Jewish Council Against Corbyn: "Enough is Enough" - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14899740
Labour finished its internal report(PDF) against antisemitism under which action was taken against the alleged antisemites, but for Jewish leaders and certain Labour MP's that action was evidently not enough. The current row comes due to a street mural that artist Mear One painted back in 2012 that has since been removed; back then Jeremy Corbyn saw the artists message on facebook in which he was complaining that his mural was marked for removal and defended him by saying:

Jeremy Corbyn wrote:“Why? You are in good company. Rockerfeller [sic] destroyed Diego Viera’s [sic] mural because it includes a picture of Lenin.”


Image

His facebook message resurfaced a couple of days and Corbyn issued an apology:

Jeremy Corbyn wrote:“I sincerely regret that I did not look more closely at the image I was commenting on.”


His apology resulted in the following furious letter by British Jews:

Board of Deputies of British Jews and Jewish Leadership Council wrote:Today, leaders of British Jewry tell Jeremy Corbyn that enough is enough. We have had enough of hearing that Jeremy Corbyn “opposes antisemitism”, whilst the mainstream majority of British Jews, and their concerns, are ignored by him and those he leads.

There is a repeated institutional failure to properly address Jewish concerns and to tackle antisemitism, with the Chakrabarti report being the most glaring example of this.

Jeremy Corbyn did not invent this form of politics, but he has had a lifetime within it, and now personifies its problems and dangers. He issues empty statements about opposing anti-Semitism, but does nothing to understand or address it.

We conclude that he cannot seriously contemplate antisemitism, because he is so ideologically fixed within a far left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities.

When Jews complain about an obviously antisemitic mural in Tower Hamlets, Corbyn of course supports the artist. Hezbollah commits terrorist atrocities against Jews, but Corbyn calls them his friends and attends pro-Hezbollah rallies in London. Exactly the same goes for Hamas.

Raed Salah says Jews kill Christian children to drink their blood. Corbyn opposes his extradition and invites him for tea at the House of Commons. These are not the only cases. He is repeatedly found alongside people with blatantly antisemitic views, but claims never to hear or read them.

Again and again, Jeremy Corbyn has sided with antisemites rather than Jews. At best, this derives from the far left’s obsessive hatred of Zionism, Zionists and Israel. At worst, it suggests a conspiratorial worldview in which mainstream Jewish communities are believed to be a hostile entity, a class enemy.

When Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour party, Jews expressed sincere and profound fears as to how such politics would impact upon their wellbeing. Our concerns were never taken seriously. Three years on, the party and British Jews are reaping the consequences.

Routine statements against antisemitism “and all forms of racism” get nowhere near dealing with the problem, because what distinguishes antisemitism from other forms of racism is the power that Jews are alleged to hold, and how they are charged with conspiring together against what is good.

This is not only historic, or about what Jeremy Corbyn did before being party leader. It is also utterly contemporary. There is literally not a single day in which Labour party spaces, either online or in meetings, do not repeat the same fundamental anti-Semitic slanders against Jews.

We are told that our concerns are faked, and done at the command of Israel and/or Zionism (whatever that means); that anti-Semitism is merely “criticism of Israel”; that we call any and all criticism of Israel “anti-Semitic”; that the Rothschilds run the world; that ISIS terrorism is a fake front for Israel; that Zionists are the new Nazis; and that Zionists collaborate with Nazis.

Rightly or wrongly, those who push this offensive material regard Jeremy Corbyn as their figurehead. They display an obsessive hatred of Israel alongside conspiracy theories and fake news. These repeated actions do serious harm to British Jews and to the British Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn is the only person with the standing to demand that all of this stops. Enough is enough.


Labour MP John Mann said that Labour will not survive if it fails to tackle antisemitism:

John Mann wrote:If [Corbyn] is incapable of dealing with this problem now, then the Labour party is not going to survive ...

