I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
I genuinely think Corbyn is too stupid to be antisemitic.
But now that the ambulances are all doing 20 mph there will be plenty of time to clear casualty before the next one arrives.
As previously, emergency services are permitted to exceed speed limits.
Come on TUD, post Sturgeon even SNP supporters are allowed to have a sense of humour.
Try me with something humorous and we'll start from there..
Hmm...I find the money that the SNP has spent on computers which are assessed as being useless during the Sturgeon era pretty funny but I am guessing that this is an issue of perspective, as humour often is. https://wingsoverscotland.com/down-the-pipe/#more-140104
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
You sound more like one of those fat single mothers who vaguebook about getting all of the toxic people out of their lives.
Imagine if someone proved an entirely new origin of humankind. It's on that level of profundity
And they phoned you first.
"Guys! We have this world-shattering info! Who shall we phone first?" "I know this drug-raddled lush that knaps flint dildos" "Excellent! Phone him immediately!"
First interview with an alien?
Remember what happened to those who got too close on Horsell Common (and, of course, in Mars Attacks).
"Lisa Cameron’s defection from the Scottish National party to the Conservatives (Report, 12 October) is a rare example of a rat joining a sinking ship." Michael Meadowcroft
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
Not at all. It's a poor show if we can't get excited about things in later life. What is it?
I genuinely wish I could say, because it is uplifting in its profundity (during a dark time), but I can't. Sworn to secrecy, for a few months at least
I just got off the call and went Jeezusss F Christickle and my instant reaction was such a level of excitement I had to tell SOMEONE even if I coiuldn't give deets so I told you guys
I told my editor at the Knappers Gazette, not a person given to exaggeration, and she reacted:
"OMG – that is insane!! Just perfection."
Ah, now it's obvious. You've just been conversing with a perfect avatar of yourself, telling you about an encounter with an Albanian taxi driver who had that Zuckerberg guy in his cab the other day.
But now that the ambulances are all doing 20 mph there will be plenty of time to clear casualty before the next one arrives.
As previously, emergency services are permitted to exceed speed limits.
Come on TUD, post Sturgeon even SNP supporters are allowed to have a sense of humour.
Try me with something humorous and we'll start from there..
Hmm...I find the money that the SNP has spent on computers which are assessed as being useless during the Sturgeon era pretty funny but I am guessing that this is an issue of perspective, as humour often is. https://wingsoverscotland.com/down-the-pipe/#more-140104
The transformation of people like you into avid WOS readers is pretty funny tbf. Wry smile rather than belly laugh, but thanks for that.
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
You sound more like one of those fat single mothers who vaguebook about getting all of the toxic people out of their lives.
Imagine if someone proved an entirely new origin of humankind. It's on that level of profundity
And they phoned you first.
"Guys! We have this world-shattering info! Who shall we phone first?" "I know this drug-raddled lush that knaps flint dildos" "Excellent! Phone him immediately!"
First interview with an alien?
Remember what happened to those who got too close on Horsell Common (and, of course, in Mars Attacks).
WhatThreeWords IPO ?
Possibly a board game of WhatThreeWords where you have to identify all the places Leon has been in the last 12 months?
"Lisa Cameron’s defection from the Scottish National party to the Conservatives (Report, 12 October) is a rare example of a rat joining a sinking ship." Michael Meadowcroft
Really interesting level of debate on here this morning. Talking about the Middle East without death threats. Not many places you get that on t'net....
Yes, but Cookie did end a sentence with a dangling participle ("mainstream British culture which I am part of"), so I've mobilized the ninjas with the high carbon steel black Damascus blades. Justice will be swift and merciless.
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
I genuinely think Corbyn is too stupid to be antisemitic.
You'd need an IQ under 80 not to realise that mural was horribly anti-Semitic. I mean, it could easily have been a particularly despicable cartoon in Der Sturmer
I believe Corbyn is quite dim, I don't believe he is THAT dim and I don't believe that he has never seen Nazi anti-Semitic imagery
The best "excuse" I can think of, for that incident, is that the Jezbollah has moved for so long in casually anti-Semitic far left circles that he now fails to notice ithis prejudice, as it is ubiquitous. To return to a prior analogy, it's like someone who lives next to a busy street, they won't suddenly notice a lorry going past, as they hear them all the time
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
Sorry, was having a work lunch.
There was a report from a few years back (which I think at the time I shared here) that had around a third of British people holding what they considered "soft" anti-Semitic views. Indeed, I think I remember their being quite some interest in it because Conservative voters were more likely to express agreement with anti-Semitic statements than Labour voters, whilst also reporting that Jewish people perceived the Labour party as more anti-Semitic.
There are a lot of shocking details in the report on Bone's conduct. There is also a rather damning section on failure of the Conservatives processes: a complaint about Bone's conduct was first made to Cameron in Dec '15, then again to May in Nov '17. https://twitter.com/Direthoughts/status/1713863299391959232
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
Not at all. It's a poor show if we can't get excited about things in later life. What is it?
I genuinely wish I could say, because it is uplifting in its profundity (during a dark time), but I can't. Sworn to secrecy, for a few months at least
I just got off the call and went Jeezusss F Christickle and my instant reaction was such a level of excitement I had to tell SOMEONE even if I coiuldn't give deets so I told you guys
I told my editor at the Knappers Gazette, not a person given to exaggeration, and she reacted:
"OMG – that is insane!! Just perfection."
I recently received a call asking me if I fancied a job as a bus driver, apparently the pay is competitive.
Leon has told his editor the world shattering commercial secret he has been told? Hmmm...
It would have to be embargoed on pain of death to stop an editor doing something with the news.
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
You sound more like one of those fat single mothers who vaguebook about getting all of the toxic people out of their lives.
Imagine if someone proved an entirely new origin of humankind. It's on that level of profundity
And they phoned you first.
"Guys! We have this world-shattering info! Who shall we phone first?" "I know this drug-raddled lush that knaps flint dildos" "Excellent! Phone him immediately!"
First interview with an alien?
Remember what happened to those who got too close on Horsell Common (and, of course, in Mars Attacks).
WhatThreeWords IPO ?
