Jeremy Corbyn 3

Trump, Brexit and Tory Mayhem: is this a crucial turning point in British politics?

The events of the past 10 days have spectacularly revealed key faultlines in British and world politics. In particular they have highlighted the acute crisis of the May government, the real motivations behind the antics of the hard right of the Tory party, the nature of the ‘America first’ strategy of Trump, the craven anti-working class politics of the Labour right and the immense potential reserves of the Left and progressive opinion in Britain.

We are at a crucial political turning point. Theresa May will certainly not survive and it is an open question whether the Tory government will survive.

quote:

The mobilisations in London and around the country against Donald Trump were extraordinary, involving hundreds of thousands. The women’s demonstration alone numbered over 20,000, with more than 250,000 on the Together against Trump demonstration in London, while women and young people were heavily represented in all the protests. These demonstrations were the largest since the Iraq war protests of the early noughties.

Most of the anti-Trump actions were on a weekday, and as Len McCluskey told the crowd in Trafalgar Square “you represent millions who couldn’t be here”. This turnout represents the Other Britain, based in the Labour Party and the Left, in the trade unions, in the peace and women’s movements, and above all among young people. Probably an overwhelming majority of people who demonstrated voted against Brexit. And this broad current in British society is fiercely anti-racist and committed to multiculturalism. While it’s true this situation is in sharp contrast to some other European countries where xenophobic Islamophobia is near-dominant, this broad Left in British society will come under heavy attack in the next period.

Is Corbyn's Greatest Trait Also His Weakest?

https://youtu.be/y9vN9LNGaUU

"...To do as he's done this evening, and throw some more people to the wolves - throw some more ideals that he's held all his life to the wolves - and not satisfy the wolves - that's not going to solve this problem, is it?"

The Crisis in Corbyn’s Labour Party is Over Israel, Not Anti-Semitism

If there is indeed an anti-semitism problem in the UK’s Labour party, it is not in the places where the British corporate media have been directing our attention. What can be said with even more certainty is that there is rampant hatred expressed towards Jews in the same British media that is currently decrying the supposed anti-semitism of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Here is what I hope is a little wisdom, earnt the hard way as a reporter in Israel over nearly two decades. I offer it in case it helps to resolve the confusion felt by some still pondering the endless reports of Labour’s supposed anti-semitism “crisis”....

josh wrote:

Gideon Levy on Jeremy Corbyn.

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-jeremy-corbyn-for-u-k-prime-minister-1.6362301

It's paywalled. If you have access to it, perhaps you could quote a representative paragraph or two.

The smear campaign against Corbyn is discussed in a 2-part TRNN interview with Norman Finkelstein and British scholar Jamie Stern-Weiner. Part 1. Part 2.

I see no 'irony', just the loathsome mendacity of the Israel lobby. Here and there.

How Israel Lobby Attacked An Auschwitz Survivor To Smear Corbyn

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/adri-nieuwhof/how-israel-lobby-atta...

"The anti-Semitism smear against Meyer is disgusting and should be treated with utter contempt."

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

It's nothing like that at all.  Saying "All Lives Matter!" meant you were denying that the lives of people of color were in any more danger from the police than anyone else.  Condemning all forms of prejudice means you acknowledge that people who identify as oppressed have a valid claim to be able to say that.

Doesn't it also condemn racism?

It doesn't condemn racism at all.  It denies that there's any greater liklihood that black or brown people are going to be unjustly killed by the police than whites, while at the same time falsely implying that white people have it just as bad as people of color.  "All Lives Matter" is code for "shut up and go away-you're making a big deal about nothing".

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Sorry, I meant: doesn't condeming all forms of prejudice also condemn racism?

Yes...which means it also condemns anti-Semitism.  And therefore, it means there was never any reason to demand that Corbyn accept the right-wing/Blairite tropes that somehow anti-Semitism is more prevalent in Labour than in any other party (in the UK, actual anti-Semitism is almost entirely a right-wing form of bigotry), that any substantive criticism of Israeli "security policy" is anti-Semitic and must be silenced, and that he also accept the idea that defenders of the Israeli government must have a veto over what anyone can and cannot say about what that government does.  
 

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

Yes...which means it also condemns anti-Semitism.

I think that when people choose to generalize about discrimination/racism/hate, rather than be specific (e.g. "all hate is bad" rather than "anti-black hate is bad" or "anti-Jewish hate is bad" or "anti-Episcopalian hate is bad") it's an attempt to stay out of a smaller dispute.

