Double Down News ✒ Meet The Wrong Type of Jew, The Media Doesn't Want You To Know Exists Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi.
Showing posts with label British Labour Party and Anti-Semitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label British Labour Party and Anti-Semitism. Show all posts
 |
| Jonathan Cook |
First, the commission’s headline verdict – though you would never know it from reading the media’s coverage – was that no case was found that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.
That, however, was precisely the claim that had been made by groups like the Jewish Labour Movement, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Board of Deputies and prominent rabbis such as Ephraim Mirvis. Their claims were amplified by Jewish media outlets such as the Jewish Chronicle and individual journalists such as Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian. All are now shown to have been wrong, to have maligned the Labour Party and to have irresponsibly inflamed the concerns of Britain’s wider Jewish community.
Continue reading @ Information Clearing House.
 |
 |
Turns out everyone's favourite millionaire communist hobbyist Andrew Murray was such a fierce opponent of the Tories, he wanted to go into coalition with them to deliver Brexit. Amazing the brass neck of Corbynites calling others Tory lite #LeftOut
 |
It’s the revelations about antisemitism or general incompetence that seem to have attracted the most attention. For me though, it’s the following passage that jumped out:
Witnesses still dispute the cause of the conflagration, and the precise language Alvarez used to deliver her coup de grâce. One attendee recalled Alvarez ‘having a pop’ that Thompson, as a long-standing friend of the couple, found particularly wounding. ‘Marsha finally blew and gave it right back to her.’ The previous evening she herself had rowed with Corbyn, whose lax approach to timekeeping and failure to keep to diary commitments had at points threatened to derail LOTO’s delicate plans for conference. That he was suffocated by his countless admirers did not help. On the night of Laura’s clash with Thompson, the hotel in which they had dined shut down its bar and kitchen temporarily so 120 of its staff could have their picture taken with Corbyn. One aide likened him to a ‘stroppy teenager’. When Thompson confronted Corbyn for an explanation of his behaviour, he accused her of siding with Murphy.
The confrontation took place at the 2019 party conference, at a time when Karie Murphy, executive director of the leader’s office, was losing Corbyn’s trust and under severe factional pressure from within the ‘project’. Marsha-Jane Thompson was Corbyn’s head of campaigns. Laura Alvarez is Corbyn’s wife. At the same time as this tight-knit inner circle was becoming dysfunctional, the leader was the focus of public celebration and adoration to the point that the business of leadership was imperilled. Behind closed doors, Corbyn was squabbled over; in public, he was venerated.
The details of this particular spat are not really important, although it’s a tribute to the authors that they have revealed a steady stream of similar anecdotes. But the story seems to encapsulate a wider duality that explains much about what happened to the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership.
On the one hand of this duality lay brutal conflict; on the other, joyful love. From 2015 to 2019, the Labour Party was engulfed in waves of vicious in-fighting and almost ecstatic hope and celebration. And we cannot understand one without understanding the other; the queasy dialectic they produced eventually leading to ignominious defeat.
Jeremy Corbyn was the propulsive force at the heart of this dialectic. He was the object of love, hate and struggle. Yet at the same time, as Left Out shows, he was often curiously disengaged. He loathed confrontation of any kind. He spoke in generalities. He avoided detail and the messy business of party management.
Usually, I am suspicious of historical accounts that centre on particular individuals. Social and political movements are rarely reducible to one person. Yet Jeremy Corbyn’s role within the Labour Party might be an exception. While the social and political forces that propelled him to the top and that resulted in electoral semi-success in 2017 and total defeat in 2019, are multiple and complex, in the end we cannot understand what happened without a clear focus on Jeremy Corbyn himself.
Or, rather, on ‘Jeremy Corbyn’ himself. There were multiple constructions of who he is and what he represents and it was these constructions that were the object of struggle. The movement that elected him and adored him usually constructed him as a man of unimpeachable integrity, of unflappable plain-speaking kindness, of idealism and as the embodiment of the hope of change. Amongst his detractors, Jeremy Corbyn was, according to taste, a crank, an antisemite, a lover of tyranny, a naive fool and an empowerer of bullies.
The hate and the conflict that scarred the party from 2015 and 2019 was, largely but by no means completely, the result of the clash of these irreconcilable ‘Jeremy Corbyns’.
The antisemitism issue is the most devastating example of this. Antisemitism on the left is not new, and the expansion in the scope and seriousness of the problem would have been an inevitable result of the election of any left anti-imperialist Labour leader. But what shifted the problem from ‘difficult but possibly solvable’ to ‘impossible and unsolvable’ was the use to which antisemitism was put in defending Corbyn from perceived and real threats. The 2016 coup against him from his critics in the PLP triggered an outraged response from those for whom Jeremy Corbyn was the repository of their hopes and dreams. Antisemitism was one weapon in the arsenal to defend the leader against those who threatened the golden future that Corbyn embodied. Those Jewish MPs who took part in the coup (Luciana Berger being one of the most prominent) became a symbol of the treachery of the Labour right and centre.
