Should Corbyn remain as Labour leader?

[polymerpunkah]

How long has he been representing Islington?

[Strontium]

35 years.

[Jairzinho]

Ha.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

He's MP for Islington and his website has more mentions of Israel than it does Islington. Read into that what you will.

That he was patron of PSC for years and that Israel/Palestine has more complex and more serious problems than Israel?

[Moctezuma]

What a load of fucking tosh. It’s you, once again, trying to make yourself look clever.

 

Man of the people Corbyn changed fucking nothing for the people he was representing. Ever. Now, if he’d been an MP solely worried about his constituents perhaps that’s forgivable, but we know that’s not the case.

 

Rico I've got to pull you up on this, having lived just south of his constituency for a while now the number of people I've met who Corbyn has directly helped either through making representation, guiding to the right bodies or lobbying for funds for is ludicrously high. In particular his work for disabled members of the community including chasing up money for housing (and amendments needed to make their homes usable) and for professional support workers is particularly commendable.

 

If anything as a critique I would have said in his parliamentary career he was perhaps too constituency orientated, though I suppose that is a route a fringe backbencher can take.

 

When I was growing up Malcolm Bruce and latterly Alex Salmond were no-where near as high profile in my local constituency, though a couple of caveats, it's fairly rural and the later was in a lot of photos pressing the flesh with local business men. 

[Stickman]

Newsnight with the ever impartial Evan Davis....When he asks Chris Williamson "why did he lay a wreath at the graves of the Munich terrorists" to which he gets the reply "well they aren't even buried there"....Davis replies "well that's an irrelevance.

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCcNhzMkMuE

[Hades]

It's a good thing left-wing politics is less of an intellectual movement now. Unfortunately, that also means a lot of the message has been diluted and over-simplified which enables the right to have legitimate critiques against it. Nobody talks about human rights under the law anymore. Everything is framed in neoliberal frameworks of self-identity. Probably a controversial opinion, but feminism latching on to left-wing movements was one of the worst things to happen to it - a lot of the youthful revolutionary energy of young men was lost.

[Denny Crane]

Corbyn doing it on a wet and cold Tuesday in Stoke, election winning form.

 

 

Matt Zarb-Cousin

@mattzarb

For those who say “alright, Corbyn can get a crowd at Glastonbury and in the heat of a general election campaign, but can he do it on a cold Tuesday afternoon in Stoke

 

Momentum

Momentum

@PeoplesMomentum

It’s a cold Tuesday afternoon in Stoke-on-Trent, and this was the queue outside Jeremy Corbyn’s rally well over half an hour before the event started, with hundreds already inside.

[Denny Crane]

Noticed lots of comments on social media like "I'm no fan of Corbyn but the smears have gone too far. Even from a Tory and not natural defenders like Duncan Bannatyne. It's a shame more Labour senior mps aren't rallying behind Corbyn.

 

Duncan Bannatyne

@DuncanBannatyne

Never thought I would say thus but #StandUp4Corbyn on the issue in question.

 

Henry Birtles

@TheRacingPoet

I am a Tory supporter, but #EvanDavis is a disgrace #NewsNight - How many times does @UKLabour Chris Williamson have to say that Corbyn did not lay a wreath for the black September killers (different country). Davis was stumped and wouldn’t admit it. ‘journalism’ at its worst

[Lee909]

 

 

Probably a controversial opinion, but feminism latching on to left-wing movements was one of the worst things to happen to it - a lot of the youthful revolutionary energy of young men was lost.

Not sure Karl Marx would agree

[Spy Bee]

It's getting to Corbyn Antisemtism fatigue levels, where even those who haven't totally dismissed the smear campaign, are so sick of hearing about this shit that they're going to ignore it anyway. It really does smack of desperation... how will they attack him next?

[cloggypop]

They could always try a constructive criticism of his policies.

[Strontium]

Does he have any yet?

[ZonkoVille77]

I think he'll try and copy all those world famous Lib Dem policies that every democracy raves about.

[ZonkoVille77]

Well fuck me sideways. The BBC not being anti-corbyn for once??

 

https://twitter.com/the_awakend/status/1029685536951345152?s=19

[Strontium]

I think he'll try and copy all those world famous Lib Dem policies that every democracy raves about.

"End the benefits freeze"

 

There's one you can have for free.

[Gnasher]

I would have thought after the real racist and discriminatory policies that recently subjected the Windrush generation such hardship these last few years the Jewish community might feel a bit embarrassed throwing round the put upon card.

[lifetime fan]

"End the benefits freeze"

 

There's one you can have for free.

 

The benefits freeze you brought in you mean?

[Gnasher]

Labour goes up in polls.

 

People not falling for fake outrage stories of the rich and famous. No one gives a fuck. Making fools of themselves.

[Gnasher]

Windrush, Yemen, Grenful.

 

Who the fuck cares about the feelings of Margate fucking Hodge.

[KMD7]

Hope he wins

[Strontium]

The benefits freeze you brought in you mean?

Actually the Tories brought it in. The Lib Dems blocked a freeze in coalition. But either way, it doesn't explain why the Labour manifesto didn't commit them to ending it.

[Gnasher]

Who gives a fuck about kids being bombed to death in Yemen when the real hurt in the world is someone calling Jess Phillips a cunt on Twitter.

