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A vote for Labour is a vote for ... ?


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27 minutes ago, alexscottislegend said:

More tripe. If they'd been Scottish or Slovenian there would be some who would claim they were kicked out because of anti-Scottishness or anti-Slovenian but if they're Jewish ah well it's different. Couldn't just be because they were right wing could it?

You'll be telling us next that he never supported the IRA and hasn't got any friends in Hamas or Hezbollah. 9_9

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1 hour ago, forlanssister said:

You'll be telling us next that he never supported the IRA and hasn't got any friends in Hamas or Hezbollah. 9_9

Not our Jeremy, he's reinvented himself as the honest broker and friend to students, well hidden is the barmy left wing bigot of the 70s/80s,  gone are the days of cosying up to Gerry and Martin, hating the EU and having secret meetings in the desert with anyone with a grudge against the West. If only that pesky antisemitism would disappear too!!

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From the Spectator this week. The bold type is my edit.

 

An air of paranoia to it? But Jews have much to be paranoid about.

 

“TANYA GOLD

 

We Jews have evolved to be neurotic; so neurotic that, in certain circumstances, the Syrian border feels slightly safer than Muswell Hill. I’ll take Muswell Hill. Polls say that only 7 per cent of British Jews will consider voting for Labour on 12 December, while 47 per cent of British Jews will consider leaving the country if Labour win. I’d rather fight Dave (generic name) from the Labour Representation Committee than Dave from Hezbollah (likewise generic). But I shouldn’t joke; and nothing feels funny any more. Things are always OK until they aren’t.

Jews have fled Labour since Ed Miliband’s time. In 2010 we were split quite evenly between Labour and the Tories: but Gordon Brown is a serious man. Despite the fact that Miliband is Jewish, support dwindled under his leadership — he was too ashamed of Israel, the homeland to which Jews remain attached, whatever the Jewish Corbynista fringe may say — and he is a nebbish. Corbyn, though, is something awful: the leader whose response to the Enough’s Enough rally in 2018 was to spend the Passover seder with Jewdas, the ‘radical diasporists’ who have prayed ‘Please God, smash the state of Israel / Smash it in the abundance of your love’. That was his answer to Jewish fear, and we knew him then for what he was: a Jew baiter, and a coward. Under his leadership, and the semi-respectable sheen of anti-Zionism — let’s have a Rainbow Nation with Hamas! — the poison spreads. The libel that the Jews are the enemy of everything holy (formerly Christ, now socialism) has returned.

There are allies, but they are largely outside Labour now. Ian Austin, a Labour MP for 14 years, now an independent, this morning asked Labour supporters to vote Tory: due to anti-Semitism. ‘For a party that’s got a proud record of fighting for equality and opposing racism, the Labour party’s been poisoned by anti-Jewish racism under his leadership and it is a complete and utter disgrace.’

 

Under Corbyn’s leadership, and the semi-respectable sheen of anti-Zionism, the poison spreads

Among Jews who care about Labour, or what Labour once was, there have been fierce battles since 2017: between those who would fight from within, and those who think that any vote for Corbyn is a vote for an anti-Semite. Broadly, the second group has won. Even I have no time for the Jewish activists who attempt to solve the crisis from within, and I previously defended them: to each Jew, her own path. But what is at the end of it? It is a familiar position for a European Jew: to be considered the enemy of goodness, and I console myself by saying they made us choose; like Trotsky, we could not be a Jew and a citizen of the world. It would have been easy for them to reassure reasonable Jews — I accept there are unreasonable ones — but instead they praised the woman who wrote ‘Free Palestine’ on the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, and too much else to print. It is contemptuous, but why not? Electorally, we do not matter; and why should they be immune from the 2,000 years of libel which is their cultural inheritance?

Most Jews now live in a state of existential fear; the rest — Jewish Voice for Labour [JVL], and Jewdas — in thrilled denial. ‘In 2017,’ says one Jewish acquaintance, previously of the left, ‘we still thought there was a chance that Labour’s anti-Semitism problem could be beaten from within. MPs such as Ian Austin, John Mann and Louise Ellman were trying to achieve change, along with many party members. But that hasn’t worked: all three of those MPs have been beaten by the sheer scale of the problem.’ All but Mann have left Labour. ‘A major religious leader [Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi] has called the opposition leader an anti-Semite and refuses to sit in the same room as him. Corbyn’s supporters — including a handful of Jews — queue up to tell Jews in the mainstream what they should and should not find anti-Semitic. This is by far the biggest challenge to the UK Jewish community of all our lifetimes.’