I would agree that the "ALL lives matter" proponents probably don't want to acknowledge that black Americans/Canadians have it and historically have had it any worse than (say) Asian Americans/Canadians or even Irish Americans/Canadians.

But if a politician can't acknowledge that Jews actually do have it and historically have had it a bit worse than Episcopalians, they're just doing the same thing. 

Quote:

Saying "All Lives Matter!" meant you were denying that the lives of people of color were in any more danger from the police than anyone else.

From a logic point of view, it says nothing like that at all.

I'll concede that some who choose to say this instead of speaking plainly might very well BELIEVE that. 

But again, from a logic point of view, if "all lives matter" is a fallacy, that would be the same as saying that if a cop shoots an unarmed person who's NOT black, that person's life doesn't matter. 

Obviously, Jews HAVE had it a lot worse than Episcopalians(or Anglicans, if we're discussing "the Artist Formerly Known as the British Empire"), and Corbyn has always acknowledged it. In the UK in 2018, the Jewish community does NOT have it worse than Muslims, than people of color, than immigrants, than LGBTQ people.  And no one can seriously argue that the portion of the Israeli population that identifies as Jewish do NOT have it worse than the portion who are Muslim, Christian or Druze, and it would be morally obscene for anyone to argue that that community could possibly have it worse than the Palestinians.  

In the UK,active anti-semitism is largely part of the past, though it hasn't totally vanished, and where it exists now is almost entirely committed by the Right.  There is virtually no commentary that can be made about the Israeli government which could ever fairly be called anti-semitic-the criticism of the Israeli government is solely due to the way it treats Palestinians; it has nothing to do with the religious/ethnic/cultural identities of the majority communities within Israel.  If that community identified as Christian, or Muslim, or athiest, the international reaction to what Palestinians have been subjected to would be exactly the same-especially if said treatment were subsidized by the United States and, to a lesser degree, by most of the rest of the "free" world.

As to "All Lives Matter"-you know perfectly well the only reason that slogan was ever invented was as a means to shout down and disrespect Black Lives Matter.  No significant group of people have ever said "All Lives Matter" with progressive, universalist intent.

And I can't believe you'd even implicitly acccept the idea that violent institutional bigotry against people of color could possibly be "a smaller dispute".  Do you honestly believe that this issue is people of color making a big deal out of nothing?

Get Corbyn! Zios Plan It (and vid)

https://twitter.com/Muqadaam/status/1029055212915515394

"Israeli embassy worker caught on camera plotting to use 'anti-Semitism' as a political gain to oust Jeremy Corbyn."

Fascist Tactics: How Jeremy Corbyn's Detractors Are Plotting to Remove Him

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1029715712875614208

"David Hearst, former Guardian leader writer, would never have been allowed to write this for that newspaper. But this is probably the best analysis so far of what's at stake in the endless Corbyn smears."

 

Et Tu Bob..?

https://twitter.com/Cnds4MEProg/status/1029519753533042688

"Out of 8 men responsible for the Munich bombings, zero are buried in Tunis where Corbyn was laying down his wreath. But that didn't keep Bob Rae from tweeting this bogus Sky News article. Bob should apologize for misleading Canadians."

It's what Zios do.

Corbyn’s Labour party is being made to fail – by design

The Labour party, relentlessly battered by an organised campaign of smears of its leader, Jeremy Corbyn – first for being anti-semitic, and now for honouring Palestinian terrorists – is reportedly about to adopt the four additional working “examples” of anti-semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).

Labour initially rejected these examples – stoking yet more condemnation from Israel’s lobbyists and the British corporate media – because it justifiably feared, as have prominent legal experts, that accepting them would severely curb the freedom to criticise Israel.

The media’s ever-more outlandish slurs against Corbyn and the Labour party’s imminent capitulation on the IHRA’s full definition of anti-semitism are not unrelated events. The former was designed to bring about the latter.

According to a report in the Guardian this week, senior party figures are agitating for the rapid adoption of the full IHRA definition, ideally before the party conference next month, and say Corbyn has effectively surrendered to the pressure. An MP who supports Corbyn told the paper Corbyn would “just have to take one for the team”.

In a strong indication of the way the wind is now blowing, the Guardian added:

“The party said it would consult the main [Jewish] communal bodies as well as experts and academics, but groups such as the pro-Corbyn Jewish Voice for Labour have not been asked to give their views.”

