General Politics Thread

[THE KING]

The State of Israel is an established fact that gets its legitimacy from functioning as one for 68 years. Moral justification doesn't come into it. But I don't think it is anti semitic to say it wouldn't exist without having carried out a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing.

But! with that statement you (according to the European Unions working definition of Anti semitisim) you are Anti Semetic.

[THE KING]

Israel is not a state that seeks ethnic homogeneity. It has committed many systemic attrocities against Palestinian Arabs, and it has committed many war crimes for excessive use of force and gross recklessness as to civilian casualties, but it has not and does not adopt a policy of "ethnic cleansing". That has a very specific meaning.

Nakba?

[THE KING]

I think bracketing GD and The King as being the same is not really fair.

The King clearly is an anti-semite.

GD is an anti-Zionist who is very defensive.

Back that up please.

[THE KING]

Sounds far fetched but in my experience of leftist politics, many genuinely believe Israel shouldn't exist.

Far fetched ? Here, the our Governments website which adheres to the EU definition of AntiSemitisim.

Have a look at how many times our Government deems it Anti Semetic ,IF you question Isreal.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-definition-of-antisemitism

[jmothecat]

Far fetched ? Here, the our Governments website which adheres to the EU definition of AntiSemitisim.

Have a look at how many times our Government deems it Anti Semetic ,IF you question Isreal.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/a-definition-of-antisemitism

That's because doing so is clearly anti-Semitic. You aren't seriously trying to defend people who argue against Israel's existence are you?

[Ludo*1]

I'm not up to date with the goings on recently, but from the short clip I've just seen on the news, Ken Livingstone compared someone to Hitler and John Mann had a complete fucking mental breakdown haranguing Livingstone about it. That about sum things up? 

[vikingTON]

Re tweeting a cartoon of Israel in America before she was an MP doesn't amount to suggesting the enforced transportation of Jews across the Atlantic.

 

Erm, yes it does. That was in fact the entire content of the cartoon - unless you're thick enough to presume that the placement of Israel in north America was a randomly generated background with no relation to the 'point' of the cartoon.

 

But of course you're just looking to wave away anti-Semitic reference towards 'transporting' wholesale communities that were, erm, 'transported' on a similar premise in the 1940s, on the basis that the clown representative shares your shrieking outrage about the actions of the Israeli state and a two-tin Trotskyist mentality. But she is an anti-Semitic bigot; as is a substantial portion of the left in Britain. The issue for posturers like yourself and Old Man Danger, who have long been white knighting for such utterly despicable groups, is whether you accept that there is a very serious problem, or continue trying to whitewash it away under the premise of mere 'anti-Israel' political rhetoric. Which it isn't; watch the Daily Politics breakdown for a start, then read those credible commentators who have been flagging this issue for months. If you think that Ken Livingstone's laughable equation of Hitler and the Zionist movement is i) a credible historical account or ii) a legitimate intervention into public discourse or iii) an isolated aberration from a normally sound discussion of Zionism on the British left then you're either completely or willfully ignorant of the facts.

[vikingTON]

Much of this, incidentally, boils down to a fallacy held by fanboys of the British left that racism is an outlook that is held exclusively by the political right, and so they can't possibly be guilty of being raging anti-Semites. Even when they call for the deportation of an entire population based on their religion/race, or comment on how a nefarious racial lobby mysteriously controls the media agenda (anti-Semite trope #1a, incidentally), or how a race shares physical characteristics that are just hilarious and noteworthy (all of which featured on a DP episode that clearly didn't take too much research or rummaging through ancient history to find).

Anyone who has even the slightest understanding of the modern, secular history of anti-Semitism would be aware that anti-Semitism has in fact been equally prevalent on the left as on the right. While the majority of the pus on the right was lanced by the obliteration of scientific eugenics and all sorts of blood and soil nonsense in 1945, the left continued on without any such check. The political status of Israel in fact sharpened anti-Semitism within the left in Stalinist states during the late 1940s and 1950s, and over subsequent decades it has seeped down to a similar level of discourse among the radical left in western Europe.

Edited May 1, 2016 by vikingTON

[vikingTON]

Oh and just to deal with Ken Livingstone/TheKing's rampantly anti-Semitic, revisionist account of history, an actual, erm, qualified historian and highly respected scholar on the topic easily demolishes their nonsense in an argument that even the thickest British leftist should be able to grasp:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36165298

Needless to say that the academic community is currently on tenterhooks waiting for TheKing's gormless right of response. After all that guy has only read pretty much all the relevant policy documents from the inter-war period relating to the Holocaust and the Nazis, as well as decades of top-level scholarship by other historians. You've googled a Library page and cherry-picked a random and incoherent definition of 'anti-Semitism' though, so this will presumably be a skoosh.

Edited May 1, 2016 by vikingTON

[Granny Danger]

That's because doing so is clearly anti-Semitic. You aren't seriously trying to defend people who argue against Israel's existence are you?

The creation of Israel was an imperial act by countries who can argue they had the legal authority under international law but really didn't have the moral authority. The fact that there are people alive today who were disposed by that act means it's hardly surprising that there is still resistance to its very existence. If someone had decided 68 years ago to annexe part of Scotland and hand it over for the creation of a new country I think we'd still have opposition here today.

I do not believe the dismantling of Israel is part of the solution but I can understand the argument of those who do. Trying to label them as anti-Semitic for doing so is just a way of trying to stifle debate.

[THE KING]

That's because doing so is clearly anti-Semitic. You aren't seriously trying to defend people who argue against Israel's existence are you?

