Rhetoric and imagery which is pure and simple Jew hatred
My UK friends are disgusted with Corbyn and Labour. The refusal to sack Ken Livingstone is not a good move.
In an escalation of the controversy, nine senior members of Labour Friends of Israel, including Joan Ryan, Louise Ellman and Rachel Reeves, wrote to Corbyn urging him to call publicly for Livingstone to be expelled and to press the national executive committee to review its decision.
Around 100 Labour MPs, among them shadow cabinet ministers such as Barry Gardiner and Angela Rayner, also signed a statement saying saying the Labour decision “was not done in our name and we will not allow it to go unchecked”.
“This week the institutions of the Labour party have betrayed our values. We stand united in making it clear that we will not allow our party to be a home for antisemitism and Holocaust revisionism. We stand with the Jewish community and British society against this insidious racism,” they said.
…
Within Labour, Watson, the deputy leader, led criticism of the panel’s decision, saying it brought “shame on us all”. “I am ashamed that we have allowed Mr Livingstone to cause such distress,” he said. “It isn’t just Jewish people who feel disgusted and offended by what Mr Livingstone said and by the way he has conducted himself over this matter, and it isn’t just Jewish Labour members who feel ashamed of any indulgence of his views anywhere in the Labour party.”
Miliband said: “I am appalled that even now Ken shows no real remorse. His status should be revisited in the light of his continuing offensive behaviour.”
There were a string of reports that Jewish Labour members were leaving the party, with Lord Levy, the chief fundraiser under Tony Blair, among those saying he was considering his future as a member. Tulip Siddiq, Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, warned Corbyn that Jewish constituents were contacting her in despair and terminating their membership.
Livingstone said it was all a move to undermine Corbyn. That didn’t go down well either.
Livingstone’s claim that the charges against him were part of a move against Corbyn were challenged by Ivan Lewis, a Jewish Labour MP and former minister, who said: “Those who claim that these concerns are part of some ‘rightwing conspiracy’ against Jeremy Corbyn should be reminded that no one forced Ken Livingstone to go into a radio studio to speak about Nazi support for Zionism. They must also confront the reality that a minority who claim to be progressive seem to think that their opposition to the policies of the Israeli government entitles them to use rhetoric and imagery which is pure and simple Jew hatred.
“Equally, those socialists who seek to justify or deny antisemitism whenever it rears its ugly head are nothing more than apologists for racism. Enough is enough.”
So that’s more bad news.
So… was there early Nazi support for Zionism? Given U.S. right-wing support for so-called “self deportation” of Hispanics and Muslims, it’s not hard to imagine the Nazis supporting Zionism in the same vein of bigotry, at least until their infrastructure for the Holocaust was in place.
It’s suggested that Livingstone, a heavy drinker, is suffering from vascular dementia, which overtakes people in later life and makes them lose their inhibitions.
But the Labour Party is in an appalling mess at the moment and the anti-Israel obsession of the far left dominates the senior members, including their useless leader Corbyn (who to do him justice has told the National Executive Council to reconsider their decision).
The rabid anti-Israelism which so many ‘leftists’ seem to take in with their mother’s milk, is a shameful holdover from the Cold War. And it is riddled with historical lies, and blatant anti Semitism.
It keeps progressives from acknowledging the existence of Islamist tyranny, puts them in league with neo Nazi human dregs, and helps push real human-rights advocates, ex-Mulsims, and real reformers into twisted alliances with the Right.
KB Player @2,
I met Livingstone in London a decade ago, when he was still mayor. The occasion was a reception for a visting delegation of scientists of which I was a member. We were from many countries and he circulated the room saying hello. He seemed to pay particular attention to “foreign” (-looking) guests and since I fit that category he came over and asked where I was from. I said Montreal (true – English-speaking – Montrealers pronounce it “muntreal” but, for the benefit of foreigners, abroad, I generally pronounce it “mauhntreal”). He still seemed puzzled, so I added Canada. He apparently heard “Kenya” and slurred a few words about Nairobi. I had had a couple of drinks but he seemed utterly drunk. Now it’s the Jews. In vino veritas?
John the Drunkard @3,
There have been various red-brown alliances over the years, most recently over Syria, but these days they’ve added green to their colours – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%E2%80%93green%E2%80%93brown_alliance – and ex-Muslims like myself have great difficulty explaining to “progressives” why donning a hijab in “solidarity” is really a regressive gesture.
Good lord – you’d think a big city mayor would be familiar with the name “Montreal”!
As I understand it, it wasn’t support per se, but a calculated attempt to get Jews to leave Germany, leaving their assets behind, ‘to be sent on’. Obviously they never would have been sent, but it seems true that some Zionists were willing to consider the possibility and negotiate. I don’t think that translates to Hitler supporting Zionism or vice versa.