No stomach for battle 

The full adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism will be a major victory both for Israel and its apologists in Britain, who who have been seeking to silence all meaningful criticism of Israel, and for the British corporate media, which would dearly love to see the back of an old-school socialist Labour leader whose programme threatens to loosen the 40-year stranglehold of neoliberalism on British society.

Besieged for four years, Corbyn’s allies in the Labour leadership have largely lost the stomach for battle, one that was never about substance or policy but about character assassination. As the stakes have been constantly upped by the media and the Blairite holdouts in the party bureacracy, the inevitable has happened. Corbyn has been abandoned. Few respected politicians with career ambitions or a public profile want to risk being cast out into the wilderness, like Ken Livingstone, as an anti-semite.

This is why the supposed anti-semitism “crisis” in a Corbyn-led Labour party has been so much more effective than berating him for his clothes or his patriotism. Natural selection – survival of the smear fittest for the job – meant that a weaponised anti-semitism would eventually identify Corbyn as its prime target and not just his supporters – especially after his unexpectedly strong showing at the polls in last year’s election.

Worse, Corbyn himself has conceded too much ground on anti-semitism. As a lifelong anti-racism campaigner, the accusations of anti-semitism have clearly pained him. He has tried to placate rather than defy the smearers. He has tried to maintain unity with people who have no interest in finding common ground with him.

And as he has lost all sense of how to respond in good faith to allegations made in bad faith, he has begun committing the cardinal sin of sounding and looking evasive – just as those who deployed the anti-semitism charge hoped. It was his honesty, plain-speaking and compassion that won him the leadership and the love of ordinary members. Unless he can regain the political and spiritual confidence that underpinned those qualities, he risks haemorrhaging support.

Critical juncture

But beyond Corbyn’s personal fate, the Labour party has now reached a critical juncture in its response to the smear campaign. In adopting the full IHRA definition, the party will jettison the principle of free speech and curtail critical debate about an entire country, Israel – as well as a key foreign policy issue for those concerned about the direction the Middle East is taking.

Discussion of what kind of state Israel is, what its policy goals are, and whether they are compatible with a peace process are about to be taken off the table by Britain’s largest, supposedly progressive party.

That thought spurred me to cast an eye over my back-catalogue of journalism. I have been based in Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee, since 2001. In that time I have written – according to my website – more than 900 articles (plus another few hundred blog posts) on Israel, as well as three peer-reviewed books and a clutch of chapters in edited collections. That’s a lot of writing. Many more than a million words about Israel over nearly two decades.

What shocked me, however, as I started to pore over these articles was that almost all of them – except for a handful dealing with internal Palestinian politics – would fall foul of at least one of these four additional IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt.

After 17 years of writing about Israel, after winning a respected journalism prize for being “one of the reliable truth-tellers in the Middle East”, the Labour party is about to declare that I, and many others like me, are irredeemable anti-semites....

We now see the extent and power of the Zionist lobby and its fifth column within the British parliament fighting to uphold the interests of Israel, the destruction of Corbyn and any possibility of  a pro-Palestinian foreign policy.  Let us be under no illusion that a similar lobby doesn't exist here, ready to do the same if necessary. Unfortunately, it isn't. More's the pity.

Quote:

Demanding that we treat Israel as a normal western-style liberal democracy – as the IHRA full definition requires – makes as much sense as having demanded the same for apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s.

From the IHRA's own website:

Quote:

1. Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.
    
2. Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
    
3. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non-Jews.
    
4. Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).
    
5. Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
    
6. Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
    
7. Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
    
8. Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
    
9. Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.
    
10. Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
     
11. Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

Which of these -- just give us the number(s) -- would prevent anyone from reasonably and meaningfully criticizing the actions of the State of Israel?

And to be clear, I'm not asking this in dutiful support of Mother Israel.  I'm just curious which of these 11 things is necessary to be able to voice one's opposition to their actions.

 

Finkelstein:  Anti-Semitism & the Crucifixion of Corbyn (podcast)

http://www.tikkit.co.uk/post/301_here-it-is-as-if-by-magic-the-full-norm...

"...Moral blackmailers and moral extortionists engaged in a vile, despicable campaign of conscripting the suffering of Jews during WWII, the very real martyrdom of Jewish people, into this extortionist blackmail to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn and the principled politics he represents from public life.

That's the agenda. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a problem of anti-semitism which is next to absent in British life. It's not about anti-semitism it's about justice for Palestinians but more broadly it's about a principled class politics that the ruling elites in the UK, whether they be the Blairites in the Labour party, the media elites or whether they be the Tories, have coalesced,  and now there is this anti-Corbyn juggernaut by those who want to prevent and protect the existing order.

