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Labour and anti-semitism

999 replies

LeLaluifleur · 10/04/2016 09:15

Apologies for DF links but ignoring the lowbrow style 'journalism' for a minute, I am perturbed about these reports.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3531852/Labour-councillor-20-suspended-claims-called-Hitler-greatest-man-history-latest-anti-Semitic-scandal-hit-Corbyn-s-party.html#comments

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3532042/Ignorant-Godless-Hateful-Corbyn-s-contempt-Jews-disgrace-withering-attack-Labour-leader-donor-backed-party-400-000-2015-Election.html

I like Corbyn a little bit but judge his cavalier attitude to anti-semitism harshly.

Has anti-semitism become cool among labour supporters or something? What is being done about the anti-semitism coming from some labour politicians and how to deal with the Islamist flavour of anti-semitism as displayed by Labour councillor Aysegul Gurbuz (and others) for examples who posted statements such as this on twitter :

"Ed Miliband is Jewish. He will never become prime minister of Britain."
"Adolf Hitler was praised as the ‘greatest man in history".

Shock Sad

OP posts:
Alyosha · 26/04/2016 11:23

Perhaps some of the committed anti-zionist posters on this thread can tell us if they agree with Naz Shah? Is this a standard position amongst self proclaimed anti-zionists who definitely 100% aren't antisemitic?

claig · 26/04/2016 11:42

Naz Shah is an MP and what she has tweeted in the past few years, as an adult, is in my opinion worse or equally as bad as what the then teenage Labour councillor tweeted.

Naz Shah, has in my opinion, been boosted by the media and Labour over the past year, so I don't expect them to do much about it

Ridiculous. As a comment under the Guido article says, imagine if a UKIP MP had tweeted such things.

claig · 26/04/2016 11:53

Apparently, Naz Shah is PPS (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to John McDonnell.

MyBeloved · 26/04/2016 13:58

Naz Shah, believe it or not, sits on a Home AffairsCommittee that is conducting an investigation into antisemitism. You could not make this stuff up!

CoolforKittyCats · 26/04/2016 13:59

She has just resigned as PPS.

Still no official word from Labour.

Helmetbymidnight · 26/04/2016 14:49

Naz Shah, believe it or not, sits on a Home AffairsCommittee that is conducting an investigation into antisemitism.

Shocking but yeah, at the same time, not shocking at all.

DarlingCherieLiebling · 26/04/2016 15:49

I have name changed but am the OP (laLui). Naz Shah is no surprise but I am glad the issues are being taken up in the media.

"The post suggested the US had “plenty of land” to accommodate Israel as a 51st state, allowing Palestinians to “get their life and their land back”."

What the [...]? I am glad I started this thread as clearly there is an issue that needs to be talked about. Labour and the left are guilty of increasing anti-semtisim dressed up as pro-palaestianin support. Confused

Her backtracking "“This post from two years ago was made before I was an MP, does not reflect my views and I apologise for any offence it has caused.”"
seems opportunistic and insincere.

Marmite59 · 26/04/2016 17:39

Naz seems an absolute darling. It's all consultation out of the woodwork today. In July 2014 she said 'the Jews are rallying' in reference to an online poll re Gaza.

How far does this go? What kind of stuff do Labour MPs say in private about Jews? This is all just peachy and rosy for my DS to emerge blinking into. 'Hi I'm Jewish'. 'Yeah? Fuck the apartheid state!'

Marmite59 · 26/04/2016 17:39

Naz seems an absolute darling. It's all consultation out of the woodwork today. In July 2014 she said 'the Jews are rallying' in reference to an online poll re Gaza.

How far does this go? What kind of stuff do Labour MPs say in private about Jews? This is all just peachy and rosy for my DS to emerge blinking into. 'Hi I'm Jewish'. 'Yeah? Fuck the apartheid state!'

lavenderdoilly · 26/04/2016 17:45

This whole "I'm not an anti-semite, I'm an anti-zionist" is bullshit. If you are an anti-zionist you don't believe that Jews are entitled to a homeland in the region. I know it is

lavenderdoilly · 26/04/2016 17:47

Oops ... It is remains a painful and difficult subject to consider the borders and statehood for the Palestinians but if your basic premise is that Israel should not exist then you are an anti-semite.