He is not going to be prime minister of this country if he does not lead and sort this problem ... If he can’t sort this problem now, he will not be the prime minister of this country, we will not be in power. And, frankly, the Labour party has an even bigger crisis than that because this is about the actual existence of the Labour party. The Labour party was formed to deal with prejudice and discrimination. It’s been in our DNA through our 100 and more years’ history. If he fails to deal with this, then he destroys the very essence of the Labour party.


Chuka Umunna echoed those feelings:







....while Chris Mullin who is a former Labour Minister took a different view:








CAA report shows conclusively that Tory voters are far more anti-Semitic than Labour voters



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#14899816
Jewish Voice for Labor wrote:We are Jews in the Labour Party currently actively campaigning for Labour in local elections. We are appalled by the actions and statements of the Board of Deputies. They do not represent us or the great majority of Jews in the Party who share Jeremy Corbyn’s vision for social justice and fairness. Jeremy’s consistent commitment to anti-racism is all the more needed now.

As the British people call time on May and the Tories, they are getting more desperate. There is massively more antisemitism on the right of politics than on the left. Any organisation claiming to represent Jews in the Labour Party should be holding up for criticism, the senior ex adviser to the Prime Minister who recently used a national newspaper to dredge up antisemitic conspiracy theories, and the local Conservative party which issued a dogwhistle leaflet aiming to mobilise racism in their local election campaign. The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council have been silent on both. They have nothing to say either on the global rise of the far right and the toxic anti-immigrant rhetoric of the tabloid press. Jewish history surely gives us an imperative to speak out against both racism and fascism.

The BoD and the JLC and those supporting them must be aware that this is an attempt to influence local elections and has nothing to do with the real and necessary task of challenging racism and antisemitism at all levels of political life. We call on them to stop playing party politics and start representing what our community needs. We believe that is best represented by the politics we fight for and hope to see win on May 3rd.

http://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/ ... lis-house/


Jewish Voice for Labor-Joseph Finlay wrote:I love stories. They’re wonderful things, helping us to understand the world around us, navigate our way through life and deal with the challenges that it throws up.
Stories don’t only exist in the pages of books, we also use them to understand real life. When there are so many facts competing for our attention we use stories, or narratives, to explain what is really going on. When new facts come along we slot them into our pre-existing narrative, saving us from having to examine them too closely. If the story is good enough, with real drama and plausible heroes and villains, it may well continue long after the facts cease to convince.

One of the most popular, and well covered stories of recent years, is that Labour is an antisemitic party. Like all the best stories it started with small details, of lowly Labour members who had posted stupid and offensive things on Facebook. There was a dark guilt-by association sub-plot — as prominent Labour figures were criticised for having had fleeting encounters with people who had said offensive things. But this weekend has been the denouement of the story — the grand finale that we should have seen coming all long. It is no longer just that the leadership of the Labour Party has been soft on antisemitism – Jeremy Corbyn himself is, drumroll, an antisemite! Now the villain of the tale has finally been unmasked the coda is inevitable – Jeremy Corbyn will be forced out, the Blairites will return to great fanfare, and everyone will live happily ever after in a centrist Eden.

This story is now out of control. It is distorting, rather than helping us understand reality.

Most real life stories have a least a grain of truth in them and this one is no different. There have been a small number of Labour members that posted antisemitic items online, mostly some form of conspiracy theory, or crude and offensive language describing Israel. The Party has rightly taken action against these people. But these true aspects, have emboldened the storytellers to make ever more outlandish claims to the point where I now see Jewish friends saying ‘It could happen here’ — with the ‘it’ implying that we are inching towards Nazism in the UK. This is madness. Small incidents do not add up to this kind of metanarrative, However good the story (and scary stories are the most compelling) it has been cast adrift from the real world. We need to take a step back.