On the other side arrayed are those you might call the 99% who think the current order needs a shaking up. That's what Corbyn represents. A new order waiting to be born..."

..and i replied

epaulo13 wrote:

..more

quote:

Betrayal of Palestinians

The article in the Guardian, the newspaper that has done more to damage Corbyn than any other (by undermining him from within his own camp), described the incorporation of the full IHRA anti-semitism definition into Labour’s code of conduct as a “compromise”, as though the betrayal of an oppressed people was something over which middle ground could be found.

Remember that the man who drafted the IHRA definition and its associated examples, American Jewish lawyer Kenneth Stern, has publicly regretted their impact, saying that in practice they have severely curbed freedom of speech about Israel.

How these new examples will be misused by Corbyn’s opponents should already be clear. He made his most egregious mistake in the handling of the party’s supposed anti-semitism “crisis” precisely to avoid getting caught up in a violation of one of the IHRA examples Labour is about to adopt: comparing Israel to Nazi Germany.

He apologised for attending an anti-racism event and distanced himself from a friend, the late Hajo Meyer, a Holocaust survivor and defender of Palestinian rights, who used his speech to compare Israel’s current treatment of Palestinians to early Nazi laws that vilified and oppressed Jews.

It was a Judas-like act for which it is not necessary to berate Corbyn. He is doubtless already torturing himself over what he did. But that is the point: the adoption of the full IHRA definition will demand the constant vilification and rooting out of progressive and humane voices like Meyer’s. It will turn the Labour party into the modern equivalent of Senator Joe McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee. Labour activists will find themselves, like Corbyn, either outed or required to out others as supposed anti-semites. They will have to denounce reasonable criticisms of Israel and dissociate themselves from supporters of the Palestinian cause, even Holocaust survivors.

The patent absurdity of Labour including this new anti-semitism “example” should be obvious the moment we consider that it will recast not only Meyer and other Holocaust survivors as anti-semites but leading Jewish intellectuals and scholars – even Israeli army generals.

Two years ago Yair Golan, the deputy chief of staff of the Israeli military, went public with such a comparison. Addressing an audience in Israel on Holocaust Day, he spoke of where Israel was heading:

“If there’s something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it’s the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.”

Is it not a paradox that, were Golan a member of the Labour party, that statement – a rare moment of self-reflection by a senior Israeli figure – will soon justify his being vilified and hounded out of the Labour party?

Evidence of Israeli apartheid

Looking at my own work, it is clear that almost all of it falls foul of two further “examples” of anti-semitism cited in the full IHRA definition that Labour is preparing to adopt:

“Applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.”

and:

“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

One hardly needs to point out how preposterous it is that the Labour party is about to outlaw from internal discussion or review any research, scholarship or journalism that violates these two “examples” weeks after Israel passed its Nation-State Basic Law. That law, which has constitutional weight, makes explict what was always implict in Israel as a Jewish state:

1. that Israel privileges the rights and status of Jews around the world, including those who have never even visited Israel, above the rights of the fifth of the country’s citizens who are non-Jews (the remnants of the native Palestinian population who survived the ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948).
2. that Israel, as defined in the Basic Law, is not a state bounded by internationally recognised borders but rather the “Land of Israel” – a Biblical conception of Israel whose borders encompass the occupied Palestinian territories and parts of many neighbouring states.

How, one might reasonably wonder, is such a state – defined this way in the Basic Law – a normal “democratic” state? How is it not structurally racist and inherently acquisitive of other people’s territory?

Contrary to the demands of these two extra IHRA “examples”, the Basic Law alone shows that Israel is a “racist endeavour” and that we cannot judge it by the same standards we would a normal western-style democracy. Not least, it has a double “border” problem: it forces Jews everywhere to be included in its self-definition of the “nation”, whether they want to be or not; and it lays claim to the title deeds of other territories without any intention to confer on their non-Jewish inhabitants the rights it accords Jews.

Demanding that we treat Israel as a normal western-style liberal democracy – as the IHRA full definition requires – makes as much sense as having demanded the same for apartheid South Africa back in the 1980s.

I agree with virtuall all of that, except for the last paragraph:  What the IHRA examples-Labour actually AGREED, in the first place, to everything in the definition except for a tiny handful of the examples-actually do is demand that the Israeli government be given special dispensation FROM being treated like a normal democratic government.  They demand that the type of policies every other democratic government may be-and always has been, since at least the late 1960s-openly condemned for pursuing must be publicly acquiesced in-and remember, there is no meaningful difference between public acquiescence in a wrong and full support for the wrong-simply because of the historic oppression of the variety of ethnic and religious communities in whose names the State of Israel purports to exist.

