Besieged for four years with charges of anti-semitism, Jeremy Corbyn’s allies in the Labour leadership have largely lost the stomach for battle, one that was never about substance or policy but about character assassination, says Jonathan Cook.
By Jonathan Cook
The Labour party, relentlessly battered by an organized campaign of smears of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn – first for being anti-semitic, and now for honoring Palestinian terrorists – is reportedly about to adopt the four additional working “examples” of anti-semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).
Labour initially rejected these examples – stoking yet more condemnation from Israel’s lobbyists and the British corporate media – because it justifiably feared, as have prominent legal experts, that accepting them would severely curb the freedom to criticize Israel.
The media’s ever-more outlandish slurs against Corbyn and the Labour party’s imminent capitulation on the IHRA’s full definition of anti-semitism are not unrelated events. The former was designed to bring about the latter.
According to a report in The Guardian last week, senior party figures are agitating for the rapid adoption of the full IHRA definition, ideally before the party conference next month, and say Corbyn has effectively surrendered to the pressure. An MP who supports Corbyn told the paper Corbyn would “just have to take one for the team.”
In a strong indication of the way the wind is now blowing, The Guardian added:
The party said it would consult the main [Jewish] communal bodies as well as experts and academics, but groups such as the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour have not been asked to give their views.
No Stomach for Battle
The full adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will be a major victory both for Israel and its apologists in Britain, who who have been seeking to silence all meaningful criticism of Israel, and for the British corporate media, which would dearly love to see the back of an old-school socialist Labour leader whose programme threatens to loosen the 40-year stranglehold of neoliberalism on British society.
Besieged for four years, Corbyn’s allies in the Labour leadership have largely lost the stomach for battle, one that was never about substance or policy but about character assassination. As the stakes have been constantly upped by the media and the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy, the inevitable has happened. Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians with career ambitions or a public profile want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-semite.
This is why the supposed anti-semitism “crisis” in a Corbyn-led Labour party has been so much more effective than berating him for his clothes or his patriotism. Natural selection – survival of the smear fittest for the job – meant that a weaponised anti-semitism would eventually identify Corbyn as its prime target and not just his supporters – especially after his unexpectedly strong showing at the polls in last year’s election.
Worse, Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. As a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, the accusations of anti-semitism have clearly pained him. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers. He has tried to maintain unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with him.
And as he has lost all sense of how to respond in good faith to allegations made in bad faith, he has begun committing the cardinal sin of sounding and looking evasive – just as those who deployed the anti-semitism charge hoped. It was his honesty, plain-speaking and compassion that won him the leadership and the love of ordinary members. Unless he can regain the political and spiritual confidence that underpinned those qualities, he risks haemorrhaging support.
A Critical Juncture
But beyond Corbyn’s personal fate, the Labour party has now reached a critical juncture in its response to the smear campaign. In adopting the full IHRA definition, the party will jettison the principle of free speech and curtail critical debate about an entire country, Israel – as well as a key foreign policy issue for those concerned about the direction the Middle East is taking.
Discussion of what kind of state Israel is, what its policy goals are, and whether they are compatible with a peace process are about to be taken off the table by Britain’s largest, supposedly progressive party.
That thought spurred me to cast an eye over my back-catalogue of journalism. I have been based in Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee, since 2001. In that time I have written – according to my website – more than 900 articles (plus another few hundred blog posts) on Israel, as well as three peer-reviewed books and a clutch of chapters in edited collections. That’s a lot of writing. Many more than a million words about Israel over nearly two decades.
What shocked me, however, as I started to pore over these articles was that almost all of them – except for a handful dealing with internal Palestinian politics – would fall foul of at least one of these four additional IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt.
After 17 years of writing about Israel, after winning a respected journalism prize for being “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East,” the Labour party is about to declare that I, and many others like me, are irredeemable anti-semites.
Not that I am unused to such slurs. I am intimately familiar with a community of online stalkers who happily throw around the insults “Nazi” and “anti-semite” at anyone who doesn’t cheerlead the settlements of the Greater Israel project. But far more troubling is that this will be my designation not by bullying Israel partisans but by the official party of the British left.