On the other hand, I’m not entirely convinced that the claims about Livingstone’s statements are entirely accurate in this case, although he has form..
Well Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem did discuss Eichmann’s “Zionism” and the absurd way he bragged about it in the courtroom.
From an FB friend:-
7 points for those like Ken Livingstone saying the Haavara agreement proves complicity between Nazis and Zionists:
1. The Haavara Agreement was a means of facilitating Jewish emigration to Palestine, by allowing them to transfer property from Germany to Palestine;. That was in the wider context of Germany encouraging Jewish emigration everywhere.
It’s true that Zionists had an interest in encouraging Jewish immigration to Palestine in order to liberate the Jewish people, It’s true that the Nazis encouraged Jewish emigration from Germany to anywhere, as part of a long-term plan to destroy the Jewish people.
But put this in some context: The Dutch Resistance fighter Geertruder Wijsmuller-Meijer, one of the top 3 rescuers of Jews during World War Two, met with Adolf Eichmann in Vienna and got him to agree to the transfer of 600 Jewish children out of Vienna to Britain. That began the Kindertransports out of Austria; one of which saved my grandmother.
So if you say that the Haavara Agreement proved “Hitler supported Zionism”, logically then does the Kindertransport prove that “Hitler supported the anti-Nazi resistance”?
2. The Haavara Agreement encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine – but it did not involve any forced deportation. Consider it in context: the Nazis wanted to expel the Jews from the Reich, and sought to use anywhere as a “dumping ground” (Cesarani’s term); be it Palestine, Madagascar, or parts of Poland they conquered.
As Nicosia writes, Germany used the Zionist movement as a way of furthering its own ends, whilst maintaining that Zionism and Jewish nationalism were a dishonest ruse. David Cesarani writes (Final Soluction, Location 2988 of Kindle edition):
“The Nazis were not Zionists in any conventional sense of the word: they did not care where Jews went when they left Germany, and treated Palestine as merely a dumping ground. If for any reason it ceased to be available they would force the Jews to go elsewhere.”
3. Hitler’s interaction with the Haavara Agreement came in the period 1937–39; not before 1932 as Livingstone suggested, and at a time when Hitler was intentionally making life as difficult as possible for the Jews in Germany. At this time, the Nazis were busy seizing Jewish businesses, banning Jews from public schools, cinemas, and parts of German cities. From 1933 until 1939, approximately half of Germany’s Jews emigrated, and Hitler wanted to encourage them to leave Germany. It is only in that context you can talk about Hitler’s attitudes towards Palestine.
4. Ken Livingstone claimed that Hitler was a Zionist, before he changed his mind in 1932 and went “crazy” and decided to kill Jews. As John Mann pointed out, this denies and distorts history. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in 1925, and wrote even then about gassing Jews:
“If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our very best German workers in the field, the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.”
In addition, Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Zionism was a Jewish ruse to trick the world into believing Jews wanted a nation-state in Palestine, whereas actually the Jews wanted a central base from which to undermine the world. Furthermore, Hitler wrote an article in the Illustrierter Beobachter in 1929, asking what the Jews could do in Palestine, when there are already two people there with the same essential qualities as the Jews: Armenians and Greeks (Ihrig, S., Ataturk and the Nazi Imagination, Cambridge, 2014, p.180).
5. If Hitler “went crazy” in 1932, it implies that Hitler was sane and rational until then. This is a glimpse into Livingstone’s depraved thinking: antisemitism is only irrational when people start killing Jews because of it; until then it is perfectly acceptable. Anyone defending Livingstone’s words is essentially defending this proposition.
6. The Haavara Agreement does not support the claim that Hitler was a Zionist (a clear lie if you read Mein Kampf or have any measure of historical awareness).
Mass deportations often go hand in hand with genocide; when the Ottomans decided to annihilate the Armenians, they euphemistically “deported” them to the Syrian desert, where they were tortured and murdered by Ottoman soliders.
In his book Final Solution, David Cesarani emphasised how often Hitler and the Nazis spoke of mass deportations of German and Austrian Jews “to the East”. In practice, the Jews were murdered as soon as they were “deported”, and after the deportations came the death camps. When you suggest a mass population transfer to a country that is not planning to receive anyone, or to a non-specified area, you effectively flirt with the first stage of genocide. At best it shows an ignorance of history, and at worst it shows a contempt for history’s lessons. Either way, no good can come of it.
7. Ken Livingstone proves the absurdity of his own argument; by speaking of Hitler going crazy and killing Jews in 1932 — as historically inaccurate as this is — he therefore proves it was logical for Jews to seek to leave Germany after this year.
The Guardian has been wrong and wishy-washy so often on matters of religion and politics, especially where these converge (their coverage of Charlie Hebdo was mostly off-target), that “guardianista” has entered the language as a particular kind of middle class liberal whose head is up his ass.