‘I’m waking up with a sense of doom every day,’ says another. ‘Fear is what it is, fear and dread, mixed with a sense of disbelief that this is happening in my lifetime, and that so few people seem to care.’

‘I feel utterly betrayed by the country I grew up in, that used to feel safe,’ says a third. ‘My father fled from Austria in 1941. I feel relieved he is not here to see what is happening now. Deep in my heart I always felt the people around me would have my back. I have now lost that trust.’ A fourth says: ‘We no longer have the freedom to vote on anything other than being Jewish.’

This is my dilemma, for the past four years have felt like an awakening. I can no longer pretend to be what I will call a Disraelian Jew: an exotic, but one who belongs here, a Jew and a leftist. In a sense it expiates my shame, which was previously dormant but is now brightly alive; that we, as British Jews, survived almost intact — there were casualties in the Channel Islands — while continental Europe is a graveyard. Incidentally, I think that explains why I spoilt my ballot paper in the referendum, an act which, at the time, mystified me slightly. I am not so attached to continental Europe.

‘Jew’ is absolutely a loaded word again. I have been told, very recently, that the Rothschilds control Europe — at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting of all places; and by a socialist, naturally. This is normal. When I ask Labour members about anti-Semitism they react with denial or, more likely, fury; why do we seek to maim the utopia, and why do we not do something about Islamophobia? (I wish I could; but how does ignoring anti-Semitism further the anti-racist cause?) I know they think my testimony is suspect — oh, lying Jew! — but my antennae are set to peril, and I trust them. I also trust that things will get worse; that the more it is tolerated, the more it bleeds across the culture. Do people really think that a far-right thug will pause before he punches a Jew and think: hang on, didn’t this rhetoric emerge from Stalin’s Russia? The left provides the script, always, for they are the pseudo-intellectuals writing their borrowed lies; the right, the fists. Chris Williamson spoke this creed in his letter of resignation; Jews are saboteurs who have infiltrated Labour on the orders of Israel and we are anti-Semites too; for self-interest, we will destroy our own.

‘Many of the victims of this witch hunt have been Jewish socialists,’ he wrote, ‘whose anti-Zionism is anathema to the apartheid apologists apparently influencing Labour foreign and domestic policy. You and others share my belief that the anti-Semitism smears against Labour activists, candidates and MPs are unfounded. And yet Labour party officials have capitulated to the Jewish Labour Movement – formerly known as Pa’ole Zion – an organisation revived in 2015 at the same time as the State of Israel launched a diplomatic strategy to delegitimise Palestinian activism on the Left and normalise Zionism in our movement.’

As the denial goes on, I allow myself the luxury of wondering if it would be better if they said, outright — we hate Jews. At least Nazis did not call themselves anti-racists, although they probably would nowadays. John McDonnell called himself ‘saddened’ on The Andrew Marr Show, as if Anglo-Jewry were a woman who had disappointed him because she did not understand him. Yet he remains the president of the Labour Representation Committee, which hosted the most excitable Jew haters at the Labour conference fringe this year; why has he not resigned, and cursed them for endangering the project? Perhaps he has forgotten he is their president; perhaps he does not believe that they do.

That they made us choose makes me weep, for I have not considered voting Conservative before. But I won’t. There is a respectable strain of Conservatism, but this is not it, not for me — one glance at Jacob Rees-Mogg’s face is enough; and all racism thrives under inequality. The Tories cannot save us; that is a laughable sentence. That Labour call themselves progressives, and yet are imbued with the infection of ancient Christian Jew-hatred — the murder of God was our original sin — is equally laughable. We have returned to our settled place; too proud, in every sense, to assimilate; rather, we drift across the world to where we feel safe: the Syrian border for some; Muswell Hill for others.

At least I feel close to my ancestors now; I understand them better. I’m not English, I tell my friend, after I had read Jim Allen’s Perdition, a ruthlessly anti-Semitic play beloved by Ken Loach. I had to read it, after I saw Loach greeted with a standing ovation at Labour conference — and I read, in its pages, of Jewish culpability for the Holocaust; of the Jewish demonic attitude.

Yes, you are, he says, meaning to comfort me. No, I’m not. If I was an English schoolgirl, I am a real Jew now.”