Of course, I will not be alone. Much of my journalism has been about documenting and reporting the careful work of scholars, human rights groups, lawyers and civil society organisations – Palestinian, Israeli and international alike – that have charted the structural racism in Israel’s legal and administrative system, explaining often in exasperating detail its ethnocractic character and its apartheid policies. All of us are going to be effectively cast out, denied any chance to inform or contribute to the debates and policies of Britain’s only leftwing party with a credible shot at power.
That is a shocking realisation. The Labour party is about to slam the door shut in the faces of the Palestinian people, as well as progressive Jews and others who stand in solidarity with them.
Betrayal of Palestinians
The article in The Guardian, the newspaper that has done more to damage Corbyn than any other (by undermining him from within his own camp), described the incorporation of the full IHRA anti-semitism definition into Labour’s code of conduct as a “compromise”, as though the betrayal of an oppressed people was something over which middle ground could be found.
Remember that the man who drafted the IHRA definition and its associated examples, American Jewish lawyer Kenneth Stern, has publicly regretted their impact, saying that in practice they have severely curbed freedom of speech about Israel.
How these new examples will be misused by Corbyn’s opponents should already be clear. He made his most egregious mistake in the handling of the party’s supposed anti-semitism “crisis” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a violation of one of the IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.
He apologized for attending an anti-racism event and distanced himself from a friend, the late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, who used his speech to compare Israel’s current treatment of Palestinians to early Nazi laws that vilified and oppressed Jews.
It was a Judas-like act for which it is not necessary to berate Corbyn. He is doubtless already torturing himself over what he did. But that is the point: the adoption of the full IHRA definition will demand the constant vilification and rooting out of progressive and humane voices like Meyer’s. It will turn the Labour party into the
Meyer: Betrayed by Corbyn. (YouTube)
to the modern equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee. Labour activists will find themselves, like Corbyn, either outed or required to out others as supposed anti-semites. They will have to denounce reasonable criticisms of Israel and dissociate themselves from supporters of the Palestinian cause, even Holocaust survivors.
The patent absurdity of Labour including this new anti-semitism “example” should be obvious the moment we consider that it will recast not only Meyer and other Holocaust survivors as anti-semites but leading Jewish intellectuals and scholars – even Israeli army generals.
Two years ago Yair Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, went public with such a comparison. Addressing an audience in Israel on Holocaust Day, he spoke of where Israel was heading:
If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.
Is it not a paradox that, were Golan a member of the Labour party, that statement – a rare moment of self-reflection by a senior Israeli figure – will soon justify his being vilified and hounded out of the Labour party?
Evidence of Israeli Apartheid
Looking at my own work, it is clear that almost all of it falls foul of two further “examples” of anti-semitism cited in the full IHRA definition that Labour is preparing to adopt:
Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
and:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
One hardly needs to point out how preposterous it is that the Labour Party is about to outlaw from internal discussion or review any research, scholarship or journalism that violates these two “examples” weeks after Israel passed its Nation-State Basic Law. That law, which has constitutional weight, makes explicit what was always implicit in Israel as a Jewish state:
1. that Israel privileges the rights and status of Jews around the world, including those who have never even visited Israel, above the rights of the fifth of the country’s citizens who are non-Jews (the remnants of the native Palestinian population who survived the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948).
2. that Israel, as defined in the Basic Law, is not a state bounded by internationally recognized borders but rather the “Land of Israel” – a Biblical conception of Israel whose borders encompass the occupied Palestinian territories and parts of many neighboring states.
How, one might reasonably wonder, is such a state – defined this way in the Basic Law – a normal “democratic” state? How is it not structurally racist and inherently acquisitive of other people’s territory?
Contrary to the demands of these two extra IHRA “examples”, the Basic Law alone shows that Israel is a “racist endeavor” and that we cannot judge it by the same standards we would a normal western-style democracy. Not least, it has a double “border” problem: it forces Jews everywhere to be included in its self-definition of the “nation”, whether they want to be or not; and it lays claim to the title deeds of other territories without any intention to confer on their non-Jewish inhabitants the rights it accords Jews.