Love can make people do terrible things in defence of the loved object. Love led members of Corbyn’s staff to tear each other apart in their rival attempts to defend the leader. Love led people who had rarely thought about Jews, Israel and the Palestinians, to retweet memes about ‘The Rothschilds’. Love led Corbynite Jews to let themselves be chosen as the ideal Jew, to be a beautiful reflection of the leader himself, to abandon any kind of solidarity with other Jews. Love led Corbyn’s inner circle to fight amongst themselves over how best to protect the man, when it was really he himself who should have had the strength to protect them from their worst selves. And Corbyn’s own love for the people he could relate to, was accompanied by an inability to relate to those he could not love.
The Corbynite who comes across best in Left Out is John McDonnell. While he was, for many years, Corbyn’s only real friend in the House of Commons, the events of 2015-2019 show him to have been motivated by a love greater than love for one man. McDonnell loved the project to build socialism first and foremost. Sometimes that meant steadfast defence of Corbynism and all that it entailed (including, on occasions, colluding in dismissing antisemitism), but from 2017 to 2019 his greater desire for socialism began to win out as he pushed back against what he saw as the increasingly disastrous job that Corbyn’s acolytes were doing. In fact, the closer one got to the Corbynite inner circle, so it became easier to express frustration with the man himself and to voice (privately) the criticisms that would, if voiced publicly, have led to vicious abuse from the Corbynite grassroots. What is depressing is how far the movement’s ‘outriders’ and grassroots activists chose to make Corbyn untouchable. Paul Mason is one of the only prominent fellow travellers who refused to bet all their desires for social and political change on the political survival of one individual.
It is only by understanding the warped effects that love can have that we can truly understand what happened to the Labour Party under Corbyn. There’s a lot of loose talk amongst critics of Corbyn that the party became a ‘cult’. To a degree, there’s something to this: It’s hard to view memes celebrating Corbyn’s ‘Nobel prize’ and crediting him for the Good Friday Agreement, without seeing something culty. But the problem with this perspective is that it assumes that Corbyn was not just fundamentally unlovable, he was positively and deviously malign. The point about a cult leaders like Jim Jones is that, while followers love them, they are actually evil charlatans.
I don’t think Corbyn is an evil charlatan. In fact, the mistake that many anti-antisemitism campaigners often make is to see the hate that undoubtedly mushroomed under Corbyn as a reflection of the man himself. In other words, they accuse Corbynites of loving a man with nothing to love about him.
One of the great strengths of Left Out is that, however devastating a picture the authors paint of Corbyn, they also detail his good qualities: He is clearly devoted to his constituency, is capable of great kindness to friends and strangers and has endless empathy for the poor and marginal. These are prosaic and relatable good qualities: not those of a hero but of an everyday decent person.
Corbyn’s worst qualities are similar: mundane and a bit pathetic rather than evil. He is peevish, has gigantic blindspots in his worldview, is not particularly bright, is often passive aggressive, is sometimes indolent, is largely incapable of dealing with people who don’t already agree with him, and is incapable of managing a team let alone a party.
Corbyn may have shared platforms with appalling haters, antisemites and friends of dictators, but he rarely joined in with and repeated their hatred; most of the time he simply stood by, deluding himself that the hate was a little bit of unfortunate excess. Even at one of the few times he explicitly repeated an antisemitic trope – the now-notorious comment that two particular Jews didn’t understand irony despite living here all their lives – seems to have been as much as anything, a way of honouring the urbanity of his Palestinian co-panelists, rather than a vicious attack. To accuse him of hating Jews (or, at least, Zionist Jews), as some have done, is to misunderstand how he works: I don’t think he hates anyone particularly, it’s just that he has no idea how to relate to those he cannot understand and that leaves the door open to tacitly colluding with those who have much more hateful feelings towards them.
It is extraordinary that a man of such regular and ’normal’ good and bad points should be the focus of such extreme love and hate. It is bizarre that this was the man over whom so many people fought, hurt and abused; the man who twisted so many decent people on both the left and right of the party, and on the inside and the outside of the Jewish community, into becoming obsessive haters.
Corbynite readers of Left Out will take comfort in the stories of shoddy behaviour of Tom Watson and the Labour right. Certainly, there is a culture of factionalism and mutual abusiveness that dates back to long before 2015. But whereas in previous eras, this tendency was held in check to the extent that it did not permeate across the party, in the Corbyn years people across the Labour spectrum into performing their worst selves. It is to Labour’s and Corbyn’s shame that so many people fell into the abyss.