Spectator.co.uk/radio Tanya Gold and Matthew Parris on political homelessness.

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From today's Guardian

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/09/jews-brexit-boris-johnson-jeremy-corbyn

 

Many Jews want Boris Johnson out. But how can we vote for Jeremy Corbyn?

Jonathan Freedland

We’re advised to shelve our angst to stop Brexit. It’s painful to be part of a community that can be so easily cast aside

 @Freedland

Sat 9 Nov 2019 08.01 GMT

 

For most progressive-minded, remain-leaning folk, is it even a dilemma? I’m not sure. To them the logic must seem simple and straightforward: they want to eject a cruel and useless government and stop Brexit, and that means denying Boris Johnson a majority and replacing him with Jeremy Corbyn, who will end austerity and hold a second referendum. Job done.

I wish it were as simple as that for me. But it’s not.

 

For more than four years, Britain’s Jews have waited for the moment when one of these revelations would prove too much

Because while I want desperately to avoid Brexit, and while I have nothing but contempt for Johnson and his hard-right party, the prospect of Prime Minister Corbyn fills me with dread. Not, I stress, the prospect of a Labour government, committed to spending billions on schools, hospitals and houses – Britain needs that badly – but specifically the notion of Corbyn and his inner circle running the country. The thought of it prompts in me, and the overwhelming majority of the community I grew up in, a fear that we have not known before.

 

I’m referring to Britain’s Jews who, for the first time in their history, have concluded that someone hostile to them is on the brink of taking democratic power. Yes, of course, not every single British Jew holds that view. But the most recent poll found that 87% regard Corbyn as an antisemite, meaning an anti-Jewish racist.

Why? The recitation is now wearily familiar. Recall that Corbyn’s first reaction on hearing of a plan to remove a mural filled with hideous caricatures of hook-nosed Jewish bankers was to ask, “Why?” Or that he decided to challenge two “Zionists” not on their arguments but by suggesting that, though they “might have lived in this country for a very long time”, they “don’t understand English irony”. Or that, when a Palestinian Islamist preacher was found by a British tribunal to have peddled the medieval and lethal myth of Jews feasting on the blood of gentile children, Corbyn declared that man a very “honoured citizen”, and invited him for tea in the House of Commons. (And those are merely some of the greatest hits; the full discography runs much longer.)

For four years, Britain’s Jews have – naively, perhaps – waited for the moment when one of these revelations would prove too much for the Labour faithful, shocking them into action. Perhaps it would be the discovery that, despite evidence against hundreds of party members – including those trafficking in grotesque neo-Nazi imagery and Holocaust denial – only a handful have actually been expelled. Or maybe it would be the BBC Panorama investigation that showed how Corbyn’s team repeatedly interfered in antisemitism cases as they went through a supposedly independent disciplinary process, “mainly so they could let their mates off the charge”, as one whistleblower, driven to the brink of suicide, put it. Or perhaps it would be the fact that Labour has become only the second political party ever to be investigated for institutional racism by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (the other was the BNP).

But no. No revelation has ever proved shocking enough that it couldn’t be explained away by those who’d rather not see it. So publicly Labour’s luminaries insist they are fighting a “ruthless” fight against antisemitism, doing all the Jewish community has asked of them, as John McDonnell said this week, even though the facts point the other way.

 

So are we meant to cheer that Chris Williamson has been barred from standing again as an MP. But Jews remember that, even when Williamson’s penchant for egregious Jew-baiting was well known, Corbyn was still praising him. Just a few months ago, in fact, Corbyn called him “a very good, very effective Labour MP. He’s a very strong anti-racist campaigner. He is not antisemitic in any way.”

None of this has stopped. Labour’s crop of prospective parliamentary candidates has included several with a documented history of anti-Jewish bigotry, Twitter back-catalogues playing on all the familiar tunes of Jewish conspiracy, greed and the rest of it. Two candidates were forced to step down on Thursday, one for calling a Jewish fellow councillor “Shylock”. It suggests this is no longer a problem of one man, but that the malaise is now institutional.

And yet Labour’s high command could soon be governing the country. Labour doesn’t even need to win many seats; Johnson needs only to fail to win a majority and Corbyn will be closing in on Downing Street. What should Jewish voters and those appalled by anti-Jewish racism do about that?