Demanding that we treat Israel as a normal western-style liberal democracy – as the IHRA full definition requires – makes as much sense as having demanded the same for apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s.
Unaccountable Politics
The Labour party has become the largest in Europe as Corbyn has attracted huge numbers of newcomers into the membership, inspired by a new kind of politics. That is a terrifying development for the old politics, which preferred tiny political cliques accountable chiefly to corporate donors, leaving a slightly wider circle of activists largely powerless.
That is why the Blairite holdouts in the party bureaucracy are quite content to use any pretext not only to root out genuine progressive activists drawn to a Corbyn-led party, including anti-Zionist Jewish activists, but to alienate tens of thousands more members that had begun to transform Labour into a grassroots movement.
A party endlessly obsessing about anti-semitism, a party that has abandoned the Palestinians, a party that has begun throwing out key progressive principles, a party that has renounced free speech, and a party that no longer puts the interests of the poor and vulnerable at the centre of its concerns is a party that will fail.
That is where the anti-semitism “crisis” is leading Labour – precisely as it was designed to do.
This article originally appeared on Johnathan Cook’s blog.
Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in Nazareth. He blogs at https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/.
I think you’re being a bit harsh on the poor old Guardian as it’s the only mainstream UK paper I have seen that has had some reasoned debate on the issue, including some comments in line with your stand on Israel’s racist policies. Those I saw were most likely after you published this article. All the other UK papers – particularly the Times and the Daily Mail have been unrelenting in their almost hysterical campaign against Corbyn throughout the summer.
This contemptible behaviour is more than sickening. israel keeps on trying, and quite effectively I would say, to intimidate and smear all those who have the audacity to speak out in defense of Palestine and Palestinians. I am of Jewish background and I find israel’s action disgusting. I have reached the point where I have turned anti Zionist and am NOT afraid of saying so. What irony…the persecuted having turned into vicious persecutors – Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. And now we witnessed the Palestinian Holocaust and the world keeps silent and looking the other way – for fear of offending israel. For shame!
Corbyn and his henchman will say and do anything to grab power. And that includes rewriting the rule book on Israel. Once they’ve grabbed power, they’ll change the rule book again. So those sympathetic to Palestine have nothing to worry about. Unlike the rest of us Britain’s who will suffer under the boot of the hard left.
Jeremy Corbyn is a decent, honourable man who needs to hold his ground & stick to his humane principles of confronting Zionist tyranny despite the fact that he’s surrounded by a nest of vipers, within his own Party & the other corrupt Conservative Party, Tory Toffs & Royal Family apologists backed up by the most poisonous MSM & fake news merchants that has ever existed! But what would you expect from a despicable, failed, former World power called Britain trying to revive its dead Empire & past glories ? This Country created the modern day State of Israel by repatriating European Jews to Palestine after WW2 because of holocaust guilt then this policy created a apartheid state, a system the English created & refined in South Africa that was then adopted by the Dutch Afrikaans’s. This shameful, ill conceived English policy has resulted in the displacement & alienation of millions of Palestinian people & for 78 yrs they have been refugees in their own Country,The Jews had their shot in this region, 2000 yrs ago, but lost their Country when God lost patience with their unfaithfulness & rebelliousness, the final straw was when they put to death his son, the Messiah, Jesus Christ. After that, God rejected & cursed them & abandoned them to the fate that Jesus prophesied about when he said “their House (or Nation) would be abandoned to them & the historical record has proved the accuracy of this prophecy when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem with it’s Temple & looted its treasures & destroyed all the genealogy records of its people! The Romans beseiged the City & a estimated, 1 million inhabitants died & the rest sold into slavery in 70 B.C.E. effectively ending the Jews claims of ownership rights to this Land! The Roman destruction was so total & severe that the only part that remains of old Jerusalem today is the Western or “Wailing” Wall”! The forebears of the Palestinians then filled the void left & occupied this Land which became Palestine! England has a lot to answer for, over the creation this modern day monstrosity called the State of Israel, a Zionist abomination that should never have been allowed to made a comeback in the modern day era!