Dodgy piss up in some Spanish backwater with a load of miserable people?
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
Not at all. It's a poor show if we can't get excited about things in later life. What is it?
I genuinely wish I could say, because it is uplifting in its profundity (during a dark time), but I can't. Sworn to secrecy, for a few months at least
I just got off the call and went Jeezusss F Christickle and my instant reaction was such a level of excitement I had to tell SOMEONE even if I coiuldn't give deets so I told you guys
I told my editor at the Knappers Gazette, not a person given to exaggeration, and she reacted:
"OMG – that is insane!! Just perfection."
I recently received a call asking me if I fancied a job as a bus driver, apparently the pay is competitive.
Leon has told his editor the world shattering commercial secret he has been told? Hmmm...
It would have to be embargoed on pain of death to stop an editor doing something with the news.
Unless the editor had a profound personal commercial interest in keeping it quiet
It wasn't about infidelity in this case, but a deeply weird and disturbing campaign of bullying through verbal, physical, and sexual conduct conducted by Bone against a young (as it happens male) employee. From the report:
"In the first place it is remarkable that a senior MP in his 60s should think it appropriate that he should be sharing a bedroom and bathroom with his employee, and an employee in his early 20s. That in itself rings alarm bells. But from an objective standpoint, the respondent’s conduct in exposing himself in this way, with his genitals close to this young employee’s face, in an unwanted intimate context in a confined space, was not mere nudity. It was indecent exposure. There can be no doubt about it. Once the complainant’s account was believed, which it was, the outcome was inevitable. Objectively, this was sexual misconduct: it was conduct of a sexual nature which was non-consensual; it was unwanted behaviour which was perceived by the complainant as sexual, and rightly so, and it was intimidating."
"This case is all about the exercise of power and control over a young employee, both in the bullying and sexual misconduct. The investigator described the respondent’s position as a ‘significant position of power’. In our view, there was a complete imbalance of power between them which the respondent deliberately exploited over months. It is said that the respondent disliked the complainant and believed him to be weak. That was no excuse for targeting him with a concerted campaign of bullying and an incident of sexual misconduct."
This is not the first case in recent times of this sort of behaviour by MPs, of more than one party. That an internal complaint in the Conservative Party went nowhere for five years is a concern. There will need to be significant reform of the way staff welfare is managed in Parliament - there are some great MPs to work for, but this sort of thing happens far too often.
Ah come on. Who hasn't accidentally and entirely innocently thrust their genitals into the face of someone much younger.
Somewhat startling piece on new homes built to low standards of insulation etc. (i.e. low specifications, rather than jerrybuilding). I am sure some are better, but even so ...
I still don't get why more homes are not built with solar panels as standard from the start. Economies of scale would, I assume, make it cheaper, and who is going to otice an extra few grand in the buying price if you are already spending £200K+.
I would have thought thta madating a minimum number of homes in each new development to haev solar panels would be a good way to up provision easily and cheaply.
I mean, because that would increase the construction price and developers dislike having to spend money and the Tories have, since Thatcher really, been in the role of mediating the interests of developers and home owners.
I'll be interested in the details of this Labour plan for modern garden cities. If the idea is just send it out to developers on current specs, it is going to be awful - huge developments of new builds that will last a decade if we're lucky. If Labour do it seriously and put proper specs on things - solar, insulation, maybe even limit the average car per home design and aim to have things build in line with the idea of walkable cities - then it could be great.
I'm not sure that people understand just how wretched new builds tend to be. It isn't universal - some are decent. But for so many (myself included) a new build home quickly shows just how cheaply it was thrown together. My former estate of 1,100 new homes from three builders had serious issues on all house designs from all three builders. So it didn;'t matter what you bought or from whom, it was crap.
In our case we had a house that audibly creaked in windy weather, with cracking plaster on various walls and as we discovered several years after buying it, empty cavity walls where Barratts had "forgotten" to install insulation. On every house they built. To say nothing about the garden made from rubble etc etc etc.
House prices have gone bonkers, yet the housebuilders construct the cheapest possible crap. This is the british problem in full effect - crap product at top money.
In Victorian/Edwardian times, builders built what they could get away with, as well.
The limiting factor was people having choice and checking quality. The houses that have survived from that period were the good ones. Plenty of references from that period of new houses being unsold as shoddy, ugly etc. - they were often knocked down, having never been occupied.
Today we have the problem that any crap sells. There is massive under
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
"From the river to the sea" is an explicit demand for the destruction of the state of Israel and the removal - whether through deportation or death - of all the Jews currently living there. It is indefensible and hateful and to claim that Jews here would not be affected by it - regardless of their views of the current Israeli government - is disingenuous rubbish.
An explicit analogy is often made with South Africa, with a "Free Palestine" being the equivalent of the end of apartheid. They see the Israelis as illegitimate settlers whom they want to progressively force out.
It's puzzlingly inconsistent. Some of the world's migrants should be encouraged, others driven out.
I have a painfully right-on Australian friend who has a poster up in her lounge staying 'Stop the Boats' - which is, it turns out, a protest against white people arriving in Australia in the 19th century.
Weren’t those protests (against 19th cent. immigration to Australia) because lots of the immigrants were Italian and Greek? Which was seen by certain types as a bit… ethnic
It wasn't about infidelity in this case, but a deeply weird and disturbing campaign of bullying through verbal, physical, and sexual conduct conducted by Bone against a young (as it happens male) employee. From the report:
"In the first place it is remarkable that a senior MP in his 60s should think it appropriate that he should be sharing a bedroom and bathroom with his employee, and an employee in his early 20s. That in itself rings alarm bells. But from an objective standpoint, the respondent’s conduct in exposing himself in this way, with his genitals close to this young employee’s face, in an unwanted intimate context in a confined space, was not mere nudity. It was indecent exposure. There can be no doubt about it. Once the complainant’s account was believed, which it was, the outcome was inevitable. Objectively, this was sexual misconduct: it was conduct of a sexual nature which was non-consensual; it was unwanted behaviour which was perceived by the complainant as sexual, and rightly so, and it was intimidating."
