Anti Semitism

Status
Not open for further replies.


Monty Pigeon said:
The renowned historian Diane Abbott said yesterday that anti-Semitism started in the 19th Century. Didn't exist before then, apparently.
Click to expand...

She should learn about what happened in medieval York, for one thing.

Horatio Pugwash said:
I reckon there's more islamophobia than anti semitism due to the fact that there aren't that many Jews threatening the uk with terrorism in comparison to Muslims.
Click to expand...

It may have changed now but I went to school in the 90s - 00s and I heard a lot more antisemitism than islamophobia, despite there being no Jews at the school. Kids who don't know what Israel is learn it.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
A worthwhile read for all:
The American Jewish scholar behind Labour’s ‘antisemitism’ scandal breaks his silence
Click to expand...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/ja...h-scholar-behind-labour-s-antisemitism-scanda

Did you create the controversial image that Naz Shah reposted?

I’m not adept enough with computers to compose any image. But I did post the map on my website in 2014. An email correspondent must have sent it. It was, and still is, funny. Were it not for the current political context, nobody would have noticed Shah’s reposting of it either. Otherwise, you’d have to be humourless. These sorts of jokes are a commonplace in the U.S. So, we have this joke: Why doesn’t Israel become the 51st state? Answer: Because then, it would only have two senators. As crazy as the discourse on Israel is in America, at least we still have a sense of humour. It’s inconceivable that any politician in the U.S. would be crucified for posting such a map.
Click to expand...

What about when people use Nazi analogies to criticise the policies of the State of Israel? Isn’t that also a political abuse of the Nazi holocaust?

It’s not a simple question. First, if you’re Jewish, the instinctive analogy to reach for, when it comes to hate or hunger, war or genocide, is the Nazi holocaust, because we see it as the ultimate horror. In my home growing up, whenever an incident involving racial discrimination or bigotry was in the news, my mother would compare it to her experience before or during the Nazi holocaust........................If you’re Jewish, it’s just normal that the Nazi holocaust is a ubiquitous, instinctual touchstone. Some Jews say this or that horror is not the Nazi holocaust, others say it is. But the reference point of the Nazi holocaust is a constant.

What about when people who aren’t Jewish invoke the analogy?

Once the Nazi holocaust became the cultural referent, then, if you wanted to touch a nerve regarding Palestinian suffering, you had to make the analogy with the Nazis, because that was the only thing that resonated for Jews. If you compared the Palestinians to Native Americans, nobody would give a darn.

Is it antisemitic?

No, it’s just a weak historical analogy – but, if coming from a Jew, a generous moral one.
Click to expand...

Last week, Ken Livingstone took to the airwaves to defend Naz Shah, but what he said wound up getting him suspended from the Labour party. His most incendiary remark contended that Hitler at one point supported Zionism. This was condemned as antisemitic, and Labour MP John Mann accused Livingstone of being a ‘Nazi apologist’. What do you make of these accusations?

Livingstone maybe wasn’t precise enough, and lacked nuance. But he does know something about that dark chapter in history. It has been speculated that Hitler’s thinking on how to solve the ‘Jewish Question’ (as it was called back then) evolved, as circumstances changed and new possibilities opened up. Hitler wasn’t wholly hostile to the Zionist project at the outset. That’s why so many German Jews managed to survive after Hitler came to power by emigrating to Palestine. But, then, Hitler came to fear that a Jewish state might strengthen the hand of ‘international Jewry’, so he suspended contact with the Zionists. Later, Hitler perhaps contemplated a ‘territorial solution’ for the Jews. The Nazis considered many ‘resettlement’ schemes – the Jews wouldn’t have physically survived most of them in the long run – before they embarked on an outright exterminatory process. Livingstone is more or less accurate about this – or, as accurate as might be expected from a politician speaking off the cuff.

He’s also accurate that a degree of ideological affinity existed between the Nazis and Zionists. On one critical question, which raged in the U.K. during the period when the Balfour Declaration (1917) was being cobbled together, antisemites and Zionists agreed: could a Jew be an Englishman? Ironically, in light of the current hysteria in the UK, the most vociferous and vehement opponents of the Balfour Declaration were not the Arabs, about whom almost nobody gave a darn, but the upper reaches of British Jewry.