Hmmm, interesting view point and perspective on the history of Israel and the United Kingdom.
Whatever his faults might be, and I don’t think they are significant, there is only one answer, elect Corbyn. I’m afraid the same thing applies to Trump.
If you believe in individual freedom including freedom of expression, don’t elect Corbyn. The hard left which he leads is a very dangerous cult.
Why aren’t the UK people protesting this assault on their free speech rights?
Why aren’t they on the streets protesting what is being done to Corbyn. This legislation is deadly, not only to the Palestinian people but the UK people and their freedom as well as literally preventing them from protestING anymore US, UK ISRAELI WARS
It isn’t just capitulation by Corbyn but by the UK people too.
People are protesting on the streets of England! Maybe not so prominently shown on news but is happening! I don’t understand why we always lurch either far right or to the far left? What’s wrong with the reasonable and moderate middle ground??
“Worse, Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. As a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, the accusations of anti-semitism have clearly pained him. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers. He has tried to maintain unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with him.”
I think we all have known for some time now how this was going to end. Remember back when Corbyn threw Ken Livingstone under the bus? That was our first clue. The sad fact is, Corbyn showed weakness before The Lobby and got eaten for breakfast. What did we all expect. I’m not sure I even feel sorry for him. No, the ones I feel sorry for are his supporters: all those earnest people who followed Corbyn, hoping he would be different from all the other politicians in modern Britain, only to be betrayed … sad.
I can understand why Corbyn, after speaking out for working and oppressed people, among them Palestinians, would get sick of the constant smears by elitists including Zionists. It is a specific example of supposed political correctness cloaking a totalitarian tactic forcing conformity. Mr. Cook used the term “natural selection” which in politics cannot apply, it is “political selection” whereby the operatives police each other to conform or lose. The UK government, from what I have read, seems to stop at nothing in its quest to control and patrol the people, to the point of absurdity in declaration of what can and cannot be said or done, and the Israel lobby in UK profits in this case.
We are already into the chapter of Orwell’s “1984” where Winston and Julia are about to be busted by O’Brien just for meeting clandestinely and then will be tortured for defying Big Brother. We are heading down a dangerous road and we do not want to end as Winston, whose last thought, after being tortured, was that he realized that “He loved Big Brother”. We had better get people to wake up, and soon.
I work in the U.K. and Corbyn doesn’t speak out for me. Rather he wants to steal my money and clamp down on my freedom. He’s a dangerous hard left cultist.
Where did you get the idea that JC wants your money? The Labour Party, in Government, want to start what they call “The Bank of the North” a publicly owned bank that can help all of us, not just the weathy in the South East. And before you shout that private enterprise is more efficient than public enterprise, may I remind yiou that the most successful bank in the USA is the publicly owned Bank of South Dakota.
The Labour party has promised (take that as you will) to raise the income tax only on the most highly paid individuals: no, their income is not earned, and corporations, who, at the moment do not pay their fair share. This means that you, as an individual, will probably loose nothing,
Then, of course there is the big money spinner for a new Government, a Financial Transaction Tax. This tax, on financial transactions only, will, even at the low rate of 5p per £100, keep the budget in the black and I have even seen one report which suggested it could pay off the deficit in 10 years.
No, I am not a member of a cult, but a member of the Labour Party which, at last has a leader with courage and vision who hopes, with our help, to make life a little richer for everyone.
Does anyone remember, if you lived through it that is, the labour gov of the 1970’s. They were pretty far left and with the help of very very powerful unions of the time they crippled the UK. Three day working weeks, due to strikes, electricity shortages, rubbish not collected for months clogging the streets with foul and disgusting refuse! UK was labeled, “the poor man of Europe”. We were a laughing stock to the world!