"This case is all about the exercise of power and control over a young employee, both in the bullying and sexual misconduct. The investigator described the respondent’s position as a ‘significant position of power’. In our view, there was a complete imbalance of power between them which the respondent deliberately exploited over months. It is said that the respondent disliked the complainant and believed him to be weak. That was no excuse for targeting him with a concerted campaign of bullying and an incident of sexual misconduct."
This is not the first case in recent times of this sort of behaviour by MPs, of more than one party. That an internal complaint in the Conservative Party went nowhere for five years is a concern. There will need to be significant reform of the way staff welfare is managed in Parliament - there are some great MPs to work for, but this sort of thing happens far too often.
Ah come on. Who hasn't accidentally and entirely innocently thrust their genitals into the face of someone much younger.
It wasn't about infidelity in this case, but a deeply weird and disturbing campaign of bullying through verbal, physical, and sexual conduct conducted by Bone against a young (as it happens male) employee. From the report:
"In the first place it is remarkable that a senior MP in his 60s should think it appropriate that he should be sharing a bedroom and bathroom with his employee, and an employee in his early 20s. That in itself rings alarm bells. But from an objective standpoint, the respondent’s conduct in exposing himself in this way, with his genitals close to this young employee’s face, in an unwanted intimate context in a confined space, was not mere nudity. It was indecent exposure. There can be no doubt about it. Once the complainant’s account was believed, which it was, the outcome was inevitable. Objectively, this was sexual misconduct: it was conduct of a sexual nature which was non-consensual; it was unwanted behaviour which was perceived by the complainant as sexual, and rightly so, and it was intimidating."
"This case is all about the exercise of power and control over a young employee, both in the bullying and sexual misconduct. The investigator described the respondent’s position as a ‘significant position of power’. In our view, there was a complete imbalance of power between them which the respondent deliberately exploited over months. It is said that the respondent disliked the complainant and believed him to be weak. That was no excuse for targeting him with a concerted campaign of bullying and an incident of sexual misconduct."
This is not the first case in recent times of this sort of behaviour by MPs, of more than one party. That an internal complaint in the Conservative Party went nowhere for five years is a concern. There will need to be significant reform of the way staff welfare is managed in Parliament - there are some great MPs to work for, but this sort of thing happens far too often.
Ah come on. Who hasn't accidentally and entirely innocently thrust their genitals into the face of someone much younger.
I know I have
The way some MPs behave is gob-smacking.
It may be that gob-smacking was what he was after…
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
I genuinely think Corbyn is too stupid to be antisemitic.
So this is something I find interesting - I went to one of the centrist Labour think tanks events where they were discussing Labour post Corbyn and how to deal with anti-Semitism in the party and one of the discussion points I found troubling (which I think has also been said publicly by Labour MPs) was the idea that some criticisms of capitalism were essentially anti-Semitic.
What they tried to argue there (which I strongly disagree with) is that any idea that "rich people control the world" is a form of "Jewish people control the world" which in my mind ignores a very clear criticism of capitalism and the world we live in - that of the "class interests" of the wealthy. This idea boils down to the fact that there doesn't have to be a smoky backroom where rich people make all the real decisions, or a "cabal" of Jewish people pulling the strings, but that people who get into elite positions of power will automatically already have the "correct" ideology for serving power because that is what is rewarded in our society. (This idea is also expressed by Chomsky in an interview I cba to look for now).
This is the hole I think Corbyn falls in - I think he clearly stands on the "class interest" side of this divide, but some things (like that mural) stood on the other side. I think you could naively view that mural as a general anti-elitist sentiment; I also think someone who is leader of the Labour Party should not be naïve in that way. It is noticeable that even Bernie Sanders was accused of anti-Semitism for many of the main reasons Corbyn was - his defence of Palestinians, his rhetoric against the wealthy elites and the 1% - but that this didn't stick a) because he didn't win the nomination and therefore it was no longer useful to propagate and b) his Jewish heritage obviously made it a lot more difficult to stick.
Somewhat startling piece on new homes built to low standards of insulation etc. (i.e. low specifications, rather than jerrybuilding). I am sure some are better, but even so ...
I still don't get why more homes are not built with solar panels as standard from the start. Economies of scale would, I assume, make it cheaper, and who is going to otice an extra few grand in the buying price if you are already spending £200K+.
I would have thought thta madating a minimum number of homes in each new development to haev solar panels would be a good way to up provision easily and cheaply.
I mean, because that would increase the construction price and developers dislike having to spend money and the Tories have, since Thatcher really, been in the role of mediating the interests of developers and home owners.
I'll be interested in the details of this Labour plan for modern garden cities. If the idea is just send it out to developers on current specs, it is going to be awful - huge developments of new builds that will last a decade if we're lucky. If Labour do it seriously and put proper specs on things - solar, insulation, maybe even limit the average car per home design and aim to have things build in line with the idea of walkable cities - then it could be great.
I'm not sure that people understand just how wretched new builds tend to be. It isn't universal - some are decent. But for so many (myself included) a new build home quickly shows just how cheaply it was thrown together. My former estate of 1,100 new homes from three builders had serious issues on all house designs from all three builders. So it didn;'t matter what you bought or from whom, it was crap.
In our case we had a house that audibly creaked in windy weather, with cracking plaster on various walls and as we discovered several years after buying it, empty cavity walls where Barratts had "forgotten" to install insulation. On every house they built. To say nothing about the garden made from rubble etc etc etc.
House prices have gone bonkers, yet the housebuilders construct the cheapest possible crap. This is the british problem in full effect - crap product at top money.
In Victorian/Edwardian times, builders built what they could get away with, as well.
The limiting factor was people having choice and checking quality. The houses that have survived from that period were the good ones. Plenty of references from that period of new houses being unsold as shoddy, ugly etc. - they were often knocked down, having never been occupied.
Today we have the problem that any crap sells. There is massive under
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
"From the river to the sea" is an explicit demand for the destruction of the state of Israel and the removal - whether through deportation or death - of all the Jews currently living there. It is indefensible and hateful and to claim that Jews here would not be affected by it - regardless of their views of the current Israeli government - is disingenuous rubbish.
