Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?

[moof]

2 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

Of course you have.

 

Feel free to address the argument rather than the man, any time you want.

What is the argument? That he isn’t a gaping chasm of a vagina of a man? Well, he is. Consider the argument forensically addressed, dickwad. 

[Red Phoenix]

57 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Chris Williamson has been suspended.

 

Haha, totally mad. The more they push the closer we get to the right reaction from enough people. Hope it arrives before the Labour Party is destroyed.

[Strontium]

Actually, I was rather hoping you'd address the argument made in his article. Never mind.

[Barrington Womble]

i have had the parliament station on in the background this afternoon. all a bit groundhog day with brexit. not for the 1st time though, i thought david lammy was bang on. i don't know too much about him - but why isn't he in the shadow cabinet? he's about the only one on the labour benches who absolutely nails the tories every time. that is what we need from the opposition. maybe i just see/read specific bits he's good on, but he seems head and shoulders above nearly all the labour front bench. 

[Barrington Womble]

On 2/26/2019 at 11:58 AM, Anubis said:

Soubry looks aghast at having to dine in Nando’s and use her fingers.

to be honest, you don't have to be an ex-tory twat to be aghast at nando's. fucking awful place where the chicken tastes of nothing but the shite sauce they cover it in. 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

50 minutes ago, Strontium Dog said:

Timely repost of Oz Katerji's excellent article from last August.

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2018/08/labour-can-be-jo-cox-s-party-or-chris-williamson-s-it-cannot-be-both

Never heard of Beeley or Katerji, so I can't say I'm particularly arsed about this article.  I would say that it's a stretch to call it "excellent": it's just a litany of complaints about Beeley. In other words, it just presents the side of the argument that Katerji agrees with, but doesn't think to ask Williamson why he holds an opposing view. It's an opinion piece, not really journalism.

 

(None of which is to say that Katerji isn't right. He may be. It's just that reading one person's opinion is not a compelling argument. )

 

Of course, it's not relevant to Williamson's comments at the JVL event, either.

[Creator Supreme]

1 hour ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Chris Williamson has been suspended. 

 

Can anybody tell me which bit of the IHRA definition he's breached? Or has he just upset people for not agreeing with the narrative they're trying to push? 

If I was a left winger in the Labour Party I'd stop my subs. Despite the efforts of momentum Blair's bellends are still calling the shots! The fact that you're not allowed to legitimately criticise a foreign country which is treating its own citizens like shit if you're an MP without having the whip withdrawn is a fucking scandal in this day and age!

[moof]

They’ve been dying to get Williamson for ages. This is some weak ass shit. 

[Creator Supreme]

I've been having my doubts about the greens for a while, but I'm sticking with them, for all their ills they're a better bet than Labour, far too many cunts in the PLP!

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

It looks like the knives are sharpening for Corbyn too. 

 

A few "senior Labour MPs" are leaking that Corbyn fought to stop Williamson's suspension and randomly added that Corbyn didn't think there was anything wrong with Ken Livingstone's Hitler/zionism comments. 

 

Unsourced comments, the veracity of which won't be questioned. And, if he did fight Williamson's suspension, fair fucking play to him. He's been a bit of a knob, but when has that been something that warrants suspension?

 

They've tried to label him a Jew hater but that wouldn't stick, so they've labelled him a Jew bater instead. 

 

On Corbyn, I would not be the slightest bit surprised if Watson makes a move on him. In the not too distant future. 

[Chris]

24 minutes ago, Barry Wom said:

to be honest, you don't have to be an ex-tory twat to be aghast at nando's. fucking awful place where the chicken tastes of nothing but the shite sauce they cover it in. 

 

Isn't that kinda just chicken in general? 

[SasaS]

1 hour ago, moof said:

Oz fucking Katerji. You’ve really jumped the shark now you fucking nut

 

1 hour ago, moof said:

Take my balls down your throat 

 

1 hour ago, moof said:

I’ve had personal dealings with Katerji. He’s completely unhinged. “Brilliant journalist” fuck the fuck off, nobhead. 

 

58 minutes ago, moof said:

What is the argument? That he isn’t a gaping chasm of a vagina of a man? Well, he is. Consider the argument forensically addressed, dickwad. 

Chapeau. Barrage worthy of the grandmaster himself.  

[Strontium]

39 minutes ago, Creator Supreme said:

If I was a left winger in the Labour Party I'd stop my subs. Despite the efforts of momentum Blair's bellends are still calling the shots! The fact that you're not allowed to legitimately criticise a foreign country which is treating its own citizens like shit if you're an MP without having the whip withdrawn is a fucking scandal in this day and age!

 

I have no idea what you mean by this. Can you expand?