But they’ve become a lot more clear-eyed recently and their take on Livingstone and Labour is quite sharp.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/05/the-guardian-view-on-labour-and-ken-livingstone-wrong-decision-terrible-message
No, there wasn’t. And the Jew-baiting motives of anyone who insists on this absurdity are painfully transparent.
Helene:
That editorial mentions that Livingstone’s comments “undermine the moral foundations of the state of Israel”. That would be the nation founded by terrorism and that remains to this day an apartheid state. It’s not Livingstone’s comments that do the undermining.
StlSin @ 11,
On the slim chance that you are simply parroting slogans from some web site and are open to learn about the situation in the Middle East…
I hold no brief for the Israeli government, especially not Netanyahu and his rightwing coalition. In particular, I loathe the meddling by ultra-orthodox rabbis and the haredi community in many civil matters (e.g. marriage, divorce). But there is little doubt that Israel is by far the most liberal (full women’s rights, gays rights — gays serve openly in the military and the only gay pride parade that I’ve seen bigger than Tel Aviv’s is the one in Berlin — press freedom, general civil rights, etc.) and democratic country in the Middle East, with a better record on many of these issues than many European countries.
The “apartheid” epithet is nonsense. If you mean it to apply to Israeli Arabs, you’re utterly wrong. Their main disadvantage is that they are exempt from military conscription and therefore do not enjoy the special government benefits extended to ex-servicemen/women. Nevertheless, some Arabs (mainly Christian Arabs), many Bedouin – and most Druze – (altogether Muslims constitute about 20% of the Israeli population) do volunteer for military or public service and then do qualify for the government benefits. In all other respects, Arabs are full citizens. All religions are fully acknowledged. The Islamic WAPF controls the Muslim religious sites and various Christian denominations control their churches and religious sites. Arabic is an official language and Arab schools have their own curriculum in Arabic. Arabs are elected to the Knesset, head scientific, medical, educational, artistic and political institutions: ambassadorships, government agencies, even seats on the Israeli supreme court.
If you mean to apply the “apartheid” epithet to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, you’d be closer to the mark. Israel controls the borders militarily but civil and domestic matters, including police, are under Palestinian Authority or (in Gaza) de facto Hamas control. Many of the Jewish “settlers” in the West Bank enclaves are vile bible-thumpers but, as the various Israeli peace proposals over the years (in particular the one brokered by Clinton in 2000 and the even more generous one made in 2008 by Olmert) showed, many of these settlements would have been closed and with border adjustments the Palestinians would have received 95- 97% of their territory, plus compensation, upon ratification. But Abbas, and even Arafat before him (about whom Clinton said: “I regret that in 2000 Arafat missed the opportunity to bring that nation into being and pray for the day when the dreams of the Palestinian people for a state and a better life will be realized in a just and lasting peace”), perhaps remembering what happened to Sadat, who was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood when he signed the first Egyptian peace treaty with Israel, declined to ratify any sort of real peace with Israel. After Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it didn’t take long for Hamas to throw Fatah members off rooftops and begin sending rockets into Israel.
If you mean “apartheid” in a strictly racial sense, there are about 125,000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, not to mention smaller groups from other African countries and, being brown myself, I could not help noticing many more dark faces in Tel Aviv than in Ramallah … or, for that matter, Beirut.
If you mean to apply the “apartheid” epithet to the separation wall/fence that Israel built along some sections of the border with the West Bank, it is undeniably repugnant, but (from the Israeli point of view) it helped put a stop to the attacks and bombings that claimed the lives of over a thousand Israeli civilians during the Second Intifada.
I gave two lectures in Birzeit University (my mother’s family is from Lebanon so I have a bit of Arabic) and I attended a conference at the Technion in Haifa… just to indicate to you that I have a bit of firsthand experience in the region.
By comparison, Lebanon, which comes closest to Israel in being multi-ethnic and multi-religious, used to have a precarious political balance between various religious and ethnic groups (Maronites, Orthodox, Sunni, Shia, Druze, &c), but it is now utterly under the sway of Hezbollah, next to ISIS the worst bunch of theocratic tyrants in the entire region (along with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, they are the ones supporting Assad’s murderous campaign against his own people). Though most left years ago, my mother still has some relatives in Lebanon, but they are Sunni (Iran and Hezbollah are Shia, Assad is Alawaite, generally subsumed under Shia, but the majority of Syrians are Sunni, including the Kurds in the north) and they see the writing on the wall. Half a million Syrians have died in this civil war, most, horrendously, at Assad’s hands, and several million more have been driven from their homes. But for some people, if it can’t be blamed on the West (or on Israel, which has quietly been treating Syrian wounded in its hospitals), it isn’t worth protesting.
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