An explicit analogy is often made with South Africa, with a "Free Palestine" being the equivalent of the end of apartheid. They see the Israelis as illegitimate settlers whom they want to progressively force out.
It's puzzlingly inconsistent. Some of the world's migrants should be encouraged, others driven out.
I have a painfully right-on Australian friend who has a poster up in her lounge staying 'Stop the Boats' - which is, it turns out, a protest against white people arriving in Australia in the 19th century.
Weren’t those protests (against 19th cent. immigration to Australia) because lots of the immigrants were Italian and Greek? Which was seen by certain types as a bit… ethnic
Haha - if the poster is a genuine reproduction, and that is the reason behind it, she would be mortified!
Just had history's most ridiculous and profound video call
I'm happy to grant you the first part of that without question. Do tell.
I wish I could. Commercially, I'm not allowed to
if what was suggested in the call genuinely comes to pass, it could change the world. I'm not joking
(I accept I sound entirely mad)
Not at all. It's a poor show if we can't get excited about things in later life. What is it?
I genuinely wish I could say, because it is uplifting in its profundity (during a dark time), but I can't. Sworn to secrecy, for a few months at least
I just got off the call and went Jeezusss F Christickle and my instant reaction was such a level of excitement I had to tell SOMEONE even if I coiuldn't give deets so I told you guys
I told my editor at the Knappers Gazette, not a person given to exaggeration, and she reacted:
"OMG – that is insane!! Just perfection."
Ah, now it's obvious. You've just been conversing with a perfect avatar of yourself, telling you about an encounter with an Albanian taxi driver who had that Zuckerberg guy in his cab the other day.
Did you swap dildo tips ?
Wait - they have replaceable tips?
Only the high end models...
Though the higher the end goes, the more you would want to make sure the tip stays in place.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
I genuinely think Corbyn is too stupid to be antisemitic.
You'd need an IQ under 80 not to realise that mural was horribly anti-Semitic. I mean, it could easily have been a particularly despicable cartoon in Der Sturmer
I believe Corbyn is quite dim, I don't believe he is THAT dim and I don't believe that he has never seen Nazi anti-Semitic imagery
The best "excuse" I can think of, for that incident, is that the Jezbollah has moved for so long in casually anti-Semitic far left circles that he now fails to notice ithis prejudice, as it is ubiquitous. To return to a prior analogy, it's like someone who lives next to a busy street, they won't suddenly notice a lorry going past, as they hear them all the time
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
And at social inferiors, esp. non-gentlemen trying to be orficers. One thinks of Trimmer in the Sword of Honour.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
IIRC it’s Richard Hannay, written when a lot of people viewed Bolshevism as Jewish. But, I do think Buchan’s attitudes shifted, especially as Nazism came to the fore.
...What they tried to argue there (which I strongly disagree with) is that any idea that "rich people control the world" is a form of "Jewish people control the world" which in my mind ignores a very clear criticism of capitalism and the world we live in - that of the "class interests" of the wealthy. This idea boils down to the fact that there doesn't have to be a smoky backroom where rich people make all the real decisions, or a "cabal" of Jewish people pulling the strings, but that people who get into elite positions of power will automatically already have the "correct" ideology for serving power because that is what is rewarded in our society. (This idea is also expressed by Chomsky in an interview I cba to look for now)...
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
It could be anything, because we can’t assume that society will move in a more liberal direction.
Drawing some threads together- If a by-election in Wellingborough is incoming, will Lib and Lab come to a mutual understanding as to who the leading challenger is?
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
Drawing some threads together- If a by-election in Wellingborough is incoming, will Lib and Lab come to a mutual understanding as to who the leading challenger is?
Surely it will be Labour, given they held the seat from 97-05 and were well ahead of the Lib Dems in the last GE.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
Really interesting level of debate on here this morning. Talking about the Middle East without death threats. Not many places you get that on t'net....
Yes, but Cookie did end a sentence with a dangling participle ("mainstream British culture which I am part of"), so I've mobilized the ninjas with the high carbon steel black Damascus blades. Justice will be swift and merciless.
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
A Grammatical Pedant Writes:
'mainstream British culture which I am part of' is ending a sentence with a preposition.
A dangling participle is something like: 'Drinking throughout the afternoon, the local pub was a wonderful place to be.' Because a participle needs to be attached to a noun, this creates the absurdity that it is the pub doing the drinking. Such constructions should be avoided.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
It could be anything, because we can’t assume that society will move in a more liberal direction.
That is certain, and we know this: because society has already moved in a more illiberal direction in the last 20 years. We were considerably freer in the 1990s than we are now, in terms of speech and the arts
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
I don't see any way in which a Palestinian state could be established "from the river [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] Sea" that didn't first result in the deaths of a sizeable proportion of the Jews currently living there.
And the history is similarly genocidal in origin: refusal to accept partition resulted in the 1948 war, in which the explicit goal of the Palestinian Arabs and their allies was to push the Jews into the sea. At no stage has anyone advocated for a single Palestinian state with a Jewish minority, and there are no current Arab or Muslim nations which could serve as a blueprint for how that might work in practice.
I mean, many people want a one state solution in the form of a multi-ethnic state. Have the issues in the last 70 years made that hard, yes. But a proper and sincere peace and reconciliation process would help towards a peaceful single state with people who have lived on the land for generations alongside Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis.
I refer my learned friend to the Dayton Accord of 1995, which ended the Bosnian War. One-State solution that has, in large part, worked for 28 years.
Err Bosnia and Herzegovina Croatia North Macedonia Montenegro Serbia
Really interesting level of debate on here this morning. Talking about the Middle East without death threats. Not many places you get that on t'net....
Yes, but Cookie did end a sentence with a dangling participle ("mainstream British culture which I am part of"), so I've mobilized the ninjas with the high carbon steel black Damascus blades. Justice will be swift and merciless.
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
A Grammatical Pedant Writes:
'mainstream British culture which I am part of' is ending a sentence with a preposition.
A dangling participle is something like: 'Drinking throughout the afternoon, the local pub was a wonderful place to be.' Because a participle needs to be attached to a noun, this creates the absurdity that it is the pub doing the drinking. Such constructions should be avoided.