Firstly we need to restore some perspective. The Labour party has thousands of Jewish members, many Jewish councillors, a number of prominent Jewish MPs and several Jewish members of it’s ruling council. Many people at the heart of the Corbyn team, such as Jon Lansman, James Schneider and Rhea Wolfson are also Jewish. Ed Miliband, the previous party leader, was Jewish (and suffered antisemitism at the hands of the press and the Conservatives). I have been a member for five years and, as a Jew, have had only positive experiences.

So what, say those enraptured by the tale? That counts for nothing — the leader is an antisemite!

This too, is nonsense. Jeremy Corbyn has been MP for Islington North since 1983 – a constituency with a significant Jewish population. Given that he has regularly polled over 60% of the vote (73% in 2017) it seems likely that a sizeable number of Jewish constituents voted for him, As a constituency MP he regularly visited synagogues and has appeared at many Jewish religious and cultural events. He is close friends with the leaders of the Jewish Socialist Group, from whom he has gained a rich knowledge of the history of the Jewish Labour Bund, and he has named the defeat of Mosley’s Fascists at the Battle of Cable as a key historical moment for him. His 2017 Holocaust Memorial Day statement talked about Shmuel Zygielboym, the Polish Bund leader exiled to London who committed suicide in an attempt to awaken the world to the Nazi genocide. How many British politicians have that level of knowledge of modern Jewish history?

There’s more. Jeremy Corbyn is one of the leading anti-racists in parliament – I would go so far to say that he is one of the least racist MPs we have. So naturally Corbyn signed numerous Early Day motions in Parliament condemning antisemitism, years before he became leader and backed the campaign to stop Neo-Nazis from meeting in Golders Green in 2015.

Because all racisms are interlinked it is worth examining Corbyn’s wider anti-racist record. Corbyn was being arrested for protesting against apartheid while the Thatcher government defended white majority rule and branded Nelson Mandela a terrorist. Corbyn was a strong supporter of Labour Black Sections – championing the right of Black and Asian people to organise independently in the Labour party while the Press demonised them as extremists. He has long been one of the leaders of the campaign to allow the indigenous people of the Chagos Islands to return after they were forcibly evicted by Britain in the 1960s to make way for an American military base. Whenever there has been a protest against racism, the two people you can always guarantee will be there are Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell. Who do you put your trust in — the people who hate antisemitism because they hate all racism or the people (be they in the Conservative party or the press) who praise Jews whilst engaging in Islamophobia and anti-black racism? The right-wing proponents of the Labour antisemitism narrative seek to divide us into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minorities — they do not have the well being of Jews at heart.

Let’s return the story to the facts. Antisemitism is always beyond the pale. Labour, now a party of over half a million members, has a small minority of antisemites in its ranks, and it suspends then whenever it discovers them. I expect nothing less from an anti-racist party and an anti-racist leader. If the Conservatives took the same approach to racism they would have to suspend their own foreign secretary, who has described Africans as ‘Picanninies’ and described Barack Obama as ‘The part-Kenyan President [with an] ancestral dislike of the British Empire’. From the Monday club, linked to the National Front, to MP Aidan Burley dressing up a Nazi, to Lynton Crosby’s dogwhistle portrayl of Ed Miliband as a nasal North London intellectual it is the Conservative Party that is deeply tainted by racism and antisemitism.

There are many threats to Jews – and we are right to be vigilant. These threats come primarily from resurgent nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment and a Brexit narrative that seeks to restore Britain to a mythical age of ethnic purity. The idea that Britain’s leading anti-racist politician is the key problem the Jewish community faces is an absurdity, a distraction, and a massive error. Worst of all, it’s a bad story that we’ve been telling for far too long. Let’s start to tell a better one.
http://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/ ... ns-record/
#14899844
Already during the holocaust the Jewish people recognized that in Britain antisemitism is located in the left (while elsewhere in the continent it's usually in the right). This camp has a history of antisemitism since Disraeli days but joining the EU turned the weight remarkably toward this side. Today it's the standart. It's doubtbul if it's reversible because of the demographic situation in UK. Many politicans are counting on Muslim vote which in Britian it's usually crazy Pakistani jihadists.
#14899879
noir wrote:Already during the holocaust the Jewish people recognized that in Britain antisemitism is located in the left

