The Labour Party

Hopefully we will get on to real discussion and not this sort of thing. I will probably be busy until then.

I was reading about the Middle Eastern food writer Claudia Roden in The Sunday Times magazine at the week-end, I had no idea that her origins were Jewish and that her family had been expelled from Egypt in the 1950s. I'm not Jewish but I can empathise with their growing disquiet and maybe the feeling of "here we go again" particularly when a party who would like to be known for their compassion are not making the stand they would if it were, as you say Lemongrove another demographic, who were on the receiving end of being smeared for the umpteenth time The President of British Board of Jewish Deputies has warned that Jeremy Corbyn is failing to lead Labour away from a damaging trend of anti semitism.

But where is the evidence?
Isolated cases are not a “damaging trend”.

GracesGran I don't subscribe to The Times on line, as you know they have a paywall. However, I do buy that paper, but not every day and I remember reading it but I don't keep old papers. I've just googled "anti semitic meeting of Momentum discussing prostitution in Stamford Hill" where you will get the beginning of that article which will show you what I quoted, so I assure you I haven't made it up.

To treat anti-semitism as a political football is not particularly clever, and is in questionable taste.

As we are all aware the islamaphobia in the Tory Party is pretty staggering, but I feel nothing is to be gained from exploring this further.

Poor taste.

Who are you accusing of "hating Jews".

The people who post content about hating Jews in Facebook groups that Jeremy Corbyn, Chris Williamson, Clive Lewis are members of!

Using words like JewNazi.
Hoping Jews in the public eye would die because they deserve it.

Sharing content from US White supremacist groups that are anti-Jew.
Describing the holocaust as 'Jewish paranoia'
There are so many of examples of this. We're not discussing a few misinformed remarks. This happened over years, with hundreds of posts. Those were the least offensive things I could find.

None of this has anything to do with Palestine.
It has everything to do with 'hating Jews'.
That's why people want to check if the group is 'safe'.

Why on earth would Clive Lewis want to be in a secret group of white supremacists???? How do you know this???

They were not white supremacists mostlyharmless They shared content from US white supremacists.

You'd have to ask Clive Lewis why he wants to be in a 'secret' Facebook group where they post this rubbish, I'm afraid I don't know.

I know he was a member, he joined the group in October 2015 and I've seen the screen grabs of his posts in the group. His posts are not anti-semitic. They're simply surrounded by posts that are, which he did not comment on to either agree with the post or explain that they are anti-semitic.

If he's your MP, I'd be interested in his response. He is certainly aware of anti-semitism within the Labour Party!

Maybe ask them all what they thought of the video by the KKK member David Duke?

Could you even imagine if Theresa May was a member and posted in a 'secret' facebook group where this sort of stuff was posted?

Corbyn aligns himself with extremists in my opinion. This is no different.
I also think Shami Chakrabarty, who I always held in high esteem when she was the head of Liberty, needs to explain how she found no evidence of anti-semitism.

Twitter has examples of the content I just will not post if anyone wants to see it.
#LabourAntisemitism #CorbynKnew

If it’s a secret group primrose does that mean you are a member too?
Clive Lewis isn’t my MP but as he is mixed race himself I can’t see why he would join a group that “shared content from US white supremacist groups” unless it was purely for research purposes.

No, it means I've read the 300-page report from an investigative journalist. My Facebook activity is less inflammatory.

Why do you think it could be for research purposes? What could he be researching, while posting and commenting?

No idea why you're focussing on one post out of thousands. Or asking me questions that only Clive Lewis, Corbyn and Williamson can answer.

Corbyn left the group a couple of weeks after he was elected leader. It wasn’t a realisation the group was bad. It was a realisation it would look bad for him.

From what I can see Corbyn was a member of a “Palestinian Facebook group”. As Palestinians they would be very likely to voice anti-Semitic thoughts as Palestine is currently being attacked by the Israeli Armed Forces.
You can’t really remove the Palestine issue from this.

Did they talk about Palestine, mostlyharmless?
Were any Palestinians members of this group?

Yes primrose. The group was called “Palestine Live”. Obviously there will be anti Jewish comments from a Palestinian group during an Israeli invasion. Corbyn apparently did not make any anti Semitic comments himself.
Anti Corbyn smears again.

I don't think the title of the group drove the content, mostlyharmless.
Obviously there will be anti Jewish comments
So are you saying it's OK to post anti-Jewish content because of the actions of Israel? Or that's OK if you're Palestinian? (By the way, none of them are Palestinian) Seems to me that plenty of Labour supporters are confused about the difference between anti-Semitism and pro-Palestinian.

No anti-Corbyn smears. You really don't need to smear him with anything. He's covered himself in it for years.

"An anti-Semitism group said evidence gathered by the blogger David Collier suggested Jeremy Corbyn was said to be among members of Palestine Live until just before he became leader in 2015.

Exchanges by members of the closed Facebook group (Palestine Live) were said to have included discussions of conspiracy myths about the Rothschild family and supposed Israeli involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, as well as links to material produced by neo-Nazi groups.

The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism said there was "no conceivable justification" for Mr Corbyn's alleged involvement in the group and that it would be filing a disciplinary complaint to the party against him."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43320296

Hmmm. No smoke without fire, as the saying goes.

One wonders if this thread has been started by Labour supporters as a damage limitation exercise.