Indeed. They are the sort of constructions up with which we will not put.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
Yeah I thought that might be Buchan. His stories are great ripping yarns but occasionally something like that comes along and leaves a very nasty taste in the mouth. A bit of that with Agatha Christie too, IIRC. They reflected the prejudices of the average British middle class person of the time, the people who read the Daily Mail pieces on the Blackshirts and attacking pre-war Jewish immigration and nodded along approvingly. IIRC Orwell writes about this and owns up to his own antisemitic thoughts. Have things changed that much? I have a Jewish American friend who spent some time in, I think, Surrey in the 80s/90s and said she encountered a lot of antisemitism among well off middle class people there.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
Delusional nonsense
You don't think there's been a massive shift in the past 50-60 years?
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Meat eating and abortion are the two things I suspect future wokeratis might cancel us for. Meat eating is, as you say, obvious, but imagine a circumstance in 300 years time where all life is considered so precious, that killing an unborn baby is considered deeply shocking.
Abortion as a concept is currently considered acceptable because of women's rights and historical oppression of women's bodies, yada yada. You know the talking points. But imagine a society in 300 years time where that isn't an issue, but the destruction of any life (hence, vegetarianism) is.
Drawing some threads together- If a by-election in Wellingborough is incoming, will Lib and Lab come to a mutual understanding as to who the leading challenger is?
Lib and Lab will both understand which party is the leading challenger. With it being a Labour seat until 2005, it's not rocket science. But whether the Libs would act on that mutually shared understanding is another matter.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Keeping people alive when they have lost all meaningful sentience through dementia. Or living through extreme pain, daily. Our attitudes towards ease of death for those who have reached a point they don't want to go on will change dramatically.
Partly down to the economics of keeping the economically inactive alive being unbearable, masked as "freedom of choice".
Really interesting level of debate on here this morning. Talking about the Middle East without death threats. Not many places you get that on t'net....
Yes, but Cookie did end a sentence with a dangling participle ("mainstream British culture which I am part of"), so I've mobilized the ninjas with the high carbon steel black Damascus blades. Justice will be swift and merciless.
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
A Grammatical Pedant Writes:
'mainstream British culture which I am part of' is ending a sentence with a preposition.
A dangling participle is something like: 'Drinking throughout the afternoon, the local pub was a wonderful place to be.' Because a participle needs to be attached to a noun, this creates the absurdity that it is the pub doing the drinking. Such constructions should be avoided.
Indeed. They are the sort of constructions up with which we will not put.
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
And why were there "military successes".
I am absolutely saying that on account of such successes they decided to clear out those villages. I'm not disputing that it happened, I am saying it occurred during the war and that the war was launched by the Arab world on the day that Israel declared independence.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Keeping people alive when they have lost all meaningful sentience through dementia. Or living through extreme pain, daily. Our attitudes towards ease of death for those who have reached a point they don't want to go on will change dramatically.
Partly down to the economics of keeping the economically inactive alive being unbearable, masked as "freedom of choice".
For the last few months of his life, my grandfather could say nothing beyond "I want to die" nor could he remember anything else, either. He was bed-bound and incontinent, and terminally ill. The last things he could remember were those four words. I loved him, but I wish I could have given him what he wanted.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
I genuinely think Corbyn is too stupid to be antisemitic.
You'd need an IQ under 80 not to realise that mural was horribly anti-Semitic. I mean, it could easily have been a particularly despicable cartoon in Der Sturmer
I believe Corbyn is quite dim, I don't believe he is THAT dim and I don't believe that he has never seen Nazi anti-Semitic imagery
The best "excuse" I can think of, for that incident, is that the Jezbollah has moved for so long in casually anti-Semitic far left circles that he now fails to notice ithis prejudice, as it is ubiquitous. To return to a prior analogy, it's like someone who lives next to a busy street, they won't suddenly notice a lorry going past, as they hear them all the time
Jeremy "2 E's at A-Level" Corbyn
In his generation, it would have been 'shrooms not E's
"The nature of Sam Bankman-Fried “genius” has come to light in his thoughts of Shakespeare, against whose genius he applies statistical reasoning:
I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare…but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favourable."
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
Nah. I think society and culture are both a lot more tolerant and understanding of difference.
So it is not Moorcock's Dancers at the Time but is is still a hell of at lot more diverse and welcoming of diversity than it was even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Hang on - I wonder what a Jain or a Buddhist would make of a zombie. Or are they not beings with souls that can be transmigrated?
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
You think with the advent of social media we have a "kinder, gentler, more accepting society"?
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I'm not convinced we're a kinder society today compared to the 1990s.
Really interesting level of debate on here this morning. Talking about the Middle East without death threats. Not many places you get that on t'net....
Yes, but Cookie did end a sentence with a dangling participle ("mainstream British culture which I am part of"), so I've mobilized the ninjas with the high carbon steel black Damascus blades. Justice will be swift and merciless.
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
It sounds like Peter Bone is fond of a dangling participle too.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
Nah. I think society and culture are both a lot more tolerant and understanding of difference.
So it is not Moorcock's Dancers at the Time but is is still a hell of at lot more diverse and welcoming of diversity than it was even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s
It's a self-congratulatory, false diversity though. There's less room for the eccentric than there used to be.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
I take your point; 'kinder' is maybe not the right word. In the past people were often kind but condescending.
Reading any nineteenth century novel brings home with a massive jolt just how much attitudes have changed.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
Yes, I think you're right (and i'm genuinely puzzled why Leon thinks it delusional). It was something Matthew Parris said when asked to come up with something genuinely positive about the Blair era - he felt that society had genuinely relaxed from the narrow-mindedness of previous years. Blair's cheery optimism and willingness to take on critics made it easier, rather than the earnest, defensive attitude that some reformers take.
And I think most of us have learned stuff too. I look back on the attitudes that I had even 20 years ago - e.g. the gay couples couldn't fulfill parenthood as well - and think "Really, did I actually think that?!"