Let me just say that I believe a place exists for socialism in our society but it needs to be tempered with freedom and opportunities to improve a person’s circumstances through hard work and ingenuity etc. That last statement can also work in the opposite way, capitalism needs to be held to account by socialism!
Caitlin Johnstone sums the vile media smearing up quite nicely:
“MSM: Why are you a Nazi?
Corbyn: I am not a Nazi.
MSM: So you’re saying that the Jews who say you’re a Nazi shouldn’t have a voice? That they should be loaded onto a train and burnt to ashes?
Corbyn: No! You’re being unethical.
MSM: JEREMY CORBYN ATTACKS MEDIA JUST LIKE HITLER”
Gary – exactly!
The situation at The Guardian becomes worse each passing day. They must have a special “get Corbyn” team at work full time.
Today, there’s a big story about a video of Corbyn from about five years. His brief quote is labelled by opponents (and of course dutifully quoted by Guardian) as “inexcusable” and “clearly antisemitic.”
To a reasonable person, there is nothing at all anti-Semitic in saying someone “lacks sense of English irony,” whether that person is Jewish or not.
Corbyn was referring to some particular Zionists at a meeting in 2013, part of a group that included both Jews and non-Jews.
So, today’s name-calling accusers, on top of everything else, have taken Corbyn’s harmless words completely out of context.
Much as they did with a 2014 photo produced some days ago and presented falsely as Corbyn laying a wreath at the grave of some Munich Olympics terrorists in Tunisia.
The vicious Netanyahu even chimed in on that one. Talk about Putin interfering in elections. Moreover, Netanyahu didn’t even know what he was talking about.
The wreath had absolutely nothing to do with Olympic terrorists. It was at the graves of some people killed by Israeli bombing in Tunisia in 1985.
The cemetery is said to also contain the graves of some “accused” of having been involved in the Munich attack, but that has nothing to do with the event with which Corbyn was involved.
I truly think the whole ugly campaign has moved past the Senator McCarthy tone it had for so long and into a kind of “the Stasi accuses” stage
I don’t know whether Craig Murray, who I think identifies as Scottish, would claim to have a “sense of English irony” specifically, but he well describes what is ironic about this whole Corbyn-antisemitism foolishness:
“The truth, of which I am certain, is this. If there genuinely was the claimed existential threat to Jews in Britain, of the type which engulfed Europe’s Jews in the 1930’s, Jeremy Corbyn, Billy Bragg, Roger Waters and I may humbly add myself would be among the few who would die alongside them on the barricades, resisting. Yet these are today loudly called ‘anti-semites’ for supporting the right to oppose the oppression of the Palestinians. The journalists currently promoting those accusations, if it came to the crunch, would be polishing state propaganda and the civil servants writing railway dockets. That is how it works. I have seen it. Close up.”
Corbyn is being trashed by the broadcast and print MSM on a daily basis, but this might backfire. I seem to remember that Trump was also trashed by the MSM on an hourly basis in order to crush his campaign for the presidency, and look how that turned out. We British have a curious tendency to want to support the under dog. especially when the rest of the dogs in the pack are snapping at his heals. I hope Corbyn carries on and always tries to be a statesman in his rebuff of the Jewish nonsense. If there was no farcical Jewish stick to beat Corby with, those maligned forces against him would find something else.
For new CN readers, a brief background on the power of Zionism is at http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
Selling out on this would be a serious mistake. I also think that if Corbyn doesn’t sell out his supporters will recognize the nature of those putting this crap forward. They are due a serious backlash and may get it if Corbyn doesn’t knuckle under.
Here in the US some (not sure how much) of support for Israel’s bad acts is from Christians. I guess evangelicals or something who only care about Israel and Jews as far as wanting them to still be around for armageddon when Jesus will come down and kill every Jew and Muslim and other nonbeliever (??)
Is there anything similar to that that could also explain or enhance why British politicians are also pushing this crap?
The truth is that Israel is an apartheid nation in the year 2018. There is nothing any man or woman on Earth can say to disprove that brutal historical fact.