[Strontium]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/15/jeremy-corbyn-honesty-labour-wreath-mess
 

For Corbyn, precision and honesty are the way out of this wreath mess
Jonathan Freedland

Controversies such as the wreath row will keep happening unless the Labour leader defends himself candidly and in full

Jeremy Corbyn did an event in Stoke last night, and a reporter interviewed some of the 400 or so supporters who had turned out to hear him. Among other things, Lewis Goodall of Sky News sought their views on “wreathgate”, the ongoing row about the ceremony Corbyn attended in Tunis in 2014. “Everyone we spoke to agreed,” Goodall wrote afterwards. “Corbyn is being smeared, Labour does not have a problem with antisemitism and that the whole thing is largely concocted by the media and Tories.”

One of the more useful phrases of our time is “tribal epistemology”, the notion that what people know is increasingly linked to the group they identify with. The wreath row has been a case in point. There is no single, agreed set of facts on which the various sides hold different opinions. Instead, among those most heatedly involved, the facts or evidence people see and don’t see depend on their tribal or factional affiliation.

Which is how a set of photographs from a Tunis cemetery has become the object of such controversy. Neutrals are probably either confused by the whole business and tune out, or they tend towards the view of that crowd in Stoke: that the media have falsely trashed Corbyn in the past – witness the baseless Czech spy accusation – and therefore are not to be taken too seriously now.

For those reasons, Corbyn and Labour will surely ride out this current storm. Nevertheless, rows like this one are not good for the party: they take up time and energy that might otherwise be devoted to opposing the government or advancing Labour’s own programme. How then should Labour deal with this argument and others like it which, if the past is any guide, are likely to keep on coming?

On the Tunis episode, there are three options. The first is to say that everything that happened, every wreath that was laid, was solely in honour of those killed in the 1985 Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunis. That was the line taken by the pro-Corbyn MP Chris Williamson as he toured BBC studios on Tuesday, and enthusiastically echoed by Corbyn supporters online. Its great strength is that deploring the 1985 bombing is not controversial: even Margaret Thatcher did it.

But there are two problems with the “1985-only” line. For one thing, the photographs clearly show two distinct wreath-laying moments: one at the 1985 memorial, with Jeremy Corbyn hovering at the back, and another at a visibly different location, by the graves of senior PLO leaders reputedly involved in the 1970s with the Black September faction, which organised the massacre and torture of Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972. The men buried there had no connection with 1985, and it’s in that location that Corbyn is pictured holding a wreath.

What’s more, Corbyn himself explicitly wrote, in the Morning Star after the Tunis trip, that 1985 was not the sole focus of the ceremonies: “Wreaths were laid at the graves of those who died on that day and on the graves of others killed by Mossad agents in Paris in 1991.” So the photographs and Corbyn’s own words make the 1985-only line unsustainable.

The second approach available to Corbyn would be to say that he has long been a devoted supporter of the Palestinians and on that day in 2014 he was not going to get too hung up on the exact details of this plaque or that grave, which were anyway opaque to him as a non-speaker of Arabic: what mattered was standing in solidarity with his Palestinian friends. But perhaps he worries that would sound insufficiently discerning for a would-be prime minister.

The third option would be to say: “Yes, as the photographs show, I did lay a wreath at the graves of Salah Khalaf, known as Abu Iyad, along with Hayel Abdel-Hamid and Fakhri al Omari. I knew exactly who they were and I make no apology for that.” The argument the Labour leader could make would be that perhaps those men were leaders of the group behind the murderous Munich attack, but they changed course: Khalaf became one of the prime proponents of the PLO’s shift away from violence and towards diplomacy. Corbyn could say that it was precisely that journey that he was honouring that day in Tunis.

The trouble is, if that had indeed been Corbyn’s motivation he would surely have mentioned it in that Morning Star article or since. Instead he has left the impression that he is a bit vague about who these men were. He wrote that they were killed in Paris, when in fact it was Tunis. He said they were killed by Mossad agents, when in fact they were killed by a rival Palestinian faction. (It’s possible Corbyn was confusing those three with a fourth man, Atef Bsesio, also allegedly linked to Munich and also buried in that same cemetery: he was reportedly killed by Mossad agents in Paris – though that was in 1992, not 1991.)

The point is, there is a way to deal with these questions which, given Corbyn’s record of activism, will keep coming. It will require precision and candour, rather than I-didn’t-inhale formulations such as “I was present but not involved”, especially when the pictures say otherwise.

Chiefly, it will mean honestly admitting that when he attended events like this one – and this goes for his history in Northern Ireland too – he was not there as some neutral peace broker, as he now suggests, but as a vocal supporter of one side against the other. He was not an intermediary in either Israel/Palestine or Northern Ireland: if he had been, he would have been scrupulous about meeting all sides, which he never did, and expressing either no solidarity with any side or plenty with all of them, which was also not his way.

Instead, in Israel/Palestine his position was not that of a healing conciliator of two warring peoples, but rather “to eradicate Zionism”, to cite the stated goal of the Labour Movement Campaign for Palestine of which he was a sponsor. In Northern Ireland, he was for republicanism and against unionism, taking part for example in a 1987 ceremony to honour not all victims of terrorism, but eight IRA gunmen killed by the SAS. As he put it at the time: “I’m happy to commemorate all those who died fighting for an independent Ireland.”

In these conflicts, Corbyn did not sit on the fence or act as some even-handed negotiator. He chose sides. That’s what makes him who he is; it’s what many people admire about him. To his most loyal supporters he can perhaps pretend that he spent decades as some kind of unofficial UN peace envoy. But for everyone else, he needs to have an honest, precise reckoning with his past. Otherwise, what happened this week will keep happening.

[ZonkoVille77]

Sees it's from Jonathan Freeland, stops reading.