To some extent we do need to cut people a bit of slack for things they just don't much think about. I remember being puzzled by the mural fuss as it had struck me as obviously about wicked capitalists. I literally never think about whether someone is Jewish (I was surprised to learn that Michael Howard is, or for that matter that I am, as a relation told me a few years ago) so the connection didn't occur to me. In the same way, people who will casually use a phrase like "welshing on a deal" aren't really expressing anti-Welsh prejudice, but simply aren't in the habit of checking their vocabulary. If they persist after being told, that's different.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
Nah. I think society and culture are both a lot more tolerant and understanding of difference.
So it is not Moorcock's Dancers at the Time but is is still a hell of at lot more diverse and welcoming of diversity than it was even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s
Yes, everyone is so different now, it's just amazing that, with all this difference, everyone has ended up believing the same things, and saying the same things, in case they "offend"
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
And why were there "military successes".
I am absolutely saying that on account of such successes they decided to clear out those villages. I'm not disputing that it happened, I am saying it occurred during the war and that the war was launched by the Arab world on the day that Israel declared independence.
I was making a point about dates. There was already a war going on that day. Fighting between Jewish and Palestinian forces had been going on in earnest since November 1947, months before the full scale invasion by Arab countries in mid 48.
Also, the motivations of the Arab countries involved were mixed. Jordan, who brought the most significant military force, wanted to annex the West Bank and was happy to leave Israel within the 1947 proposed borders, whereas other Arab countries wanted to create a unitary (majority Arab-speaking) Palestinian state
NATO warns: Putin could freeze the War at any time
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be planning to put the war against Ukraine on hold, according to a report by RBC Ukraine.
The NATO Secretary-General acknowledges that there is always a certain risk that President Putin may take measures to prevent Ukraine from regaining its territory.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Agatha Christie often reflected the social mores of the time.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
I take your point; 'kinder' is maybe not the right word. In the past people were often kind but condescending.
Reading any nineteenth century novel brings home with a massive jolt just how much attitudes have changed.
Tech has changed a lot, and not just those old Invacar things trying to compete with Trabants for crappiness. When I were a lad the deaf children were the ones with earpieces and wires down to their shirt pockets. Now ...
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
And why were there "military successes".
I am absolutely saying that on account of such successes they decided to clear out those villages. I'm not disputing that it happened, I am saying it occurred during the war and that the war was launched by the Arab world on the day that Israel declared independence.
I was making a point about dates. There was already a war going on that day. Fighting between Jewish and Palestinian forces had been going on in earnest since November 1947, months before the full scale invasion by Arab countries in mid 48.
Also, the motivations of the Arab countries involved were mixed. Jordan, who brought the most significant military force, wanted to annex the West Bank and was happy to leave Israel within the 1947 proposed borders, whereas other Arab countries wanted to create a unitary (majority Arab-speaking) Palestinian state
Not that the vast majority of Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians etc. have any responsibility for the actions of their ancestors, taken before they were born (or were only children).
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Agatha Christie often reflected the social mores of the time.
She would have to - she'd be targeting the middle classes = DM readers. On commercial grounds if nothing else. No literary equivalents of a Vorticist painting wanted there.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
Calamitous ratings. It is doing so badly they are potentially shelving the planned trilogy
Ill-considered remake flunks - blame the Wokes!
It really is the Wokeness that has ruined it. Do try and keep up
"there’s a weird underlying Kumbaya quality to the whole thing. The Catholic Church, represented by the disappointingly wimpy Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), has opted out, stating that it favors treating the girls with psychiatric methods. (Hello? Is this the Vatican talking?) And a theme of “community” is introduced — the idea that what can save these girls isn’t just an exorcist but the spirit of everyone working together. (Hello? Is this the Joe Biden administration talking?) "
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Keeping people alive when they have lost all meaningful sentience through dementia. Or living through extreme pain, daily. Our attitudes towards ease of death for those who have reached a point they don't want to go on will change dramatically.
Partly down to the economics of keeping the economically inactive alive being unbearable, masked as "freedom of choice".
I think we are, on the whole, kinder to pets around the end of life than humans, at least in the UK. I know that people have the worry that some old folks will feel pressured to end themselves, and I know that some feel suicide is against their beliefs, but if its ok to put down a pet in agony then I don't see why it shouldn't be an option for a human who wants to go.
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
Horseshit.
Wikipedia on the 47-48 civil war says the death toll was about 2,00 total, split roughly evenly between the two sides. It makes no mention of any villages being "ethnically cleansed", because it never happened.
Anyway, it wasn't exactly a secret that the regular Arab armies were going to attack as soon as the Mandate expired (in Transjordan's case, they actually attacked some days before). So any military successes over the local Arab population would always have been expected to be transient.
Somewhat startling piece on new homes built to low standards of insulation etc. (i.e. low specifications, rather than jerrybuilding). I am sure some are better, but even so ...
I still don't get why more homes are not built with solar panels as standard from the start. Economies of scale would, I assume, make it cheaper, and who is going to otice an extra few grand in the buying price if you are already spending £200K+.
I would have thought thta madating a minimum number of homes in each new development to haev solar panels would be a good way to up provision easily and cheaply.
I mean, because that would increase the construction price and developers dislike having to spend money and the Tories have, since Thatcher really, been in the role of mediating the interests of developers and home owners.
I'll be interested in the details of this Labour plan for modern garden cities. If the idea is just send it out to developers on current specs, it is going to be awful - huge developments of new builds that will last a decade if we're lucky. If Labour do it seriously and put proper specs on things - solar, insulation, maybe even limit the average car per home design and aim to have things build in line with the idea of walkable cities - then it could be great.
I'm not sure that people understand just how wretched new builds tend to be. It isn't universal - some are decent. But for so many (myself included) a new build home quickly shows just how cheaply it was thrown together. My former estate of 1,100 new homes from three builders had serious issues on all house designs from all three builders. So it didn;'t matter what you bought or from whom, it was crap.
In our case we had a house that audibly creaked in windy weather, with cracking plaster on various walls and as we discovered several years after buying it, empty cavity walls where Barratts had "forgotten" to install insulation. On every house they built. To say nothing about the garden made from rubble etc etc etc.
House prices have gone bonkers, yet the housebuilders construct the cheapest possible crap. This is the british problem in full effect - crap product at top money.