So is almost every Islamic state too. As an atheist, I’d rather live in Israel than in an Islamic state.
People consistently underestimate the power of modern Zionism. This ideology believes tha Jews are the master tribe whose mission is to control the world and in order to do so any means is justified. These people are tightly networked and fanatical and very, very rich. To even indicate that is to be labelled with the misnomer of anti-Semitic even if you are Jewish. Thus was Noam Chomsky not allowed to even be referred to in mainstream media and Norman Finklestein’s many travails are also well known. Radical Zionism is one of several major plagues afflicting the world but it may be the only one we are not allowed to even talk about.
Zionism, like many late 19thCen. political nationalist organizations, were handmaids of the American eugenics movement. It was a huge, white, globally promoted ideology, based not on Darwinian theory as some claim, but, because of racialist government policy and the ethnic/religious bigotry they encouraged of their populations. Some of these laws remained on the books, of a few countries, until just recently. In this case, it seems to be the guiding light of Israeli expansion and power.
Great Britain is rotten to the core. There is nothing Corbyn or anyone can do to save it.
Unlike the mighty United States of America? I’ve had the pleasure of working with representatives from most Nations of this world and I’m afraid to say that they are all rotten and corrupt. As in every aspect of life, always exceptions to this but so few!!
Israel works hard to condition people to your set of responses.
Constant lobbying. Constant pressure. Constant influence on the press. And 2700 assassinations as a recent book told us.
Absolutely. This has been the most shameful sets of events in modern British political history.
The tactics of Senator McCarthy. Slander. Direct pressures from a foreign government. A small minority literally ignoring principles of democracy. Corbyn had to be elected twice, and by convincing majorities, yet still he is attacked.
I have done a search on one of my sites for items of interest I’ve written in this long and ugly affair. You may enjoy some of the comments. Here is the list of articles.
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/?s=corbyn+anti-Semitism
Dame Margaret Hodge, an MP in the Labour Party, accused Jeremy Corbyn of being on the “wrong side” of the line between being pro-Palestinian and anti-Semitic. This was clearly an unfounded allegation, considering Jeremy Corbyn’s past and current record. Dame Hodge who is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust was told that she would face disciplinary proceedings for her outbursts. Following her threat to take court action against the Labour Party the proceedings were dropped. On sky TV she compared her treatment by the Labour Party to the action of the Nazis. She felt she was being punished because she was Jewish. She followed up by saying “on the day that I heard that they were going to suspend me, I kept thinking, what did it feel like to be a Jew in Germany in the thirties?. It felt almost as if they were coming for me”. She recalled what her father had said to her as a child, “you got to keep a packed suitcase at the door Margaret, in case you ever have to leave in a hurry. She compared her treatment to McCarthyism.
Numerous polls in the UK over a sustained period of time have found that anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon and is less pronounced then almost anywhere else in Europe and is far less obvious than hostilities to other British minorities.
Relative to the general population and other ethno-religious groups UK British Jews are, in the aggregate, disproportionately wealthy, educated and professionally successful. They occupy positions of power in almost every institution the the UK including Government.
There is nothing as outrageous, grotesque and hypocritical as those in positions of power and Privilege posing as victims.
The real victims in this charade are, of course and continue to be, the Palestinians, who in the last seventy years suffered ethnic-cleansing, massacres, occupation and apartheid as the world looks on and proceeds to do very little. Anti-Semitism is used by Israel and friends of Israel to deflect criticism of their egregious crimes against the Palestinians. Siding with the victims cannot be described as anti-Semitic.
For every 1000 in the UK 4 are Jewish . Of those how many support Labor? Of those supporters of
Labor how many are involved in the attacks on the party and in support of Israel? This is based on the
66.7 million population of the UK and 291,000 population of those who are Jewish. Or for every 66,700 only
291 are Jewish. There is no way that Labor is going to be able to appease those attacking Corbyn and the Labor party. Isn’t it about time to say “Enough! We don’t tolerate anti-semitism and we won’t tolerate baseless attacks on our members who speak out against Israeli policies and practices. If you don’t like that vote for someone else.” We have the same problem in the US although to now it has been an attack on individual candidates rather than a whole party. But that is changing. Sheldon Adelson’s contributions to the Republican House and Senate committees effectively buys the GOP. The changes in the Democrat party to more
progressive candidates and candidates who support Palestinian rights is likely to see future attacks similar to
those against Labor.