Plenty advise Jews to shelve their angst in return for a government that will stop Brexit (Jews are overwhelmingly pro-remain). In effect, Jews and their would-be allies are being told that some racism is, if not quite acceptable, then a price worth paying. That seems to have been the bargain struck with those Labour “moderates” who were once so admirably vocal in their denunciation of the leadership on this issue and who are now – minus Tom Watson – knocking on doors to put Corbyn in No 10: you’ve got your second referendum, now shut up about the Jews. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, to be part of a small community that can be so quickly cast aside for the supposed greater good.

Progressives and remainers who care about racism are left with a dilemma. Some try to swerve around it by denying the evidence, telling Jews they are wrong about the racism they experience. That’s not a great look. Others (rightly) point out that Johnson is himself a bigot and an Islamophobe – as if we should accept that this is a contest of two racists and we should back the one we agree with more. Still others war-game assorted hung-parliament scenarios that might magically both despatch Johnson and deliver a non-Corbyn prime minister.

 

But all of this is to dodge the main point – which is that none of us should have ever been put in this position. None of us should be forced to choose between a hard Brexit enforced by an Islamophobe, and electing a man whose record fills one of Britain’s smallest minorities with fear.

Many, Jews included, ask themselves how bad would it really be. What’s the worst that could happen? Of course this isn’t the 1930s and, despite the Sunday Telegraph’s front page, most Jews would not leave the country. But that the question is even in the air, that someone who sees Jews as not quite “us” – “they don’t understand English irony” – is deemed eligible to be prime minister, makes our presence here feel conditional and shaky. And, whether Corbyn makes it to Downing Street or not, to realise that the historic party of social justice in this country finds a little bit of racism acceptable for the sake of the larger cause, and that many millions of voters agree – well, that realisation contains its own heartbreak. It means that what we thought about this country wasn’t quite true.

I understand that to many, all this will sound overwrought. I’m afraid that Jewish history has made us that way, prone to imagining the worst. We look at our usually sparse family trees and we can pick out the pessimists, those who panicked and got out. It was they who left their mark on us. You see, the optimists, those who assumed things would work out for the best, they never made it out in time.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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This is a technique known as 'gaslighting.' Basically it involves repeating a lie so many time that the listener starts to doubt the effect of their own hearing.

The latest smear involved the Labour Shadow minister Dan Carden, apparently overheard by a journalist with links to the Guido Fawkes site claiming that he substituted the words of 'Hey Jude' with 'Hey Jews'!

 

Seriously, who would do that in public on a  bus with all and sundry listening?

Personally I prefer to take the view of high profile Jews like Alexei Sayle, Noam Chomsky, Michael Rosen and John Bercow who have all declared that Corbyn is no anti-semite.

To be fair Corbyn has not helped with his craven apologetic attitude to this campaign; weakness only emboldens the likes of the Jewish Chronicle with its sectarian and arrogant stance. He reportedly said about the Carden incident; "If this is true it is appalling." Just tell them to get to...

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41 minutes ago, alexscottislegend said:

This is a technique known as 'gaslighting.' Basically it involves repeating a lie so many time that the listener starts to doubt the effect of their own hearing.

The latest smear involved the Labour Shadow minister Dan Carden, apparently overheard by a journalist with links to the Guido Fawkes site claiming that he substituted the words of 'Hey Jude' with 'Hey Jews'!

 

Seriously, who would do that in public on a  bus with all and sundry listening?

Personally I prefer to take the view of high profile Jews like Alexei Sayle, Noam Chomsky, Michael Rosen and John Bercow who have all declared that Corbyn is no anti-semite.

To be fair Corbyn has not helped with his craven apologetic attitude to this campaign; weakness only emboldens the likes of the Jewish Chronicle with its sectarian and arrogant stance. He reportedly said about the Carden incident; "If this is true it is appalling." Just tell them to get to...

So as well as Ye Olde "wrong kind of Socialism" we now have "the right kind of Jew"? 9_9

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20 minutes ago, forlanssister said:

So as well as Ye Olde "wrong kind of Socialism" we now have "the right kind of Jew"? 9_9

Then that works two ways doesn't it? Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Chronicle cannot claim to speak for all Jews. Listen and repeat: anti-zionism does not equal anti-semitism.

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4 minutes ago, alexscottislegend said:

anti-zionism does not equal anti-semitism.

In the vast majority of people it certainly does. The reality is that anti-zionism is usually just an attempt to sanitize antisemitism. 

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