The antisemitism problem that is growing in the party
Naz Shah has been suspended by the Labour party pending an investigation. Earlier today Corbyn said he had accepted her apology, but it turned out that his acceptance wasn’t the only issue.
But later in the day, Labour announced that the Bradford West MP had been suspended, “by mutual agreement,” while claims against her were investigated by the compliance committee of Labour’s national executive committee.
The allegations centre around a 2014 Facebook post, in which Shah shared a graphic of Israel’s outline superimposed on a map of the US under the headline “Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict – Relocate Israel into United States”, with the comment: “Problem solved.”
And Buzzfeed said its article about the party’s drastic editing of Shah’s apology was all wrong.
Sources close to Corbyn denied that they had edited an article in Jewish News, in which Shah apologised. It was alleged in an article on Buzzfeed that the article had been changed, to remove references to the wider challenge of antisemitism on the left but senior party sources insisted that was “categorically not the case”, and the only changes had been stylistic. Buzzfeed later accepted that this was the case and that “nobody in Jeremy Corbyn’s office or Labour HQ saw or edited the draft referred to in our [Buzzfeed’s] original story”.
Later, Shah issued a statement, by email, saying: “The statement referred to by Buzzfeed was neither drafted by me nor approved by me. This was a very personal issue which I felt required a very personal response.
“I had caused the offence, it was right that I wrote my own apology. I sent my final statement to the Labour party for information. At no point was it changed by my party.”
People are saying it’s about time Labour did something about antisemitism in the party.
John Woodcock, MP and former chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, said: “The handling of this has been a mess. But the most important thing is that the Labour leadership properly acknowledges now the scale of the antisemitism problem that is growing in the party.”
“This is abhorrent to our values as a party. It ought to transcend views on the leadership and wider party direction but unless and until it is gripped by everyone from Jeremy downwards it is going to fester and undermine everything we do.”
Shah’s suspension was the latest in a series of incidents which have raised questions about antisemitism in the Labour party. Former parliamentary candidate Vicki Kirby was recently suspended, after being re-admitted to the party following anti-semitic Tweets, including comments about Jews having “big noses”.
The latest involved the suspension of Khadim Hussain, a Labour councillor and former lord mayor of Bradford, who was put under investigation for sharing a Facebook post that complained “your school education system only tells you about Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler”. He has now quit the party.
There’s one more general paragraph about antisemitism in the party, and that’s it. Nowhere in the article is the likely source of much (or all?) of this antisemitism mentioned. Why would Khadim Hussain say a thing like that?
What a mess.
The rot is a lot deeper, unfortunately. In one especially revolting case, another Bradford Labour councillor, Ishtiaq Ahmed, tweeted a link to the notorious Goebbels-commissioned film, “Der Ewige Jude”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eternal_Jew_%281940_film%29
Shah’s unedited apology was good and heartfelt and I hope she’s reinstated.
Sam Kriss provides an interesting counterpoint to the current narrative: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/sam-kriss-the-right-has-an-anti-semitism-problem
Now Ken Livingstone has thrown a Molotov cocktail into the fray. (Livingstone has already been suspended)
Sam Kriss? yeah…tell me another:
‘In my experience, though, nobody is more invested in rooting out anti-Semitism within the Palestine solidarity movement than the Palestine solidarity movement itself. ‘
@3
Ah yes, “anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism”. That thread is getting a little bare.
Ok, now let’s turn over the same coin. How about the left acknowledging that philo-Islamism isn’t progressive?
Some years ago I learned what liberal Muslims (not to mention atheists, “apostates” or Jews) may now be learning. When an acquaintance discovered that I was (born) Muslim (I’m light brown and my surname is French so the usual assumption in Montreal is that I’m Haitian and therefore Christian), she invited me to the meeting of a group in Montreal’s “McGill ghetto” that had evolved over the years from the old nuclear disarmament campaign into something like a catch-all left “alternative” organization. Why my “religion” attracted her I couldn’t fathom, but I went along. The attendees were an eclectic group, including some old “new-left” survivors, some straightforward municipal activists and some new young Trotskyist “stoppers”. After discussing a few local issues (a green space was going to disappear under new condos), the talk turned to provincial politics (disagreement all round since the group was divided between anglophones and francophones), federal politics (disappointment over the new conservative government) and then international politics.
That’s when my “religion” entered the discussion. There was unanimous opposition to western policies around the world, especially American. Egypt was still under Mubarak, Gaddafi still ruled Libya, Syria hadn’t yet disintegrated, the Sunni tribes hadn’t yet rebelled against the Shiite government in Baghdad, so the Middle East was no special issue beyond one pro-Hamas comment to which most nodded. I dissented saying that Hamas was a nasty, theocratic group that would ultimately set back the Palestinian cause, but the group were clearly ill-informed, puzzled and remained silent. Then I mentioned that I approved of western efforts in Afghanistan against the Taliban in order to open schools for girls. Here they knew which side they were on. The majority felt that “we” had no business telling Muslims how to run their affairs. That’s when I revealed that I had briefly worn a hijab myself and I preferred not having imams, or any religious authorities, ruling my life. I think some in the group misunderstood my position because they immediately began “sympathizing” with my predicament and how I was “forced” to remove my hijab. It was only when I made it clear that I was just as much against mosques and imams as they seemed to be against the Church, that the rift became apparent. The Church was the “oppressor”; Islam was a symbol of the “oppressed”. When I opined that Islam was a far greater “oppressor” around the world these days – I mentioned blasphemy, misogyny and homophobia, the subjugation of women and minorities – I could see that some of my interlocutors were confused. I wasn’t playing my assigned part! In short, the evening didn’t end well.
A decade later the Middle East has collapsed into horrific bedlam and the alliance between the regressive left and theocratic Islam is in full display in places like Bradford.
Kriss is full of it. The Palestine solidarity movement has excused everyrhing from chants of “shoot the Jew” at a concert to synagogue arson as, as Kriss puts it, “a strongly worded outcry against the violence of the Israeli state.”
It’s appropriate that he wrote this for Vice, whose co-founder Gavin Mcinnes once said of the publication’s editorial vision, “We don’t like Jews.”