Sorry but in the context of the coming mid-terms, your comment about Democrat candidates is borderline disinformation. The DNC has snuffed out all meaningful progressivism, and freshman Dem candidates mostly have a military/intel background. Yes Democrat jews like Soros and Saban are “liberal”, less overtly religious. And of course left- and right-wing jews squabble among each other, that’s our culture. But when it comes to the race, the Motherland, and the wars in furtherance thereof, then the ranks are closed; as a result, the Dems are just as bought as the GOP. I have mixed feelings about it, but objectively this is why jews are successful, while most others are not.
What’s up anyway with this sentimental attachment to the two officially allowed parties which haven’t served their stated purpose for decades already? What happened to the USA as the home of “new&improved”? Where it was a plus if a product was disposable?
Ma Laoshi, , I agree with your comment.
” I have mixed feelings about it, but objectively this is why jews are successful, while most others are not.”
I think you mean successful in shaping policies to their advantage. That so many have money and managerial talent, and a coordinated commitment to use it to buy public opinion regarding Jews in general and Israel is the situation today. Absent any cohesive counterforce, they have their way. That they do have their way, despite their protestations, is irrefutable.
These Jews know what the want, most of the rest of us do not. The danger of such a condition is that it could create a reaction as happened in Germany and other countries.
The hope is that the Jewish community, seeing the danger, will cease supporting an apartheid state and allow a truly democratic state in Israel/Palestine.
I have a sense that many thoughtful Jews understand the danger. That they will be successful in remedying it is problematic. Reason loses it allure in situations like this.
I have made these statements many times to Jews who I consider friends. Their reaction is deep suspicion, conditioned by the history of Jews and their ingrained distrust of people who want to “help them”. Getting past that will be very difficult.
The elites are betting that their crude propaganda trumps anything the alternative press on the web can put out in the way of truth and reason. Given the besotted and indifferent consciousness of the masses, they may be right. But we have to keep trying to get the truth heard nevertheless. What else have we got?
Is it too late for Corbyn to just reset this thing? Couldn’t he admit he’s been outmaneuvered rhetorically, restate the basic principles by which he has lived his lengthy public career (which are obviously not “anti-semetic”), and then resume pushing the real political agenda that has been so popular?
His enemies would pounce on that as a sign of weakness, but he must know continuing to try to appease them is futile – there will be no progress without a final break with the forces that are currently crushing him. Can’t he just bet on the people and tell the corporate media and the Blairites to go screw?
Wealth rises to the top; so does milk scum. This is what happens when your media are monopolized and beholden to corporate interests. The elite want neoliberalism/globalism maintained, so they will attack anyone with an alternative viewpoint.
Corbyn is crushed under anti-semitism, but if they had something else on him, they would have used that. Meanwhile, domestic policies are not talked about and the U.K. continues to circle the drain.
Same with Trump. You want to bring jobs back, stop the wars, rebuild infrastructure? No can do! Out comes Russiagate, Stormy Daniels, and the kitchen sink. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to circle the drain.
“Remember that the man who drafted the IHRA definition and its associated examples, American Jewish lawyer Kenneth Stern, has publicly regretted their impact, saying that in practice they have severely curbed freedom of speech about Israel.”
He has publicly regretted their impact? No kidding. Mr. Kenneth Stern chose a “winner”, his own people, and he paid no mind to the “losers”. I predict that he will be the loser in the end. Such shortsightedness!
Corbyn should give the speech of his life on the importance of free speech and let the chips fall where they may. When you shake hands with the devil, you have already lost.