[Red Phoenix]

This is brilliant from Jonathan Cook. Half is posted, link to the other half at the end :

 

France’s Macron leads the way as western leaders malevolently confuse anti-Zionism with antisemitism

 

How far the international community’s approach towards Israel has reversed trajectory over the past half century can be gauged simply by studying the fate of one word: Zionism.

 

In 1975 much of the world broke ranks with the United States and Europe at the United Nations general assembly to declare that Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology, “is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. Western publics were generally shocked. Zionism, they had been told, was a necessary liberation movement for the Jewish people after centuries of oppression and pogroms. Its creation, Israel, was simply the righting of terrible wrongs that had culminated in the horrors of the Holocaust.

 

But Zionism looked very different to those countries around the globe that had been exposed to centuries of European colonialism and the more recent advent of US imperialism. The long history of crimes against Jews that led to Israel’s establishment took place mostly in Europe. And yet it was Europe and the US that had sponsored and aided the arrival of Jews in another people’s homeland, far from their own shores.

 

To the global south, the great purges of native Palestinians carried out by European Jews in 1948 and 1967 looked all too reminiscent of white Europeans cleansing indigenous peoples in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

 

A colonial anachronism

 

By 1975, the time of the UN vote, it was clear that Israel had no intention either of handing back to the Palestinians the occupied territories it had seized eight years earlier. Rather, Israel was entrenching the occupation by illegally transferring its own civilian population into the Palestinian territories.

 

Across much of the globe, these Jewish settlers looked like an anachronism, a reminder of the white “pioneers” heading westwards across the supposedly empty lands of the US; the white farmers who seized vast tracts of South Africa and Rhodesia as their personal homesteads; and the white newcomers who herded the remnants of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples into reservations or turned them into a sideshow at its tourist sites.

 

The UN’s “Zionism is racism” resolution lasted 16 years – until the fall of the Soviet Union and the emergence of the US as the world’s sole superpower. After a lot of diplomatic arm-twisting by Washington, including promises that Israel would engage in a peace process with the Palestinians, Resolution 3379 was finally scrapped in 1991.

 

Decades later, the pendulum has swung decisively the other way.

 

US and European elites have moved on from their once-defensive posture that Zionism is not racism. Now, they are on the attack. Their presumption is that anti-Zionism – the position of much the international community 44 years ago – is synonymous with racism. Or more specifically, it is increasingly being accepted that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two sides of the same coin.

 

Apartheid-style system

 

That trend was consolidated last week when Emmanuel Macron, the centrist French president, went further than simply reiterating his repeated conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. This time he threatened to outlaw anti-Zionism.

 

Macron’s confusion of anti-Zionism with antisemitism is patently nonsensical. Antisemitism refers to the hatred of Jews. It is bigotry, plain and simple. Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is opposition to the political ideology of Zionism, a movement that has insisted in all its political guises on prioritising the rights of Jews to a homeland over those, the Palestinians, who were already living there.

 

Anti-Zionism is not racism against Jews; it is opposition to racism by Zionist Jews.

 

Of course, an anti-Zionist may also be antisemitic, but it is more likely that an anti-Zionist holds his or her position for entirely rational and ethical reasons. That was made only clearer last summer when the Israeli parliament passed a basic law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The law asserts that all Jews, even those with no connection to Israel, enjoy a right to self-determination there that all Palestinians are deprived of, including the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian and formally citizens.

 

In other words, the law creates two statuses in Israel – and implicitly in the occupied territories too – based on an imposed ethno-religious classification system that entitles all Jews to superior rights over all Palestinians.

 

In constitutional terms, Israel is explicitly operating an apartheid-style legal and political system, one even more encompassing than South Africa’s. After all, the apartheid rulers of South Africa never claimed that theirs was the homeland of all white people.

 

Criminalizing BDS

 

Macron’s threat to outlaw anti-Zionism is the logical extension of existing moves across Europe and the US to penalise those who support BDS, the growing international solidarity movement with Palestinians that calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Many members of the BDS movement, though not all, are anti-Zionists. A proportion are anti-Zionist Jews.

 

The movement not only leapfrogs western policy elites’ decades of complicity in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians but highlights the extent of that complicity. That is one reason it is so reviled by those elites. France has gone furthest so far in this direction, criminalizing BDS as a form of economic discrimination. It thereby conflates a state, Israel, with an ethnic group, Jews – precisely as antisemites do.

 

Such legislation makes as much sense as France outlawing a boycott of apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s on the grounds that it discriminated against whites.

 

Israel lobbyists in action

 

France, however, is simply at the head of the curve. In the US some 26 states have enacted laws to punish or sanction individuals and organisations that support a boycott. Similar legislation is pending in a further 13 states. None seem concerned that they are violating Americans’ much-cherished First Amendment rights, and making an exception to the right to free speech in one case only – that of Israel.