Perhaps the story of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn is ultimately a cautionary tale of what happens when the image of a person becomes completely disconnected from the actual person. Corbyn could never square accusations of tolerance for antisemitism with his self-image as a lifelong anti-racism. He made the mistake in thinking that good intentions are enough; that if you understand yourself as working for good, if bad things follow then it is not your responsibility.
Pogrund and Maguire argue at the end of Left Out, that ‘on no subject was he more stubborn than his own sense of identity’. As they conclude:
When it came to Labour’s relationship with the Jewish community, the failure was his. The empathy that defined him as a man and politician escaped him. In the face of accusations of racism, he too often empathised with himself. It might reasonably be argued that here was a leader whose preference was to split his own party, rather than apologise.
All of us have sometimes faced a situation when someone accuses us of being something other than who we feel we are. It’s disorienting, hurtful and even scary. Sometimes facing up to such accusations, when they are made in good faith, can allow us to grow as people, to incorporate new elements into one’s self-identity. Sometimes such accusations are purely malign gaslighting. But you can never know which is which without at least allowing for the possibility that who you think you are is not all that you are.
Years ago, when he was a marginal MP, and in the right private circumstances, perhaps Jeremy Corbyn might have been able to open himself up to a serious dialogue about the blindspots in his identity. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he would always have been someone who would countenance no discussion of his self-identity, regardless of whom he had become in life. We will never know. But as head of the Labour Party, as someone the continual eye of the political storm, there was never any prospect that he could have seriously engaged with the limitations of his anti-racist identity and the unintended consequences of his good intentions. When there are people who have constructed you as a uniquely loveable figure, would any of us listen to those who say we are uniquely hateful? That’s not narcissism so much as simple human weakness – it’s nicer to be validated than challenged.
So love was always the problem. Unloveable – but not unhateable – politicians may be healthiest for democracy. In Keir Starmer we have an unloveable Labour leader. While my politics are further to the left than Starmer’s, I am more content with a leader of the opposition that sparks only tepid emotion. When the book is written on the Labour Party under Starmer, I hope that it will be intensely dreary. That Left Out is a page-turner isn’t a good thing.
 |
| Dr Keith Kahn-Harris is a senior lecturer at Leo Baeck College, runs the European Jewish Research Archive at the IJPR and is an Honorary Fellow of the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck College. His most recent book is Strange Hate: Antisemitism, Racism and the Limits of Diversity (Repeater 2019). This article was originally published at JewTh!nk |
One of us had a discussion with an elderly relative:
The last comment was spoken with real anguish, the result of continuous exposure to just two main news sources: the Daily Mail and the BBC.
What is astonishing is that, just four years ago, essentially no-one held this view of Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn first became an MP in 1983. He stood for the Labour leadership 32 years later, in May 2015. We searched the ProQuest database for UK newspaper articles containing:
‘He can’t be allowed to become Prime Minister.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s so awful…’
‘What is?’
‘The way he hates the Jews.’
The last comment was spoken with real anguish, the result of continuous exposure to just two main news sources: the Daily Mail and the BBC.
What is astonishing is that, just four years ago, essentially no-one held this view of Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn first became an MP in 1983. He stood for the Labour leadership 32 years later, in May 2015. We searched the ProQuest database for UK newspaper articles containing:
‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ before 1 May 2015 = 18 hits
‘Jeremy Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ after 1 May 2015 = 11,251 hits
None of the 18 hits accused Corbyn of anti-Semitism. For his first 32 years as an MP, it just wasn’t a theme associated with him.
Continue reading @ Media Lens
 |
| By Lisa O'Carroll and Jessica Elgot |
The Labour party has apologised “unreservedly” and paid out a six-figure sum to seven former employees and a veteran BBC journalist, admitting it defamed them in the aftermath of a Panorama investigation into its handling of antisemitism.
The settlement and formal apologies to both the reporter, John Ware, and the ex-employees, which have been read in open court, is believed to have cost the Labour party between £600,000 and £750,000, with about £200,000 in damages agreed for the eight individuals.
The settlement is believed to be an unprecedented case of a political party libelling a journalist and former employees.
Labour conceded it had made defamatory and false allegations against the litigants in the light of their interview with the Panorama programme Is Labour Antisemitic?, broadcast last July.
Continue reading @ The Guardian.
1) She said nothing that could remotely be construed by any reasonable person as in any way anti-Semitic. On the contrary, by implying that any criticism of the Israeli state is anti-Semitic, it is Keir Starmer who is breaking one of the IHRA's basic definitions of anti-Semitism: i.e., implying that Jews in general can be held collectively responsible for the actions of Israel.