Eminent British Jews published open letters to newspapers like the Timesopposing British backing for a Jewish home in Palestine. They understood such a declaration – and Zionism – as implying that a Jew belonged to a distinct nation, and that the Jewish nation should have its own separate state, which they feared would effectively disqualify Jews from bona fide membership in the British nation. What distinguished the Zionists from the liberal Jewish aristocracy was their point of departure: as Theodor Herzl put it at the beginning of The Jewish State, ‘the Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one . . . It is a national question’. Whereas the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy insisted Judaism was merely a religion, the Zionists were emphatic that the Jews constituted a nation. And on this – back then, salient – point, the Zionists and Nazis agreed.

John Mann, when he accosted Livingstone in front of the cameras, asked rhetorically whether Livingstone had read Mein Kampf. If you do read Mein Kampf, which I suspect none of the interlocutors in this debate has done (I used to teach it, before the ‘Zionists’ drove me out of academia – joke!), you see that Hitler is emphatic that Jews are not a religion, but a nation. He says that the big Jewish lie is that they claim to be a religion; whereas in fact, he says, they’re a race (at that time, ‘race’ was used interchangeably with ‘nation’). And on page 56 of the standard English edition of Mein Kampf, he says that the only Jews honest enough to acknowledge this reality are the Zionists. Now, to be clear, Hitler didn’t just think that Jews were a distinct race. He also thought that they were a Satanic race, and ultimately, that they were a Satanic race that had to be exterminated. Still, on the first, not trivial, premise, he and the Zionists were in agreement.

As a practical matter, the Zionists and Nazis could therefore find a degree of common ground around the emigration/expulsion of Jews to Palestine. It was a paradox that, against the emphatic protestations of liberal Jews, including sections of the Anglo-Jewish establishment, antisemites and Zionists back then effectively shared the same slogan: Jews to Palestine. It was why, for example, the Nazis forbade German Jews to raise the swastika flag, but expressly permitted them to hoist the Zionist flag. It was as if to say, the Zionists are right: Jews can’t be Germans, they belong in Palestine. Hannah Arendt wrote scathingly about this in Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is one of the reasons she caught hell from the Jewish/Zionist establishment.
Click to expand...



etc, etc, etc. So basically agreeing with what I and many others have been saying all along.
 
danbob said:
Correct, and most of the anti Semitism in the Labour Party seems to be coming from Muslim MPs and councillors, backed up by idiots like Ken Lebensraum.
Click to expand...
It's a fact of life that the majority of muslims hate jews just as they hate gays. I expect people to kickoff and say this is only extremists but watch Jon Snow Islam survey on All 4 , its widely acknowledged that Islamic culture raises people to detest gays and jews. Not saying some aren't capable of independent thought but it is striking how many have these prejudices.
 
Lionel Hutzz said:
It's a fact of life that the majority of muslims hate jews just as they hate gays. I expect people to kickoff and say this is only extremists but watch Jon Snow Islam survey on All 4 , its widely acknowledged that Islamic culture raises people to detest gays and jews. Not saying some aren't capable of independent thought but it is striking how many have these prejudices.
Click to expand...

Are you going to clarify that 50k estimate mate? Looked dangerously like holocaust denial to me.
 
Lionel Hutzz said:
It's a fact of life that the majority of muslims hate jews just as they hate gays. I expect people to kickoff and say this is only extremists but watch Jon Snow Islam survey on All 4 , its widely acknowledged that Islamic culture raises people to detest gays and jews. Not saying some aren't capable of independent thought but it is striking how many have these prejudices.
Click to expand...

Does it? Interestingly the Afghan military were quite well known amongst lad I talked to for shagging blokes
 
I think it all boils down to them getting Jesus killed thousands of years ago.

People do like to hold a grudge.
 
Lionel Hutzz said:
It's a fact of life that the majority of muslims hate jews just as they hate gays. I expect people to kickoff and say this is only extremists but watch Jon Snow Islam survey on All 4 , its widely acknowledged that Islamic culture raises people to detest gays and jews. Not saying some aren't capable of independent thought but it is striking how many have these prejudices.
Click to expand...
how many jews died in the holocaust?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top