DarlingCherieLiebling · 26/04/2016 19:19

I can't help but draw comparisons between how outraged the Left including Labour, especially under Corbyn, respond whenever Islam is criticised in any way. Islamism must not be criticised, in fact, conservative muslim communities must be coveted, as seen by Labour party meetings in Muslim areas where women and men are segregated in public spaces, not the mosque to be clear.

lavenderdoilly · 26/04/2016 19:29

The Soviet Union had a Jewish state called Birobizhan in the arse end of nowhere. Google it. It gave them an excuse to put "Jew" in internal ID papers (seen that with my own eyes when i lived there) and to deny exit visas to Jews. Horrific.

DarlingCherieLiebling · 26/04/2016 20:10

www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/apr/26/bradford-labour-mp-naz-shah-quits-john-mcdonnells-pps-antisemitic-facebook-posts

What a mess all this is. Sad so much hate Sad

BigChocFrenzy · 26/04/2016 21:44

The Labour leadership should be proactive and publicly stamp out antisemitism in the party, before it gets worse. Antisemitism is racism, just as bad as being anti-Muslim.

Uni was very different when I was there in the 1970s: the jewish and palestinian societies were both very active. Mind you, Vietnam dominated political discussion and the ME hardly got a look in.
There was some anti-semitism then in the Tory Party, but it died out under Mrs Thatcher.
imo Tories now have some prejudice against Muslims and UKIP are a vile racist & xenophobic party.

I think the massive swing in political clout - not just in the Labour Party - is mostly due to the dramatically changed demographics, which fed into party membership, voting potential and the issues that excite those voters:
In the 1970s, Jews and Muslems were of comparable numbers on the population, around 300k so both v small minorities.

The Jewish population has shrunk to about 270k, whereas Census figures of the Muslim population show how it rapidly became about 10 times more numerous than the Jewish one:
1961 50,000
1971 226,000
1981 553,000
1991 950,000
2001 1,600,000
2011 2,706,000

Labour are reluctant to offend what is now an important demographic for them. Other Uk institutions and commercial organisations are motivated similarly, with vast Saudi oil wealth certainly greasing the wheels.

Interestingly, US Muslims are far more politically conservative (iirc George Bush got about 56% of their vote in 2000) and in Michigan recently, the large Muslim population there proudly supported Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders - because they had "lots in common".
Better integration & education ?

twelly · 26/04/2016 21:57

I find the anti-Semitic stance offensive and even more worryingly the fact that attacks on other religions are immediately stamped upon shows double standards

NameChanger22 · 26/04/2016 22:09

It is remains a painful and difficult subject to consider the borders and statehood for the Palestinians but if your basic premise is that Israel should not exist then you are an anti-semite.

Lavenderdoilley - I completely agree with you. My grandfather was Jewish and managed to escape a prisoner of war camp in WW2. Israel should exist and it should be able to defend itself.

I agree with Corbyn on many issues, but on Israel I couldn't disagree more.

DarlingCherieLiebling · 26/04/2016 22:34

"in Michigan recently, the large Muslim population there proudly supported Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders - because they had "lots in common". "

^
I love this. This, to me, is multiculturalism, a mixture of people from different cultural backgrounds coming together and forming a greater community in a new setting, where new connections are being made, where new, rich possibilities are fostered; MC does not mean living in silos within your own cultural context and expecting the rest of society to accommodate all your particular preferences and practises.

JewryMember · 27/04/2016 12:34

I would like to thank many of the posters here for their intelligent debate (obviously that does not include Bertrand) and especially Claig for her indefatigable bravery on any thread she comments on. I found the this article after Googling 'victimhood hierarchy': ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS OF PC VICTIMOLOGY. This article articulates everything I have considered to be true regarding the Left for a very long time - whose hierarchy indeed looks something like this: Muslims > gay/black > females, everybody else > the Jews.

Personally, I am sick of the practice of certain mumsnetters Bertrand whose attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate mirrors a rising intolerance on the Left.