Of corse not!

Are you seriously suggesting that anyone who thinks Israel is a racist state is Anti semitic?

[Ad Lib]

The creation of Israel was an imperial act by countries who can argue they had the legal authority under international law but really didn't have the moral authority. The fact that there are people alive today who were disposed by that act means it's hardly surprising that there is still resistance to its very existence. If someone had decided 68 years ago to annexe part of Scotland and hand it over for the creation of a new country I think we'd still have opposition here today.

I do not believe the dismantling of Israel is part of the solution but I can understand the argument of those who do. Trying to label them as anti-Semitic for doing so is just a way of trying to stifle debate.

Nice to know that the UN is now an empire. The foundation of the State of Israel was literally one of the first major acts of dismantling the British Empire when control was *relinquished* of the Palestinian Mandate and the principal forum of the international community decided collectively what to do with it. It is no more an "imperial act" than the UN sending peacekeepers into Kosovo, enabling them to become de facto independent from the then remnants of Yugoslavia.

[Granny Danger]

Nice to know that the UN is now an empire. The foundation of the State of Israel was literally one of the first major acts of dismantling the British Empire when control was *relinquished* of the Palestinian Mandate and the principal forum of the international community decided collectively what to do with it. It is no more an "imperial act" than the UN sending peacekeepers into Kosovo, enabling them to become de facto independent from the then remnants of Yugoslavia.

I love how you offer opinions as facts.

It was undoubtedly an imperialist act. Because it was a collective one doesn't make it any less so. It bears no parallel to UN peacekeepers in Kosovo. Did the people of Palestine request the UN annex their country?

[Ad Lib]

And for what it's worth, the Scottish analogy is a terrible one. Palestine was *never* an independent state. As a political entity Palestine was the informal name given to an administrative region of the Ottoman Empire that had resulted from cleaving it off from the Damascan-led subdivision. The "Palestinian people" were just as much split-up and displaced by the independence and territorial regularisation of states like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon as they were by the formation of the State of Israel. The functional difference is the latter isn't Arab.

Before the foundation of Israel, Palestinian nationalism was a minority pursuit. Pan-Arab nationalism had a much stronger hold over the region. Notice, of course, that when it comes to minority ethnicities or nationalities, few Arab states have what you could call an unimpeachable record, even with respect to Palestinian Arabs!

[Ad Lib]

I love how you offer opinions as facts.

It was undoubtedly an imperialist act. Because it was a collective one doesn't make it any less so. It bears no parallel to UN peacekeepers in Kosovo. Did the people of Palestine request the UN annex their country?

Palestine wasn't a country. It was a territory of the British Empire and before that was an Ottoman administrative region cleaved from Damascus.

[HaikuHibee]

I'm not up to date with the goings on recently, but from the short clip I've just seen on the news, Ken Livingstone compared someone to Hitler and John Mann had a complete fucking mental breakdown haranguing Livingstone about it. That about sum things up? 

 

Ken said something daft. Mann becomes a seething husk, outdoing Ad Lib.

 

[welshbairn]

Palestine wasn't a country. It was a territory of the British Empire and before that was an Ottoman administrative region cleaved from Damascus.

 

Zionists keep peddling this idea that people who lived in a place for countless generations didn't really exist because they hadn't established a nation state. People who don't exist don't have any rights.

[Ad Lib]

Zionists keep peddling this idea that people who lived in a place for countless generations didn't really exist because they hadn't established a nation state. People who don't exist don't have any rights.

No one here is pretending that the Palestinian people did not exist or did not live in the land covering the Mandate of Palestine for centuries.

I am merely pointing out that the analogy with breaking up part of modern Scotland by force very clearly does not hold in the slightest given the perpetual ambiguity as to the administrative and governing properties of that territory.

I have never argued that Palestinians should not achieve sovereign statehood. Clearly they should. I am simply pointing out that their claim to sovereign statehood does not give them an inviolable claim to either the whole of Mandatory Palestine, as has been clear ever since Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon all took big chunks of it for themselves, nor does it entitle them to the whole of Israel, as currently defined by the UN.

Almost no one says that Palestinians have "no rights". The debate is about *what rights*, *where they come from* and *how they may be exercised* and *over what*.

[Granny Danger]

And for what it's worth, the Scottish analogy is a terrible one. Palestine was *never* an independent state. As a political entity Palestine was the informal name given to an administrative region of the Ottoman Empire that had resulted from cleaving it off from the Damascan-led subdivision. The "Palestinian people" were just as much split-up and displaced by the independence and territorial regularisation of states like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon as they were by the formation of the State of Israel. The functional difference is the latter isn't Arab.

Before the foundation of Israel, Palestinian nationalism was a minority pursuit. Pan-Arab nationalism had a much stronger hold over the region. Notice, of course, that when it comes to minority ethnicities or nationalities, few Arab states have what you could call an unimpeachable record, even with respect to Palestinian Arabs!

The Scottish analogy is terrible says the guy who compared the creation of Israel to the UN sending troops to Kosova. You really couldn't make it up.

I think you probably fitted in well with the Foreign Office or whichever subsidiary department that did the dirty work back in 1947. I can see you coming up with a lot of self serving verbage for creating a country based on a 2,000 year old religious claim regardless of the impact of those already in the region.

[pandarilla]

Does anyone actually believe this is a genuine case of anti semitism bubbling over in the labour party?

It's one of the clearest examples of a politically manufactured crisis, with the media very much in tow.

That in no way defends the words of anyone involved but this is a really underhand piece of political shenanigans.