I don’t give a care about anyone’s Semitism or even their deliberate misuse of the term, but I cannot abide their shameless racism and acts of genocide against Palestinians and Muslims in general that have been ongoing for at least 70 years. I don’t care who you are, what you call yourselves or what delusions you suffer about your megalomaniacal conception of a deity, I do care about the people you persecute and murder in order to steal their land.
I do care that the asinine leaders of my country and those of its subservient vassal states have been totally co-opted into supporting systematic warmongering against nearly all the other countries in the Middle East whom Israel alleges to be its enemies, though they have never attacked Israel. (Though Israel has surely attacked them and assassinated their citizens time and again, often simply because of their education and scientific research.) This has happened to the point where several such countries have been completely devastated with millions of their people killed and millions of others driven into exile. The “side effects” have had enormous consequences in Europe in terms of terrorism and societal disrupting mass migrations. Yet the perpetrators of these crises don’t care. No sacrifice by anyone is too great if it serves Israel’s interests.
Having mopped the floor with Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Yemen, the Axis of Evil, comprising Israel, America, Saudi Arabia and NATO continues to conspire to attack even more target countries, most notably Iran and Lebanon (but who is to say that places like Turkey, Egypt or Jordan have permanent immunity?), which clearly have no intent to engage these rogue states because they are not suicidal. The arrogant warmongers from the Zionist state even go so far as to unpredictably attack the Russian forces in Syria trying to stabilise the country against the mercenary terrorists imported by the Axis, showing their willingness to take the world to the precipice of another global war to achieve regional domination. And the presumed rules are that no one is allowed to shoot back against the Israeli forces making these sporadic raids, because to do so would invite potential nuclear retaliation by Washington or the Zionist state. Or, maybe just more “shock & awe” directed from the carrier fleets skulking around the world’s high seas. In either case, no one dares throws a real punch back at the Zionist bully because his big tough uncle is always there to stomp you to death if you try.
How much territory do these bloodthirsty fanatics believe that their god promised them? What’s it say on the deed that no one has ever seen? Everything from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea? Everything from the Caucasus to the sands of the Arabian peninsula? And, when they acquire all that at the cost of torrents of goyim blood, will their lust for power be sated? Or is the “unipolar” world empire really meant to be ruled from Jerusalem rather than Washington? Trump has never been Putin’s puppet. He is clearly Netanyahoo’s puppet. How do the sane and righteous people on this planet stop the Punch and Judy show?
I’m happy to agree both BackwardsEvolution and Realist on the Israel/Palestinian issue. All individuals with any compassion for human suffering, in the face of ideological bullying must speak out, even if it is only as a few pixelated words in a comment section.
I worked in the Sinai on water resources, on behalf of Egypt. In conversation with an Israeli hydrogeologist, he called the Sinai, and the adjacent Negev, a “stinking, fly-infested place,” whereas every Egyptian spoke proudly of the Bedouins and the past and present history of the peninsula. I understand that the Israeli’s opinion is that of only one individual, but it is telling, nonetheless, given the events of recent years in Gaza. Only with such a jaundiced opinion of the land itself, can leaders of a nation justify genocide against the people inhabiting a place. This might explain the West’s idea of Israel, as the “Holy Land,” and the Jewish rule there, as being somehow “sacred.” Repeated bombing of captive people already living in rubble isn’t exactly compatible with holiness, as the actions taken in Gaza and the West Bank show clearly.
EXACTLY! Well said, Realist…as usual.
Ruling elite has to waste so much precious time managing these pesky elected officials.
The people in the British elite who accuse Corbyn of anti-Semitic rhetoric, should look at the amount of anti-Russian, anti-Serb and anti-Chinese rhetoric in their own present (or very recent) rhetoric. They would be crying to the skies if 100th of it was used against Israel.
Anything that is unlawful to question is very clearly a lie. Censoring questions and enforcing lies can only work for a time.The times are once again changing.
The question is the following: are the Israeli people and its supporters for human rights or the rights of Israeli’s? The rest of the west cannot help but follow that decision. It’s a pretty easy decision to make. Otherwise, there can be no doubt as to the reality of the situation at all.