…are these things Corbyn has been accused of?
I think as so often, the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes of posts 79 and 80. In other words, I’m not convinced that Corbyn was personally an anti-Semite (and I certainly don’t think there is any evidence that he is or was a Holocaust-denier). But I do think he allowed accusations of anti-Semitism to damage himself and his party, and that was a factor (among others) in his general election defeats. He could and should have dealt more quickly and firmly with the whole issue. Instead he allowed it to blow up out of proportion - and no doubt there were people inside the party apparatus pushing that agenda. That was what he needed to stamp out.
On the other hand, I also believe there were elements of the right who had a vested interest in magnifying the issue for their own interests.
My personal takeaway from this thread has been a slight softening of my own position towards Israel, recognising the almost impossible position they are in and the difficulties they would have if they attempted a more moderate policy than currently (that is probably too euphemistic - I mean, for example, they could unilaterally disarm, but that could lead to their swift destruction, so I understand that’s totally off the table. In my younger, more idealistic days I probably didn’t appreciate that properly). Put another way, I now think the onus is more on the Palestinian leadership (and the people who elect them) to soften their position first. But painting all Palestinians as racist murderers isn’t really helpful.
Have you read Zoster’s posts? He’s happily accusing Corbyn of everything he can think of, with precious little evidence or cites, in a Gish Gallop of epic proportions. Corbyn’s almost certainly been accused of these things.
Whether the accusations have merit, of course, is another matter entirely.
At this point, any accusation he makes without a clear cite is easily dispensed with.
@chappachula1 Your arguments don’t make any sense. I support human rights for Palestinian people, but I have no belief that Israel shouldn’t exist. There is no inherent correlation between the two. I’m either for a one state solution with Israel or a two state solution with Israel and Palestine. It depends on whether both sides can learn to live with each other or not.
Telling people that, if they believe X, they must also believe Y, and Y is wrong is not a winning argument strategy. You can show that X and Y are really the same position, but you can’t do that with separate positions. All it takes is for someone to show why they support X but not Y, and your argument fails.
And, no, I don’t actually talk much about Israel and Palestine. You’re not going to see me say anything about them except when others bring them up. While I have an idea of where I would hope things would end up, I don’t have a good idea on how it should get there. There are so many more concerns in this world that I am far more confident in what should be done, and so will stick with those.
But, even so, the fact that I can so easily distinguish between your X and Y tells me they are not invariably linked. You’d need to prove to me that any particular person who is against Israel’s national policies is also for the removal of Israel as a State.
Having been around the original Labour division over Blair and having seen the attempt by the far left factions to ‘reclaim the heart’ of socialism after Blair I can see a lot of familiar things in your post.
Blair had repositioned Labour toward the centre, or rather he took the party in the logical direction based upon the momentum started by Kinnock.
Repealing Clause IV by Blair was central to that,
“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
One might say that the hard left of Labour sort of went along with it because they really couldn’t do much about it, and there was no other political home that would realisticly put them in a position to gain power - so the left kept their heads down.
Instead they created factions with similar outlooks within trade unions, such as Left Unity because those same unions were the ones who largely funded the Labour Party - the aim to hijack the source of cash. I personally know loads of utterly incompetent union officials whose ambition was mainly to have loads of employer recognised time to be away from work on trade union business - but when it actually came to dealing with members direct employument issues most of them were shite.
Labour itself declared certain very left wing factions in the party as being so far outside the party remit they no longer belonged - the idea being to kick them out.
It seems to me that what happened was that those more extreme elements developed their own lighthouse signals to identify each other - I know of a few groups who would follow the party rules in name and then hold their own meetings.
One of those Lighthouse signals was antying to do with the Palestinians - it really didn’t matter what the issue was or the platform, all it needed was for members to become emotionally engaged with Palestinian injustice and you were in - and set for movement upward within the union.
If you are for the Palestinians then logicly you much be against Israel, that’s how it seemed to emerge to me, I could see fringe meetings where it was reasonably coherent but along would come guests of allegedly displaced West Bank and Gaza persons describing their circumstances and these would be speakers and happy to discuss Q & As.
I walked out of a couple of such fringe meetings, you could see what was happening and you could see it in the flyers being handed out, in addition there were often fringe meetings of fringe meetings.
This is the area where the anti-semitism was sold, in order to gain support for a radical agenda its helpful to have someone to blame - the radical agenda was actually far left politics and move the Labour party over far to the left - a position certain to lose Labour power - and one which came completely true.
Point being, a lot of that pro-Palestinian (there was also plenty of pro-Cuba in amongst it too) was nothing to do with Palestine at all - that was just the bait to draw the less scrupulous and less intelligent into a Radical Left grouping.
I’ve already mentioned how I saw many useless individuals moving up with my own union and also in Unison union, not all that bright and not all that politically savvy - easy to see how they can be manipulated, so they came to believe loads of the pro Palestine stuff and quite easily went over into Anti-Semitism.