Have Jeremy Corbyn's Enemies Overplayed Their Hand   -   by Neil Clark

https://t.co/QP4qWo0uFd

Corbyn adopting the IHRA "...is likely to lead to a mass purge of thousands of Corbyn supporters from the party because of past criticism of Israel and might even lead to Corbyn himself being suspended or expelled...It would  be quite ironic if having seen off so many challenges, 'The Corbynator' then commits political hari-kari and does the one thing that could hand his opponents victory - when they themselves are so close to defeat."

Quote:

OK...1)the prohibition against calling Israel a "racist state".

So it's for sure just "racism", and not "other-ism"?  "Racism" makes a great sound bite, but I'm not certain that Israelis just naturally hate those people who are -- religion notwithstanding -- genetically pretty similar.  When Indians fight Pakistanis,  I don't think of it in terms of "race" because the only two things that make an Indian and a Pakistani different are a line on a map and religion.

More to the point, I honestly don't believe that people who refer to the "racist state of Israel" are doing so because that's the only reasonable way to describe it.

Quote:

2) The "double-standard" law-based on the bogus assertion that people criticize the Israeli government for things they're fine with other "democratic" governments doing.

Haven't we, at some point here at babble, discussed First Nations denying membership to those who don't meet their standards?  What's specifically the difference?  Is it that the FN are independent, sovereign Nations?  Because that's actually not a difference at all.  What say you, though?

Quote:

I think you'd have to agree that there are no valid reasons to make it THAT difficult to make critical comments about what is, after all simply another government existing some place in the world.

I certainly agree that any government should be fair game, and I hope that some day babble also comes to that same conclusion, and people stop acting like I'm the second coming of Donald Rumsfeld if I have something to say about Venezuelan monetary policy.  But let's neither of us hold our breaths, lest we both die waiting.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

So it's for sure just "racism", and not "other-ism"?  "Racism" makes a great sound bite, but I'm not certain that Israelis just naturally hate those people who are -- religion notwithstanding -- genetically pretty similar.  When Indians fight Pakistanis,  I don't think of it in terms of "race" because the only two things that make an Indian and a Pakistani different are a line on a map and religion.

Religious bigotry is certainly the primary driving force behind the establishment of the country, but if every non-Jew in Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, the country would still have a pretty big problem with racism. And since I can already hear you typing "Hey, so does Canada", then I'll happily note for the sake of consistency that if British Labour adopted a policy banning anyone from describing Canada as a racist state and expelling all First Nations from the party for anti-Canadian bigotry, I'd be opposed to that policy, as well.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

More to the point, I honestly don't believe that people who refer to the "racist state of Israel" are doing so because that's the only reasonable way to describe it.

I prefer "apartheid state", but the "racist" shoe fits pretty well.

Mr. Magoo] <p>[quote wrote:

2) The "double-standard" law-based on the bogus assertion that people criticize the Israeli government for things they're fine with other "democratic" governments doing.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Haven't we, at some point here at babble, discussed First Nations denying membership to those who don't meet their standards?  What's specifically the difference?  Is it that the FN are independent, sovereign Nations?  Because that's actually not a difference at all.  What say you, though?

The difference, obviously, is that Israeli Jews are the settler minority in complete control of the government, imposing pass laws, denying citizenship, banning intermarriage, and preventing the acquisition of land by non-Jews.
The First Nations in this analogy are the Palestinians, despite the Israeli contention that God obviously meant the land for them and them alone.

Magoo wrote:

"Racism" makes a great sound bite, but I'm not certain that Israelis just naturally hate those people who are -- religion notwithstanding -- genetically pretty similar. 

Well, it's not so much a question of objective similarity, but rather how much importance someone wishes to attach to the differences that do exist. Here's an article from a Hong Kong newspaper about racism in South Korea...

In 2012, the Korea Communications Standards Commission was granted the power to remove racist posts from the internet, following a spike in anti-Chinese racism after a Korean-Chinese man murdered a Korean woman and carved 365 pieces of flesh from her body.

Obviously, the genetic difference between Chinese and Koreans is smaller than that between European Jews and arabs, but the Hong Kong media apparently still consider it racism when someone uses that difference to posit the Chinese as a group worthy of villification.