This is totally ignorant. You only have to look at the Battle of Cable Street:

The Battle of Cable Street was a riot that took place on Sunday 4 October 1936 in Cable Street in the East End of London. It was a clash between the Metropolitan Police, sent to protect a march by members of the British Union of Fascists[1] led by Oswald Mosley, and various anti-fascist demonstrators, including local anarchist, communist, Irish, Jewish and socialist groups.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cable_Street
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Google translate

Aba Ahimeir wrote:‏The roots of England's hatred of us must be sought not only at the eternal focal point, on the narrow strip of land between the sea and the desert. It must be sought in the English spiritual heritage. The English people, who symbolized Anglophilia among the Jews, were Christians and conservatives. We mention only a few names: Queen Victoria, Disraeli, founder of the tradition of modern conservatism and British imperialism, and Balfour. On the other hand, the left in England symbolizes the hatred of Israel and especially the hatred of Judaism and the spirit of Israel. On the continent of Europe lies the source of anti-Semitism in the right-wing camp, while in England-in the leftist camp. Byron and Shelley, out of Christianity, came to hatred of Judaism. (See "Cain" for Byron and argue.) English "socialism," which in theoretically sense was embodied in Fabianism and in practice - in Labor, infused with deep hatred of Israel. The heads of the Fabian society were openly haters of Israel: Wells and Shaw and the economist Sydney Webb ("our" Lord Passifeld ). Bevin is nothing more than a student of British socialism, whose actual fulfillment is, in this sense, merely a student of British socialism, whose realization is in practice, and in this sense does not represent a random phenomenon.
#14899909
So you are pretending the battle of cable street never happened then? When Communists stepped forwards to defend Jews from the far right? You know nothing about the UK, you should not comment on things that you are so ignorant of.
#14899918
The sharks circling around Corbyn scent blood
After a short reprieve following Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected success in Britain’s general election last year, when he only narrowly lost the popular vote, most of the Labour parliamentary party are back, determined to bring him down. And once again, they are being joined by the corporate media in full battle cry.

Last week, Corbyn was a Soviet spy. This week we’re in more familiar territory, even if it has a new twist: Corbyn is not only a friend to anti-semites, it seems, but now he has been outed as a closet one himself.

In short, the Blairites in the parliamentary party are stepping up their game. Corbyn’s social justice agenda, his repudiation of neoconservative wars of aggression masquerading as “humanitarianism” – lining the coffers of the west’s military-industrial elites – is a genuine threat to those who run our societies from the shadows.

The knife of choice for the Labour backstabbers this time is a wall mural removed from East London in 2012. At that time, before he became Labour leader, Corbyn expressed support on Facebook for the artist, Kalen Ockerman, known as Mear One. Corbyn observed that a famous anti-capitalist mural by the left-wing Mexican artist Diego Rivera was similarly removed from Manhattan’s Rockefeller Centre in 1934.

Interestingly, the issue of Corbyn’s support for the mural – or at least the artist – originally flared in late 2015, when the Jewish Chronicle unearthed his Facebook post. Two things were noticeably different about the coverage then.

First, on that occasion, no one apart from the Jewish Chronicle appeared to show much interest in the issue. Its “scoop” was not followed up by the rest of the media. What is now supposedly a major scandal, one that raises questions about Corbyn’s fitness to be Labour leader, was a non-issue two years ago, when it first became known.

Second, the Jewish Chronicle, usually so ready to get exercised at the smallest possible sign of anti-semitism, wasn’t entirely convinced back in 2015 that the mural was anti-semitic. In fact, it suggested only that the mural might have “antisemitic undertones” – and attributed even that claim to Corbyn’s critics.

