{"id":2255,"date":"2016-09-29T13:29:08","date_gmt":"2016-09-29T11:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=2255"},"modified":"2016-10-02T00:01:09","modified_gmt":"2016-10-01T22:01:09","slug":"israel-lobby-confects-another-labour-racism-row","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-09-29\/israel-lobby-confects-another-labour-racism-row\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel lobby confects another Labour racism row"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is difficult to ignore the shared agenda of the Blairites and Israel’s uncritical\u00a0supporters in the Labour party as they seek to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership at every turn. The confected anti-semitism “row” – claiming that the Labour party became a hotbed of anti-Jewish hatred the moment Corbyn took over \u2013 would look preposterous if it had not been continuously fuelled by a conniving\u00a0UK media.<\/p>\n

One of the early victims of this anti-semitism witch hunt was Jackie Walker, who has Jewish and African ancestry. She was tarred and feathered \u2013 and suspended from the party – for pointing out that the slave trade was an “African holocaust”. I wrote about that here<\/a>.\u00a0She and the other members purged from Labour were saved only because the Chakrabarti inquiry refuted the claims that the party actually had an anti-semitism problem.<\/p>\n

Now after Corbyn’s re-election, it looks like it is starting up again – and Walker finds herself\u00a0in the hot seat again too. One has to raise one’s eyes to the heavens to believe what the Guardian<\/a>, among many others,\u00a0is getting its\u00a0knickers in a twist about this time. Here is Walker’s\u00a0supposedly offensive comment at an “anti-semitism training event”\u00a0dominated\u00a0by the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM) at Labour’s\u00a0annual conference:<\/p>\n

In terms of Holocaust day, wouldn\u2019t it be wonderful if Holocaust day was open to all people who experienced holocaust?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Walker was appealing for Holocaust Day to be treated, in line\u00a0with\u00a0its original aim, as\u00a0a universal event that includes holocausts like the one in Africa.<\/p>\n

No matter. The Guardian claims\u00a0she then compounded\u00a0her\u00a0crime\u00a0by stating: \u201cI was looking for information and I still haven\u2019t heard a definition of antisemitism that I can work with.\u201d<\/p>\n

One can understand why the Jewish Labour Movement and the many Labour MPs who include themselves as Friends of Israel are upset. They have worked hard both to redefine antisemitism so that it forbids\u00a0almost all criticism of Israel, and to rebrand Holocaust Day so as to eclipse other groups,\u00a0including Europe’s Romany population, who were also victims of this industrialised genocide.<\/p>\n

A group of Jewish Labour activists issued a defence of Walker, noting<\/a>: “The way Jackie has been treated demonstrates the unfitness of the JLM to deliver training on antisemitism.”<\/p>\n

There can be little doubt\u00a0that the JLM is\u00a0trying to instrumentalise Jewish suffering to make it harder to criticise Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. It is probably\u00a0not surprising that Israel loyalists want\u00a0to corrupt the public discourse \u2013 and undermine concern about real racism towards Jews and the important, universal lessons of the Holocaust \u2013\u00a0by politicising these\u00a0issues. But that is no excuse for either the Blairites or supposedly liberal media like the Guardian to jump on their bandwagon simply because it offers a quick\u00a0path to damaging Corbyn.<\/p>\n

Sadly, as Corbyn tries to reframe the discussion about Israel and the Palestinians to make sure Palestinians are viewed as human too, we can expect much more of this kind of nonsense.<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/h3>\n

Sadly, and rather confirming the\u00a0worst\u00a0fears expressed\u00a0in this piece, Jewish Voice, one of the more progressive, if still Zionist, factions in Labour, took to Twitter to denounce this article as “anti-semitic”. Questioned why, they claimed\u00a0it was unfair to the JLM, which, they say, criticises some Israeli policies (but, of course, wholeheartedly supports Israel as a state conferring special citizenship privileges on Jews).<\/p>\n

My criticism\u00a0of the JLM \u2013 for repeatedly seeking\u00a0to undermine Corbyn and supporters like Jackie Walker \u2013 was apparently proof that I was “targeting Jews”. Jewish Voice has insisted that I apologise for my “offensive” article.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is difficult to ignore the shared agenda of the Blairites and Israel’s uncritical\u00a0supporters in the Labour party as they seek to undermine Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership at every turn. The confected anti-semitism “row” – claiming that the Labour party became a hotbed of anti-Jewish hatred the moment Corbyn took over \u2013 would look preposterous if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,59],"class_list":{"0":"post-2255","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-israel-lobby","8":"tag-jeremy-corbyn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}