mindblowing:

"When I worked in the AP’s Jerusalem bureau, the Israel story [ie news about Israel] was covered by more AP news staff than China, or India, or all of the 50-odd countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. This is representative of the industry as a whole."

fathomjournal.org/the-ideological-roots-of-media-bias-against-israel/

One, tiny country in the Middle East (population just over 8 million) gets more journalists to cover it than the number of journalists sent to cover around half the world's population (3 billion). Why is that? Is it really that there is 'nothing to see' in that half of the world? Can it really be true, as so many like to claim, again and again, that the 'Israel lobby' is successful in shutting down all debate about what goes on in Israel and that no-one is 'allowed' to comment on Israel? No - clearly the figures show otherwise. The complete opposite, in fact.

People don't know that the news agenda has been fixed; and certainly not by the 'Israel lobby'. It's time that people woke up and questioned why it's rare that a day goes past without a story about Israel, usually several.

From the same article:

"Vandalism of Palestinian property is a story. Neo-Nazi rallies at Palestinian universities or in Palestinian cities are not – I saw images of such rallies suppressed on more than one occasion. Jewish hatred of Arabs is a story. Arab hatred of Jews is not. Our policy, for example, was not to mention the assertion in the Hamas founding charter that Jews were responsible for engineering both world wars and the Russian and French revolutions, despite the obvious insight this provides into the thinking of one of the most influential actors in the conflict."

News reporting is not a neutral act.

And again, from the same article:

"In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel’s flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased. I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialised. I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality. Lest we think this is something that has never happened before, we might remember Orwell’s observation about journalism from the Spanish Civil War: ‘Early in life,’ he wrote, ‘I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. (…) I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”’ That was in 1942."

Hitler also considered sending European Jew's to Africa. Madagascar specifically.

To be run as an SS police state, and in full knowledge that there would be massive deathtolls both in transit and upon arrival. It was essentially a proposal to off-shore the Łódź and Warsaw ghettos, which was rendered moot by the decision at the Wannseekonferenz to proceed to extermination.

The proposal wasn't Hitler's, rather Franz Rademacher's ; Hitler approved a proposal by Adolf Eichmann, but it was abandoned after Germany's failure to defeat Britain in 1940--41, which meant that Germany didn't have the merchant shipping required to move one million people per year, and superseded by the Final Solution.

One might ask why a soi-disant anti-racist Socialist, not to mention some of the people engaging in this debate on "his side" (I realise, JayDot, that you aren't doing this), are so deeply mired in the sewage of the Third Reich, without understanding it, that they trot out talking points straight from Stormfront which ar variously designed to deny or minimise the holocaust, or (bizarrely) to pretend that Hitler didn't know.

It is perfectly clear from Mein Kampf that Hitler saw the only "solution" as extermination, but he lacked the means to do it. When the means became available, he pursed extermination, even past the point of logic; well-fed slave labour would be more effective at building V2s and the Atlantic Wall for the purpose of war, but to Hitler, the extermination was the main purpose. The claim that there's sane Adolf, who just wanted those pesky Jews out of his hair, and mad Adolf, who wanted to exterminate them, is a popular revisionist trope; it is horrifying, but perhaps unsurprisingly, that the unschooled auto-didact is unable to see that he is not doing history, he is taking the lines of holocaust deniers.

Oh Richardian, I agree with you fully! He'd created his own 'Jewish problem'. Extermination, a self-fulfilling prophecy. He needed to present some logical reason for killing Jews to his party. By stripping Jews of wealth, strength and hope, it was easy to verbalise and execute his plan because these poor people were of no use to a (now at war) Nazi Germany. And Germany of the 1930s was a progressive country with laws and civility. Hitler had to play his cards correctly, he could not just say 'kill the Jews', and have everybody on board. The book was written to sew seeds.

The Madagascar plan would be one big tropical ghetto, really. The ghettos weren't killing them off quickly, so they needed another solution. What is sad is that Madagascar wasn't an original idea when proposed to Hitler. It didn't even stem from Germany :(.

Hitler killed German disabled and mentally ill people, before he started systematically killing Jews. He didn't feel like food and shelter should be 'wasted' on them either.

Hitler knew what his own agenda was from the outset, and his party made his dream a reality.

Stupid Ken.

pilpiloni: There were so many groups up for extermination - Romani, mischlinge who had converted, poor people, protestants, anyone Nazis didn't like the look of. There was so much collaboration too and we all knew (and talked about) who ended up with pots of money afterwards and our families lived, and still do, in tremendous fear of them because of it. It is a huge factor in the declining demographics/rejection of religious institutions in the West (because many of the church leaders were right in on the corruption both then and afterward) I had classmates in my rural public school whose Romani grandparents were also survivors of the camps in Europe and they had very different stories about who was running the joint and what happened. It is a fact that forty million Europeans died - how does this minimise the holocaust? Why is it not relevant? If the numbers are important, many more non-Jews than Jews died. Millions more lost everything, including all their friends. It is precisely because of the holocaust and losing everything that many of us are so freaked out that the same ilk of war criminals are collaborating yet again to try and get us to invade the Middle East. It is because we are being asked to die for this ... again... that everyone is now , rightly, asking questions about last time.

grinkle
Those are interesting quotes indeed. But could I politely point out that those personal views are no more nor less valid than the ones the writer himself seeks to 'correct'.

the same ilk of war criminals are collaborating yet again to try and get us to invade the Middle East.

Which same ilk would that be? The international Jewish conspiracy that controls government from behind the scenes? The Nazis of the EU? Could you perhaps be a little more precise about which same ilk you are accusing of both casing the second world war and then "invading the Middle East", whatever that might mean?

Zionist? Nah, Hitler just wanted them far from him

I think it's very difficult to defend KL's remarks on historical grounds precisely because of this point. Hitler was not a Zionist and never shared the goals of Zionists. I find it extraordinary that he would even have gone into this territory without being absolutely sure of his facts. I actually wonder whether he's going a bit senile.

On the other hand, Zionism (I mean here Zionism in the sense that Israel is the promised land and the Jews God's chosen people) springs from a vein of exceptionalism that is found in all types of nationalist, separatist and supremacist thinking. KL is right that it has become very difficult to discuss this without being accused of anti-semitism.

Anyone else notice how the holocaust is slowly being appropriated by other groups, who were never victims of the Nazis (and are often great supporters of Hitler). There was even a Kristallnacht event in Sweden in which Jews were not in included (the whole point about Kristallnacht was that it was the night in which Nazis burned, looted and killed Jews and smashed their shops). www.breitbart.com/london/2015/11/10/jewish-community-excluded-swedish-anti-nazi-holocaust-kristallnacht-commemoration/

History is slowing being rewritten by a pernicious and virulent ideology that is seeping into every aspect of the West. It's Orwellian that the liberals tend to be leading the way.