And rather than claiming, as the entire corporate media is now, that the mural depicted a cabal of Jewish bankers, the Chronicle then described the scene as “a group of businessmen and bankers sitting around a Monopoly-style board and counting money”. By contrast, the Guardian abandoned normal reporting conventions yesterday to state in its news – rather than comment – pages unequivocally that the mural was “obviously antisemitic”.

Not that anyone is listening now, but the artist himself, Kalen Ockerman, has said that the group in his mural comprised historical figures closely associated with banking. His mural, he says, was about “class and privilege”, and the figures depicted included both “Jewish and white Anglos”. The fact that he included famous bankers like the Rothschilds (Jewish) and the Rockefellers (not Jewish) does not, on the face of it, seem to confirm anti-semitism. They are simply the most prominent of the banking dynasties most people, myself included, could name. These families are about as closely identified with capitalism as it is possible to be.

There is an argument to be had about the responsibilities of artists – even street artists – to be careful in their visual representations. But Ockerman’s message was not a subtle or nuanced one. He was depicting class war, the war the capitalist class wages every day on the weak and poor. If Ockerman’s message is inflammatory, it is much less so than the reality of how our societies have been built on the backs and the suffering of the majority.

Corbyn has bowed to his critics – a mix of the Blairites within his party and Israel’s cheerleaders – and apologised for offering support to Ockerman, just as he has caved in to pressure each time the anti-semitism card has been played against him.

This may look like wise, or safe, politics to his advisers. But these critics have only two possible outcomes that will satisfy them. Either Corbyn is harried from the party leadership, or he is intimidated into diluting his platform into irrelevance – he becomes just another compromised politician catering to the interests of the 1 per cent.

The sharks circling around him will not ignore the scent of his bloodied wounds; rather, it will send them into a feeding frenzy. As hard as it is to do when the elites so clearly want him destroyed, Corbyn must find his backbone and start to stand his ground.

UPDATE:
This piece in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz by their senior columnnist Anshel Pfeffer sums up a lot of the sophistry (intentional or otherwise) underscoring the conflation of leftwing critiques of neoliberalism and globalism with rightwing ultra-nationalism and anti-semitism.

Pfeffer writes:

The conspiracy theories of globalist bankers utilizing mainstream media and corrupt neoliberal politicians to serve their selfish sinister purposes, rather than those of ordinary people, are identical whether from left or right.

And on either side, most of the theorists will never admit to being anti-Semitic. They are just “anti-racist” or “anti-imperialist” if on the left, or “pro-Israel” on the right. And most of them really believe they have nothing against Jews, even while parroting themes straight out of the Protocols [of the Elders of Zion].


Notice the problem here. If you are a radical leftist who believes, as generations of leftists before you have done, that military, political, media, and financial elites operate in the shadows to promote their interests, to wage class war, then not only are you a conspiracy theorist, according to Pfeffer, but you are by definition anti-semitic as well. If you believe that an Establishment or a Deep State exists to advance its interests against the great majority, you must hate Jews.

The logic of Corbyn’s critics has rarely been articulated so forthrightly and so preposterously as it is here by Pfeffer. But make no mistake, this is the logic of his critics.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2018 ... ent-blood/
#14899922
Seeker8 wrote:If the mural isn't anti semitic though, why did he apologize?

Looks more anti capitalist to me. Pretty cool art.


I have done some research on the artists interpretation of 'their' work and Mear One said his Mural is about class not religion. Looking at it I concur. Stereotyping bankers who happen to be Jewish is not antisemitic. I too would support this art. If I was Corbyn I wouldn't even have apologised. It's just more SJWs complaining that their feelings got hurt because they can't see that this is an anti capitalism piece. Obviously the monopoly board and bent over workers wasn't obvious enough. The bankers have big noses. They have to be Jews so naturally it is against Judaism. :roll:
#14899924
They are no different than the idiots who claim that David Icke is somehow talking about Jews when he moans about the blood drinking, shape shifting, reptiles who traveled to this planet inside of the moon (actually a hollow space craft).
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