2) Israel makes no secret of the fact that one of its main exports is police and military security training and equipment, and does use similar repressive techniques itself (although it's true that the US police don't need much advice in how to murder innocent civilians).
3) Tory propaganda based on the accusation that Labour is anti-Semitic is just that: propaganda - a monstrous lie, in the traditions of previous Tory smears, such as the Zinoviev letter in 1923, or Churchill's warning in 1945 that a Labour government would instal a Gestapo police state. The only defence against such propaganda is implacable exposure of the truth, not appeasement. The ritual sacrifice of so many innocent socialists unfairly branded anti-Semitic (Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, and hundreds more) has done absolutely nothing to placate the Tory liars.
4) By far the biggest Labour Jewish organisation is not the so-called "Jewish Labour Movement", for membership of which there is no requirement to be either Jewish or Labour, but Jewish Voice for Labour, which staunchly opposes this witch-hunt.
5) Keir Starmer won the leadership election promising to unite the party and maintain Corbyn's radical agenda; that's why he had to appoint one token Corbynite to his front bench team. Now, at the first and flimsiest excuse, he has wasted no time in sacking RBL, in the process breaking both promises at one fell swoop. I suspect that his real motive for doing so was to escape Johnson's repeated taunts that Labour was supporting the legitimate objections of the National Education Union to a premature reopening of the schools. Already Starmer's policy is visibly shifting towards Johnson's policy, which risks a new wave of infections and thousands more deaths.
6) Labour will stand a far better chance of winning the next election by upholding principled policies rather than capitulation and appeasement.
➽Roger Silverman is a veteran socialist and campaigner.
Jonathan Cook ➤ Crackdown by UK Labour leader on left-wing rival will subdue critics of Israel in his party ahead of Israel’s annexation move.
Middle East Eye – 29 June 2020
The sacking of Rebecca Long-Bailey from the UK shadow cabinet – on the grounds that she retweeted an article containing a supposedly “antisemitic” conspiracy theory – managed to kill three birds with one stone for new Labour leader Keir Starmer.
First, it offered a pretext to rid himself of the last of the Labour heavyweights associated with the party’s left and its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Long-Bailey was runner-up to Starmer in the leadership elections earlier in the year and he had little choice but to include her on his front bench.
Starmer will doubtless sigh with relief if the outpouring of threats on social media from left-wing members to quit over Long-Bailey’s sacking actually materialises.
Second, the move served as a signal from Starmer that he is a safe pair of hands for the party’s right, which worked so hard to destroy Corbyn from within, as a recently leaked internal review revealed in excruciating detail. Despite the report showing that the Labour right sabotaged the 2017 general election campaign to prevent Corbyn from becoming prime minister, Starmer appears to have buried its contents – as have the British media.
Continue reading @ Middle East Eye.
By Ronan Burtenshaw.
Keir Starmer never intended for Rebecca Long-Bailey to play a prominent role in his shadow cabinet.
Her 135,000 votes in the leadership election meant she couldn’t be excluded from high office entirely – not, at least, after a campaign in which he had promised to stick by Corbyn’s policies and preached a message of unity. But nor was she going to be allowed to continue her work on Labour’s Green New Deal. The Great Offices of State were clearly out of the question.
And so they settled on shadow education secretary, where Long-Bailey’s close friend Angela Rayner could give her a steer. The brief was calculated to be significant enough to appease the Left, but far enough from the leadership’s priorities to keep the shadow cabinet’s highest ranking socialist relatively quiet. After all, the word ‘education’ hadn’t even appeared in Starmer’s famous ten pledges during the election.
But even the most forensic political operation couldn’t have foreseen the emergence of a global pandemic. The Covid-19 crisis forced Starmer and his team to adapt – and had the unhappy consequence of elevating the importance of the education brief. Starmer resisted this initially, making the decision to leave Long-Bailey out of his Covid-19 response committee. Soon, however, conditions imposed themselves.
And so they settled on shadow education secretary, where Long-Bailey’s close friend Angela Rayner could give her a steer. The brief was calculated to be significant enough to appease the Left, but far enough from the leadership’s priorities to keep the shadow cabinet’s highest ranking socialist relatively quiet. After all, the word ‘education’ hadn’t even appeared in Starmer’s famous ten pledges during the election.
But even the most forensic political operation couldn’t have foreseen the emergence of a global pandemic. The Covid-19 crisis forced Starmer and his team to adapt – and had the unhappy consequence of elevating the importance of the education brief. Starmer resisted this initially, making the decision to leave Long-Bailey out of his Covid-19 response committee. Soon, however, conditions imposed themselves.
Continue reading @ Tribune.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