Ken Livingstone was suspended from the Labour Party after his remarks about Hitler and Zionism. It's no wonder the Labour Party is linked to anti-semitism. (Of course all members of Palestine Live, in any way associated with Labour are likely to be back-pedalling furiously.) It is likely that Livingstone will be readmitted to the fold any time soon.

www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/pa/article-5478165/Corbyn-admits-FB-Palestine-group-membership-denies-seeing-anti-Semitic-posts.html
The Daily Mail is widely known to be pro Jewish and anti blacks and Moslems. Yes just a little bit racist.
I wouldn’t trust their anti Corbyn smears.
No point in discussing Corbyn or Labour with you really Primrose.

I think you've made your position perfectly clear to everyone mostlyharmless when you said

Obviously there will be anti Jewish comments

Not anti-Israel
Not pro Palestine
Anti Jewish.

You expect anti-semitism, so it's OK in your books. It's somehow justified.

Day6 I'm pleased that someone has made a complaint about Corbyn. I hope they do the same about the other MPs, Corbyns twitter guy and Seb Corbyn too, as they were all members. Apparently now some LP members have been suspended. (The Guardian).
What isn't reported is that 2 people posted they were leaving the group because it was filled with anti-Semitic posts. Neither of them were LP MPs or activists.

You’re good at quoting out of context here primrose. You missed out half my sentence. Not worth continuing this discussion with you.

OK.

I think you've made your position perfectly clear to everyone mostlyharmless when you said

Obviously there will be anti Jewish comments from a Palestinian group during an Israeli invasion.

Not anti-Israel
Not pro Palestine
Anti Jewish

You expect anti-semitism, so it's OK in your books. It's somehow justified. Obviously.

Never thought I'd see people on the left defend youtube videos by the KKK, because Palestine, obviously.
You live and learn.

Is the Guardian more to your taste then mostly harmless?

If so, this article, a scathing attack on what is being denied in Labour's ranks, was printed at the time of the last Labour conference.

"Meanwhile, Livingstone was on the radio cheerfully saying that it was perfectly possible to say offensive things about Jews without being anti-Jewish. He too has long argued that this whole business is bogus and confected, and that Labour does not have any kind of antisemitism problem.

And yet the evidence was there in Brighton if you were willing to see it. There were the Labour party Marxists handing out a paper that repeated Livingstone’s toxic claim of ideological solidarity between the Nazis and those German Jews who sought a Jewish homeland

There’s the testimony of John Cryer MP, who sits on Labour’s disputes panel. He says some of the anti-Jewish tweets and Facebook posts he has seen from Labour members are “redolent of the 1930s”.

There were loud calls for the expulsion of Jewish groups, one of which has been part of the Labour movement for a century. Hardly a surprise that some Jewish activists turned away from the conference, describing an atmosphere that felt too hostile to endure.

But no – for Len and the Kens (the left wing Ken Loach, Len McCluskey and Ken Livingstone) and their allies, it’s all made up.

Perhaps they don’t realise that that itself is a tired anti-Jewish trope: that Jews invent stories of suffering to drive a secret political agenda. Or, to put it more simply, that there is a Jewish conspiracy.

It means that a man such as Ken Loach – an artist so sensitive he is capable of making the film I, Daniel Blake – ends up lending a spurious legitimacy to Holocaust denial.

Asked to react to a speaker at a Brighton fringe meeting who had said Labour supporters should feel free to debate any topic, including the veracity of the Holocaust – “did it happen or didn’t it happen”, as the BBC interviewer put it – Loach could not give a simple, unequivocal denunciation of Holocaust denial. “I think history is for all of us to discuss,” he said.

Remember, Loach had not been asked whether there should be discussion of the meaning of the Nazi slaughter of the Jews. He had been asked about the fact of it happening. And on that, he said there should be discussion – the same apparently innocuous formulation routinely advanced by hardcore Holocaust deniers.

When distinguished men of the left are echoing, even inadvertently, the language of Holocaust denial, when the leader of Britain’s biggest trade union is rehashing the age-old notion of a Jewish conspiracy, you know you have entered a dark place. It’s not impossible to navigate your way out. But first you have to admit that you’ve got badly lost

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/27/labour-denial-antisemitism-party-dark-place

There's your left wing take on it.

ukhumanrightsblog.com/2018/03/08/demolitions-in-the-west-bank-highlight-a-deep-inequality-josh-newmark/

I'd much rather read about this, as we appear to have diverted into the Jewish question.

It is important, before going further, to acknowledge that Palestinian solidarity activists, academics and human rights defenders are indeed under a sustained attack by organized campaigns intent on labeling us as anti-Semitic. Such 'weaponization' of anti-Semitism serves the purpose of discouraging those with influence from critiquing Israel, Zionism and the human rights violations meted out daily against the Palestinian people.

Additionally, the real number of leftists with real anti-Jewish beliefs is tiny. According to the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (the largest ever study of anti-Sematism in Great Britain) the left is "no more anti-Semetic than the general population", and of the general population only 5% can be considered "hard" and "softer" anti-Semites.

It seems to me that exactly the same tactics as described here - the weaponising of anti-Semitism against the generally pro Palestinian element of the Labour Party - is what we have seen on this thread.

Ref for above: www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-the-pro-palestinian-left-s-jew-baiting-problem-1.5455368