Diane Abbott

[Flowerly]

To say that Diane Abbott is doing her best to help the Labour Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

Hideous antisemitism seemingly not gone away at all and add that to the horrendous misogyny in the Labour Party I wonder at this point why ANYONE would vote for them.

AIBU?

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

But he has tried to keep the hard left on side and it is backfiring. They are woman haters and antisemites. He needed to purge the lot of them ages ago but he has tried to placate them and in doing so has mired himself in the mess of identity politics and now cannot even define what a woman is for fear of annoying them.
I wish he had done a Neil Kinnock on the lot of them as I would rejoin the party in a heartbeat.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

@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.

What does that mean?

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. 🙄

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.

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

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

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.

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

We have the occasional post on our community forum when groups of Travellers have come to stay for a while warning people to be more careful of their dogs, make sure their sheds etc are locked. They stay up for a surprisingly long time, until a less prejudiced admin sees them.

This.

My Nan was very obviously Roma, Polish Roma at that. I've inherited my Grandads much lighter Irish Roma genes, meaning that I'm very fair skinned and blonde haired. But wow do I tan easily. I'm very proud of my heritage BTW, I'm pretty much completely Roma, even though the Roma I'm descended from is a mix of Irish, Polish and Italian origin in the last 3 generations. We may be settled but that is also literally in the last 2 generations, my Mum was born in a caravan.

Oh and my Nan would have had a field day if anyone called her a traveller. The use of traveller is a very recent thing, as far as she was concerned travellers were dirty, didn't clean up after themselves etc. But i do think she only thought of "new age travellers" rather than how many Irish Roma now describe themselves. We're gypsy, that's what she would say and gypsy's are clean.

But racism doesn’t mean ‘being killed in the millions’, that’s genocide.

Mumsnet normally seems to be quite logical and intelligent but this thread really seems to be a case of emotion clouding everything. The word ‘racism’ now seems to be applicable according to how bad the abuse or bigotry is, rather than because it affects a race rather than a religious group.

But racism doesn’t mean ‘being killed in the millions’, that’s genocide.

Would you mind then defining for me exactly which ethnic groups can and can't be victims of racism. Maybe you could include a colour chart.

@Coffeeandbourbons Jews are an ethno-religion. They (and Roma - Porajmos) were exterminated by Hitler because they were perceived to be racially inferior. Can't work out if you're trolling or just plain stupid.

"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. 🙄"

I love this reply. Spot on