In Victorian/Edwardian times, builders built what they could get away with, as well.
The limiting factor was people having choice and checking quality. The houses that have survived from that period were the good ones. Plenty of references from that period of new houses being unsold as shoddy, ugly etc. - they were often knocked down, having never been occupied.
Today we have the problem that any crap sells. There is massive under
Really interesting level of debate on here this morning. Talking about the Middle East without death threats. Not many places you get that on t'net....
Yes, but Cookie did end a sentence with a dangling participle ("mainstream British culture which I am part of"), so I've mobilized the ninjas with the high carbon steel black Damascus blades. Justice will be swift and merciless.
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
Damascus steel is cultural appropriation.
With Ninjas that’s cultural imperialist mixing as well.
Plus ninjas are rather offensive in Japanese culture.
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
Yes, I think you're right (and i'm genuinely puzzled why Leon thinks it delusional). It was something Matthew Parris said when asked to come up with something genuinely positive about the Blair era - he felt that society had genuinely relaxed from the narrow-mindedness of previous years. Blair's cheery optimism and willingness to take on critics made it easier, rather than the earnest, defensive attitude that some reformers take.
And I think most of us have learned stuff too. I look back on the attitudes that I had even 20 years ago - e.g. the gay couples couldn't fulfill parenthood as well - and think "Really, did I actually think that?!"
To some extent we do need to cut people a bit of slack for things they just don't much think about. I remember being puzzled by the mural fuss as it had struck me as obviously about wicked capitalists. I literally never think about whether someone is Jewish (I was surprised to learn that Michael Howard is, or for that matter that I am, as a relation told me a few years ago) so the connection didn't occur to me. In the same way, people who will casually use a phrase like "welshing on a deal" aren't really expressing anti-Welsh prejudice, but simply aren't in the habit of checking their vocabulary. If they persist after being told, that's different.
Has it occurred to you there may be a link between your inability to see how we are restricting ourselves, with illiberal Wokeness, and your inability to see the anti-Semitism in that mural?
I'm not accusing you of being as dim as Corbyn, but you do strike me as someone who is quite phenomenally lacking in perception, at times
It's fine. I'm really bad at ice skating and algebra - and much, much else - we all have our faults
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
And why were there "military successes".
I am absolutely saying that on account of such successes they decided to clear out those villages. I'm not disputing that it happened, I am saying it occurred during the war and that the war was launched by the Arab world on the day that Israel declared independence.
I was making a point about dates. There was already a war going on that day. Fighting between Jewish and Palestinian forces had been going on in earnest since November 1947, months before the full scale invasion by Arab countries in mid 48.
Also, the motivations of the Arab countries involved were mixed. Jordan, who brought the most significant military force, wanted to annex the West Bank and was happy to leave Israel within the 1947 proposed borders, whereas other Arab countries wanted to create a unitary (majority Arab-speaking) Palestinian state
Ah I see. Yes that is true. According to Israel, the full scale invasion is named "Phase III" of the war. "Phase I" as the Israelis call it, was when the Arabs began to fight and it was during the course of that fighting that, and then throughout the subsequent phases, Israel decided to go further than defending the proposed borders and began to annex the Arab villages.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
Calamitous ratings. It is doing so badly they are potentially shelving the planned trilogy
Ill-considered remake flunks - blame the Wokes!
It really is the Wokeness that has ruined it. Do try and keep up
"there’s a weird underlying Kumbaya quality to the whole thing. The Catholic Church, represented by the disappointingly wimpy Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), has opted out, stating that it favors treating the girls with psychiatric methods. (Hello? Is this the Vatican talking?) And a theme of “community” is introduced — the idea that what can save these girls isn’t just an exorcist but the spirit of everyone working together. (Hello? Is this the Joe Biden administration talking?) "
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
And why were there "military successes".
I am absolutely saying that on account of such successes they decided to clear out those villages. I'm not disputing that it happened, I am saying it occurred during the war and that the war was launched by the Arab world on the day that Israel declared independence.
I was making a point about dates. There was already a war going on that day. Fighting between Jewish and Palestinian forces had been going on in earnest since November 1947, months before the full scale invasion by Arab countries in mid 48.
Also, the motivations of the Arab countries involved were mixed. Jordan, who brought the most significant military force, wanted to annex the West Bank and was happy to leave Israel within the 1947 proposed borders, whereas other Arab countries wanted to create a unitary (majority Arab-speaking) Palestinian state
Not that the vast majority of Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians etc. have any responsibility for the actions of their ancestors, taken before they were born (or were only children).
That is a strange comment when the whole problem in the Middle East centres around exactly the same issues that were relevant 70 years ago. Israel's place in the region.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
Calamitous ratings. It is doing so badly they are potentially shelving the planned trilogy
Ill-considered remake flunks - blame the Wokes!
It really is the Wokeness that has ruined it. Do try and keep up
"there’s a weird underlying Kumbaya quality to the whole thing. The Catholic Church, represented by the disappointingly wimpy Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), has opted out, stating that it favors treating the girls with psychiatric methods. (Hello? Is this the Vatican talking?) And a theme of “community” is introduced — the idea that what can save these girls isn’t just an exorcist but the spirit of everyone working together. (Hello? Is this the Joe Biden administration talking?) "
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
I take your point; 'kinder' is maybe not the right word. In the past people were often kind but condescending.
Reading any nineteenth century novel brings home with a massive jolt just how much attitudes have changed.
Tech has changed a lot, and not just those old Invacar things trying to compete with Trabants for crappiness. When I were a lad the deaf children were the ones with earpieces and wires down to their shirt pockets. Now ...
The tech for adapting standard cars for disabled drives rather than restricting them to dangerous, green, plastic Noddy cars was always there. What was missing was the right attitude.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
Nah. I think society and culture are both a lot more tolerant and understanding of difference.
So it is not Moorcock's Dancers at the Time but is is still a hell of at lot more diverse and welcoming of diversity than it was even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s
I think society is much more tolerant of difference in some ways (racial, gender, transgender, clothing, etc.) but less tolerant in other ways (opinions, some anti-social habits such as littering or drunk driving, etc.). There's also much less deference to strangers than there used to be.
