midnight_rendezvous
Well-known member
Yes, the problem is antisemitism ... a major problem in the Labour party according to Labour MP's, Labour Members, Jewish groups as reported in The Guardian and The Mirror. If it was just the right-wing press and Tories making claims you may have a point but it isn't. I am sure Corbyn supporters and Labour-supporting papers have trawled high and low for stories that show a similar problem in other parties. If the PM had been found defending an obviously anti semetic mural, associating with rabidly anti-Semitic people and groups I expect she would be under fire. As would the Tories If they had launched an internal investigation into anti-Semitism two years ago and still had over 70 cases unresolved. If Jewish groups had declared the Tory party officially racist I expect that would also have made the news.
This is about legitimate scrutiny of Corbyn and the Labour party. Playing the victim/conspiracy card or indulging in whataboutery looks very much like political diversionary tactics.
Of course Labour have a responsibility to confront any signs of anti-Semitism within their own ranks (I have already acknowledged this), but the data I posted earlier suggests that the commonplace anti-Semitic attitudes of the past are being rapidly outnumbered by the flood of new progressive left-liberal people to have joined Labour since Corbyn became leader.
Now I am calling into question the following: are people only pretending to care about anti-semitism so they can undermine Corbyn and the left? And if not, where is the balance of posters on NSC and the media? Because at the moment I’m not seeing it. You can call it what you want, a conspiracy theory, whataboutery, it still comes down to one thing. Balance. Or the lack thereof.
Here is a few things that haven’t found, or barely found, their way onto NSC this week or the press this week. And you can guarantee if it was Labour or Corbyn we’d be inundated with new threads. But, I digress...
- When May claimed "there is no place in Labour for those who want to tackle anti-Semitism" she labelled every single Jewish person within the Labour Party as tolerant of anti-Semitism. A non-Jew accusing a significant number of Jewish people of being tolerant of anti-Semitism is fundamentally an act of anti-Semitism in itself because it's an invocation of the deeply anti-Semitic trope of the "self-hating Jew".
- The Tory government minister Sajid Javid stood up in parliament and accused the Labour activist group Momentum and their leader, Jon Lansman (who is Jewish), of being "neo-fascists". So where is the tide of outrage about this hard-right government minister deliberately and offensively tarring hundreds of peaceful anti-fascist left-leaning Jewish people with the vile ideology that resulted in the mass genocide against their ancestors?
- The Tories decided to out someone as gay against their will in a desperate effort to discredit their whistleblowing over alleged cheating by the Vote Leave campaign. Theresa May's reaction to this outrageous piece of homophobic bullying wasn't to apologise to the victim and sack the perpetrator. In fact she didn't even bother to apologise to the victim at all, and instead put out a statement of "full confidence" in the homophobic bully.
- On the same weekend that Theresa May's team resorted to homophobic bullying in order to defend their beloved Brexit the Tory MP Bob Blackman took to Facebook in order to share a grotesque piece of extreme-right, Islamophobic, anti-Somalian propaganda from the United States. Blackman subsequently deleted the post and issued the extraordinary excuse that he had never actually visited the website he shared a link to, but this is a guy with a proven track record of bigotry that even went as far as promoting the EDL founder Tommy Robinson. Has Theresa May reprimanded Blackman for his disgusting behaviour. Of course she hasn't, she's just remained completely silent and relied on the mainstream media to almost completely ignore the scandal.
- Boris Johnson's pathetic effort to demean Labour's shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry by referring to her by her husband's title. The Speaker John Bercow rightly chastised Boris Johnson for his sexism, but the fact remains that the Tory party is stuffed full of political dinosaurs who consider addressing women by their husband's title is some kind of incredibly witty attack.