From the article:

Those who obsess over identity politics—who believe that every political and social question can be reduced to somebody’s skin pigmentation or what’s between their legs—ought to realize that there is no truck with people who kill people precisely because of their immutable traits. When it comes to fighting violent Islamist supremacy—theocratic, sexist, genocidal, homicidally anti-gay—the identity politics brigade should put warmongering neocons to shame. Yet just at the moment when we need our identity-politics warriors to be most outraged, they are notably silent. Why?

Many progressives would claim that they believe in “intersectionality”: that aspects of an individual cannot be separated out to highlight the oppression associated with that group. And so we cannot understand Muslims killing gays without first understanding the effect of Western colonial power on the peoples of Muslim lands. The embrace of insersectionality by progressives is ironic in that it has undermined one of the left’s greatest (and most fundamental) attributes—universalism—and replaced it with a myopia that obsesses over the minute concerns of ever-narrowingly defined minority groups, rather than those of broader segments of society.

In the game of Race, Gender, Sexuality, black beats white, woman beats man, trans beats cisgender, and gay (or, preferably, “queer”) beats straight.

Like gay men, Jews have been relegated to the bottom of the progressive victim pyramid, a low ranking that has held fast in spite of the rampant bigotry and violent attacks directed at them.

In the progressive imagination, the perceived plight of Muslims now trumps the sufferings of all other groups.

And this gem: [The Left] are reluctant to draw much attention to anti-Semitism for the same reason they are reluctant to speak plainly about militant Islamism: They seek an accommodation with the Muslim world, where bigoted views about Jews are prevalent if not mainstream, and harping about anti-Semitism gets in the way of that all-consuming aspiration. The same goes for anti-Christian animus; see, for instance, the White House’s anodyne condemnation of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya last week, which made no mention of the reason why they were killed. As such, the president cannot let a discussion go by of the Islamic State (which, he insists, is “not Islamic”) without a reference to the Christian Crusades (“committed … in the name of Christ”) of five centuries ago.

It is important to note that all this hypersensitive concern about “Islamophobia,” and corresponding lack of ardor for combating anti-Jewish hatred, has no relation whatsoever to actual facts. The latest FBI crime statistics report six times as many hate crime incidents directed against Jews as they do against Muslims. Likewise in Europe, Jews are more likely to be victimized by hate crime than Muslims, who are themselves usually the perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks.

Fucking read it and weep.

claig · 27/04/2016 13:17

Here is the link to the article that JewryMember mentioned. The other link failed.

www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189030/victimhood-olympics

Helmetbymidnight · 27/04/2016 14:04

Mm, that's a good article. Thanks for the link.

If people are on twitter, I recommend following Yair Rosenburg - he looks at anti-semitism (plus he has a handsome face).

DarlingCherieLiebling · 27/04/2016 14:16

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3561296/Jeremy-Corbyn-brands-Muslim-Labour-MP-suggested-Israel-relocated-offensive-unacceptable-WON-T-kick-party.html

So Corbyn os not kicking suspending Naz Shah out then. Angry

"Mr Corbyn earlier met personally with Ms Shah today before issuing his own statement.
He said: 'What Naz Shah did was offensive and unacceptable. I have spoken to her and made this clear."

Wow.

Her third (!) public apology since her smartypants twitter comments:
In her new statement, Ms Shah said: 'For someone who knows the scourge of oppression and racism all too well, it is important that I make an unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past.'
The MP added: 'With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them. I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence.'

It's a fair apology but she should do more if Corbyn has not got the spine to get rid of her. At the very least she should visit and engage with the Jewish community in her area as soon as possible. Words are not enough for someone who holds public office.

Member interesting post, I'll look at the link later.

Alyosha · 27/04/2016 15:35

I usually really dislike Owen Jones but he's been great on this - I wonder if he regrets voting for JC in the leadership election.

CoolforKittyCats · 27/04/2016 16:22

Naz Shah has now been suspended.

Her apologies were allegedly edited.

www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/labour-hq-deleted-references-to-anti-semitism-from-naz-shahs?utm_term=.bd1ggN1JX

Helmetbymidnight · 27/04/2016 16:29

That is astounding if Labour HQ did that. Wow - what fuckers!

I'm an idealist, and like to believe the sincerity of Naz Shah's apology. I think people who once thought like her, maybe when young and impressionable, often turn out to be very powerful anti-racism allies. (I also like Sadiq Khan)