(And yes, I realize this contradicts the erstwhile orthodoxy on babble that non-whites can't be racist. But I never really bought that idea. Yes, it was whites who invented pseudo-scientific racial categories to justify their own dominance, but if non-whites adopt those same categories against each other, it's still rooted in the same ideas.)  

https://tinyurl.com/ya279sjw

 

 

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

OK...1)the prohibition against calling Israel a "racist state".

So it's for sure just "racism", and not "other-ism"?  "Racism" makes a great sound bite, but I'm not certain that Israelis just naturally hate those people who are -- religion notwithstanding -- genetically pretty similar.  When Indians fight Pakistanis,  I don't think of it in terms of "race" because the only two things that make an Indian and a Pakistani different are a line on a map and religion.

More to the point, I honestly don't believe that people who refer to the "racist state of Israel" are doing so because that's the only reasonable way to describe it.

Quote:

2) The "double-standard" law-based on the bogus assertion that people criticize the Israeli government for things they're fine with other "democratic" governments doing.

Haven't we, at some point here at babble, discussed First Nations denying membership to those who don't meet their standards?  What's specifically the difference?  Is it that the FN are independent, sovereign Nations?  Because that's actually not a difference at all.  What say you, though?

Quote:

I think you'd have to agree that there are no valid reasons to make it THAT difficult to make critical comments about what is, after all simply another government existing some place in the world.

I certainly agree that any government should be fair game, and I hope that some day babble also comes to that same conclusion, and people stop acting like I'm the second coming of Donald Rumsfeld if I have something to say about Venezuelan monetary policy.  But let's neither of us hold our breaths, lest we both die waiting.

 

1) You clearly don't know of the Nation-State Law, a measure which officially declares Israel to be an ethnic/religious supremacist state in which every Israeli citizen not of the dominant religion/ethnicity is designated as having no real right to live in the country, but is merely allowed to live their on sufferance, and in which no other language than imposed majority language of the dominant community(few Jewish people anywhere in the world spoke Hebrew as their language of daily life prior to 1948-most spoke Yiddish, Magrehbi, Ladino and/or the main language in the countries where they held citizenshop) would be considered official.  What would you call that?  What would you call the refusal of Israel to simply allow people to hold "Israeli" citizenship, requiring them to have citizenship-by-ethnicity instead?  What would you call the treatment of the Bedouins, a people whose only crime is trying to build villages in the Negev Desert, a region where nobody else in Israel lives or even WANTS to live?  

2) Have First Nations groups set up illegal settlements in Calgary or Toronto or Montreal, displacing long-existing anglophone or francophone settlements in those communties, forcing those displaced anglophones or francophones to live on un-arable wastelands, sending the First Nation Defense Force swaggering through the streets beating non-FN people?   Have the FN's taken the Okanagan, replanting the apple trees on FN land?   Or arrested white settler teenagers for slappign the FNDF troops who'd shot their cousins in the head for no reason?  Or caused elderly people of settler ancestry to die of heart attacks rather than allow them to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance driven by the wrong ambulance company?

3) As to Venezuela...you've received debate and critical responses.  You haven't been banned from posting or, to my knowledge, even threatened with banning.  Nothing said to you is comparable to the threat of being suspended or expelled from a political party.

Mass Media is the Enemy of the People Like the Cage is the Enemy of the Bird

https://t.co/aKkePp502L

"The GUARDIAN has just published an actual, non-fictional op-ed that is titled 'Is my Jewish three-year-old too young to learn about antisemitism?,' about a concerned mother who is teaching her toddler about the in case Jeremy Corbyn becomes Prime Minister.

The GUARDIAN. Not the Onion. The GUARDIAN..."

Sputnik: Jeremy Corbyn and the Strange Rebirth of Labour England (and vid)

https://www.rt.com/shows/sputnik/436831-jeremy-corbyn-labour-party/

"Despite a wave of negativity - much of it from his own side - Jeremy Corbyn has achieved the greatest increase in the Labour vote since Clement Atlee in the historic landslide of 1945. It is the biggest left-wing party in Europe. Francis Beckett has chronicled Labour leaders from Atlee to Blair to Miliband. We invited him into the Sputnik studio to tell us what he has uncovered."

Dear Mr Corbyn: When Hamas Salutes You, You Are A Problem

https://twitter.com/koshermcdonald/status/1031966326728916993

"Canada's Jewish community stands with our friends in family in the UK as they take a stand against rising anti-semitism in Labour under Corbyn." CIJA Info

'Canadian. Jewish. Advocacy'