I personally think thats why Corbyn was so blindspotted - because the left wing support he had gained was through allegedly pro-palestine groups which were really that thinly disguised far left ‘party within a party’ that the Labour mainstream had excluded from membership - I think Corbyn thought it was nod nod wink wink indication of far left committment rather than it had morphed or had actrively become anti-semite
This analysis is absolutely correct - I’ve provided some background in my prior posts on how “anti-Zionism” was invented and became a leftist cause, and its use to identify the left wing of the party absolutely worked the way you set out here. This is why I don’t subscribe to the notion that “anti-Zionism” arises out of a pre-existing anti-Semitism; rather, the arms race to prove who is more anti-Zionist than the next guy in the endless rounds of leftist purity testing has, over time, led to the embrace of anti-Jewish positions by the far left as they attempt to cast their net against “Zionism” wider and wider each year. It’s a set of shibboleth issues from people who will go on Iranian state television to laud Vladimir Putin in the morning and then somehow demonstrate for “human rights” in the afternoon with a straight face.
Mind naming the person that did this? Maybe link to a dated, sourced news story for this day? Don’t worry about the “straight face” part, I’ll figure that’s poetic license. Just the rest of it.
How droll. Putin doesn’t show up anywhere in that article. Perhaps you misread?
Are you seriously unaware of Corbyn carrying water for the Russian regime or are you just pretending to be? This is a major reason he couldn’t compete in the last election.
Well I am certainly not aware of any overt support by Corbyn of Putin, although I would acknowledge that he is of a grouping that at one time did have some admiration for the ‘workers paradise’ version of the Soviet Union - he kept all that hidden if he had it at all.
I do remember way back that the only party that was against joining the EU back in the early 1970’s was the Communist Party, and Corbyn was also well known among us for having held a pretty strong anti EU outlook at one time, and Leavers often tried to tempt Corbyn into making a definitive statement of his personal position many times - only to be met with very weaselly responses about the Labour Party policy.
We never got his personal view, but some of his close associates from his early days were anti-EU, perhaps he changed his outlook but I was never convinced, I always thought he was holding his nose and making non-anti EU noises, I don’t recall him ever heartily endorsing EU.
I dunno, I always got the impression he was/is very much a CND creature and we do know that the CND Greenham protester were funded through Soviet channels - but that is far from holding a candle for Russia directly, it isn’t the smoking gun.
…you were asked for a cite that Corbyn went “on Iranian state television to laud Vladimir Putin.” Are you able to provide that cite or would you prefer to withdraw that claim?
- Make outrageous claim.
- Receive a request for a cite.
- Offer a cite that does not support the claim.
- Be challenged on that.
- Imply that the challenger is stupid or lying.
I’m no longer expecting a cite; my curiosity on the subject is fully satisfied.
So if he accepted money from the Iranian regime to propagandize for them on state television at one time, and repeatedly apologized for Vladimir Putin at other times, but didn’t do so on the same day, that’s totally an exoneration of the notion that he supports both the Iranian regime and Putin and is thus completely without credibility on the notion of “human rights” for anyone.
Because he didn’t do it on the same day, which is the key condition for it mattering, because you say so.
It’s just a huge surprise that you people can’t manage to crack 40% support in an election.
In the interest of total accuracy: In his most notable paid appearance on the Iranian regime’s propaganda channel, Corbyn did not discuss Putin, but rather accused a conspiracy of Jews of being responsible for a mass killing in Egypt that was actually perpetrated by Islamic extremists.
A great guy whose reputation I should not sully by claiming that he mixes up the days on which he accepts money from the Iranian regime to invent Jewish conspiracy theories and the days when he justifies the Putin regime murdering dissidents on British soil. Let it never again be said that Corbyn has ever devoted less than his full daily attention to either of those agendas.
Nobody’s exonerating anything. We’re calling you on a bullshit claim. If you’d like to make a different claim that’s not bullshit, maybe someone else will entertain it; as I said, my curiosity about the quality of your claims is satisfied.
And in the interests of total accuracy, your latest claim is much closer to accuracy, and is indeed a good example of Corbyn being an antisemitic asshole. If you’d make your claims carefully instead of just throwing all sorts of different shit together and then heaping scorn on anyone who isn’t okay with it, you’d be more persuasive.
The metaphor of “doing one thing in the morning and the other in the afternoon” to juxtapose the hypocrisy of those two things is an “outrageous” and “bullshit” claim even though there is no serious dispute that both things were done.
I wonder how you would react to someone accusing the Labour Party of, say, “having a left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” or “speaking out of both sides of its mouth.” Corbyn didn’t pick up his payments from the Iranian regime with his left hand, he clearly used his right, and this video shows him using only the center of his mouth to justify Vladimir Putin assassinating people on British soil! Completely discredited!
It’s like trying to argue with Amelia Bedelia over here. No, don’t pour dust over the curtains, that’s not what we meant…
What when he said it would have been in Israel’s interest? It’s just speculation and Israel does like to assissinate it’s enemies, it’s not something they actively deny or at least plausibly deny.
You two will have to put your bickering on hold for now because I have discovered they are doing the same shit in Australia.
Rupert Murdock, famous propagandist has his goons smearing Australian Labor too:
Lies from an absolute shit-rag. The Australian newspaper has waged campaigns against belief in global warming, taxing the well-off and obeying international rules on being nice to refugees, they are total scum, fuck them.
Copy and paste bullshit from Murdock, when they are expert racists with decades of experience.