 

This month the US Senate joined the fray by passing a bill to encourage states to inflict economic punishments on those who support a boycott of Israel. These victories against the non-violent BDS movement are the result of vigorous and malevolent efforts behind the scenes by Israel lobbyists to confuse anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

 

As Israel’s standing among western publics has plummeted with the advent of social media, endless videos of violence by the Israeli army and settlers caught on phone cameras, and Israel’s starvation of Gaza, Israel’s lobbyists have moved to make it ever harder to speak out.

 

Redefinition of antisemitism

 

Their coup was the recent widespread acceptance in the west of a redefinition of antisemitism that intentionally confuses it with anti-Zionism. Israel’s fingerprints are all over the work of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). It is therefore hardly surprising that the lengthy and vague definition of antisemitism devised by the IHRA has been supplemented by 11 examples, seven of which refer to Israel.

 

One example, stating that Israel is a “racist endeavour”, suggests that the 72 UN member states that voted for 1975’s “Zionism is racism” resolution, as well as the 32 that abstained, were themselves espousing, or turning a blind eye to, antisemitism.

 

Western governments, local authorities, political parties and public bodies are now racing to adopt the IHRA definition. The result has been a growing fear among western publics about what can be said any longer about Israel without eliciting accusations of antisemitism.

 

That is the goal. If people become afraid that others will think them antisemitic for criticising Israel, then they will keep quiet, giving Israel greater leeway to commit crimes against Palestinians.

 

‘Self-hating Jew’ trope

 

Were Macron and the IHRA right – that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are all but indistinguishable – then we would have to accept some very uncomfortable conclusions.

 

One would be that Palestinians should be uniformly damned as antisemites for demanding their own right to self-determination. Or put another way, it would be impossible for Palestinians to demand the same rights as Jews in their homeland without that being declared as racist. Welcome to Alice Through the Looking Glass.

 

Another conclusion would be that a significant proportion of Jews around the world, those who oppose Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish state, are also antisemites, infected with an irrational hatred of their fellow Jews. This is the “self-hating Jew” trope Israel has long relied on to discredit criticism from Jews. On this view, those Jews who want Palestinians to enjoy the same rights as Jews claim for themselves in the Middle East are racist – and not only that, but racist against themselves.

 

And if Macron’s efforts to criminalise anti-Zionism prove fruitful, it would mean that Palestinians and Jews could be punished – maybe even jailed – for demanding equality between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Preposterous as this reasoning sounds when laid out so bluntly, similar approaches to dealing with antisemitism are being readily accepted by actors across Europe and the US.

 

The extent of this insanity was evident in the decision of Germany’s Bank für Sozialwirtschaft, or Bank for Social Economy, to shut the account of a Jewish anti-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East, over its support for a boycott of Israel. It was the first time a German bank had closed down a Jewish organization’s account since the Nazis were in power.

 

The bank took the action after complaints that Jewish Voice was antisemitic by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a group that masks its fervent support for Israel behind campaigning for Jewish rights.

 

https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/western-malevolently-antisemitism/

[TheHowieLama]

27 minutes ago, Chris said:

 

Isn't that kinda just chicken in general? 

Yea man, tastes just like chicken

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

[moof]

31 minutes ago, SasaS said:

 

 

 

Chapeau. Barrage worthy of the grandmaster himself.  

This is the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Thank you, sir 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

Oh, and that Labour MP who was castigated, not for saying that Israel were funding the In Group, but for saying that it was possible and that the secrecy about their finances made any such claim a legitimate one? Remember her? 

 

Well, it turns out that David Garrard, a man who has made sizable donations to Labour Friends Of Israel, has recently also made a large donation to the Independent Group. 

 

Telling the truth = "antisemitism"? 

[Strontium]

David Garrard is not Israel. He's not even Israeli. Happy to help.

[Creator Supreme]

I heard that lovely woman Margaret Hodge demanding Chris Williamson have the Labour whip removed earlier!

 

By lovely woman I mean sanctimonious backstabbing paedophile enabling shitebag!

[Jairzinho]

Margaret Hodge should have been chucked in a skip years ago. 

[Rico1304]

All of these terrible Labour MPs. Did you hate them before the 2nd coming?  

[Anny Road]

I had no idea that the Jews were an oppressed minority. I thought they were doing alright and were well represented in all areas of society.

[Barrington Womble]

3 hours ago, Chris said:

 

Isn't that kinda just chicken in general? 

Shite badly cooked chicken, yeah. 

[Creator Supreme]

All of these terrible Labour MPs. Did Rico love them before they became backstabbing twatbags?