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
Horseshit.
Wikipedia on the 47-48 civil war says the death toll was about 2,00 total, split roughly evenly between the two sides. It makes no mention of any villages being "ethnically cleansed", because it never happened.
Anyway, it wasn't exactly a secret that the regular Arab armies were going to attack as soon as the Mandate expired (in Transjordan's case, they actually attacked some days before). So any military successes over the local Arab population would always have been expected to be transient.
Not quite horseshit. As I have mentioned, pre-declaration and immediate invasion, there was ongoing fighting as the Arabs sought to pre-empt the establishment of the state of Israel. During this fighting, and subsequently, there was definitely a plan hatched and executed to annex Arab villages that were fighting them.
Angry people are angry that a pro-Palestine protest has set up shop next to the Cenotaph. A Tory MP blamed Westminster Council for approving it, but the council denies it, as do the police. As an aside, some are also annoyed that the police are storing their kit on the Cenotaph.
On the face of it, storing your kit directly on the cenotaph does seem more disrespectful than setting up next to it. But then it seems the angry MPs are also saying that any pro-Palestinian protests (as opposed to just pro-Hamas ones) should be made illegal so I would suggest he can probably just go fuck himself.
Everyone has the right to peaceful assembly and protest. It is an absolute core of our approach to citizenship. That isn't to say that I approve of every protest - that would be ridiculous.
So if the PSC people want to go and march, they should be allowed. The balance to tread is when their banners and chants are genocidal - do we send the police in to remove such things? You can't stand in the street demanding the murder of someone else in the street - why should you be able to do so for the murder of someone elsewhere?
S.1 of the Terrorism Act 2006 says hello.
Quite a few of the statements being made on the streets of London and other cities over the last few days would appear to be in breach of this provision.
Lots of talk about hate crimes and, yet, shouting hate at Jews is somehow ok. Well, not to me it isn't and not I hope to lots of other people. If we're going to have such crimes then we apply them properly to everybody not just to a select few who seem to think they should have a free pass to spew hate at others while claiming they are the victims if anyone dares point out what they're doing.
A lot of that depends on whether you think that verbally attacking Israel is the same as verbally attacking Jews.
I don't.
I think Israel under its current administration is the epitome of strong arm bullying and their treatment of Palestinians is utterly indefensible. That has abosolutely nothing to doing with them being Jewish and everything to do with them currenlty being ruled by a bunch of ultra right wing religious nutters.
I think people should have the right to say this and protest about it.
Indeed, I would go further and argue that conflating Jewish people and Jewishness with Israelis or the state of Israel is in and of itself anti-Semitic. Not all Jewish people are Zionists or pro Israel - lots of the criticism of Israel comes from Jewish organisations. To make criticism of Israel a marker of anti-Semitism is ludicrous.
It is complicated by the fact though that many, probably most, Jewish people have some sort of relationship with the state of Israel. Often as simple of family ties or friends who live there, but also just 'having a view', which if you're Jewish you are generally kind of expected to have vs the way that you wouldn't have a view on, say, Uruguay or Liberia.
Which is to say that criticism of Israel, which is often of the 'river to the sea' saying-without-saying kind, can still feel personal to a Jewish person, even one who is deeply critical of the Israeli government and its actions.
As a matter of record Israel is a Jewish state (as per UN 181). So it appears that while it is of course legitimate and necessary to criticise any state's actions if you disagree with them, blah, blah, in criticising Israel people are also criticising (the) Jewish people.
So any criticism of Israel is also criticism of Jews? Think you’ve disappeared up your own reductive butthole there.
Well by definition that is the case. Israel is a Jewish state. And criticism of Jews is perfectly legitimate.
That is a long way from believing that Israel doesn't have a right to exist, for example. Or from being prejudiced against Israel/Jews for being Israel/Jews.
Israel doesn't have a right to exist. It has lots of rights including a right to self-defence, but not a right to existence. States do not have a right to existence. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union all ceased to exist without their rights being violated.
Not everyone who uses this term is being sneaky intentionally but I think the reason someone invented this weird, slightly philosophical term is because they're trying to conflate "a country has the right to not be invaded" which is uncontroversial with "there must be a majority Jewish state with Judaism as its official religion" which is controversial.
Perhaps when they say "right to exist" they use it as shorthand for "we believe in the validity of UN 181". It is of course perfectly understandable that people think that UN 181 is controversial and that there should never have been a Jewish State established in the Middle East.
Since 1967 it has been Israel who apaprenty do not believe in the validity of UN 181 since they have refused to accept one half of it. They are happy to have the Jewish state within Palestine but unwilling to accept the Arab state alongside it. You continually refer to UN 181 as if it only refers to a Jewish state and Israel is in compliance. It does not and Israel is not.
There is some truth in that. I am cherry picking.
1947: UN 181 1948: Establishment of the state of Israel Also 1948: Invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria.
Where Israel has consistently gone wrong (and is why it is being criticised today for current events) is that it fails to realise that that wars of aggression or militant action against it change in no way whatsoever much of the international community's views (as Israel sees it) about how it should behave.
So in 1948, when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated they thought "fuck it" and took over Arab villages as an act of war. In 1967 and 1973 when they realised they were actually winning the war, and not being annihilated, they occupied enemy land as an act of war. And in 2023, when they were attacked, they took the fight to the enemy.
The nascent Israel realised they could do better than the 1947 proposal with military successes in early 1948, before the attacks by Egypt, Jordan etc. They were taking over, i.e. ethnically cleansing/massacring, Arab villages before then (and the nascent Palestinian forces also carried out massacres of Jews).
Horseshit.
Wikipedia on the 47-48 civil war says the death toll was about 2,00 total, split roughly evenly between the two sides. It makes no mention of any villages being "ethnically cleansed", because it never happened.
Anyway, it wasn't exactly a secret that the regular Arab armies were going to attack as soon as the Mandate expired (in Transjordan's case, they actually attacked some days before). So any military successes over the local Arab population would always have been expected to be transient.
From that Wikipedia article: “The operation was a military success. All the Arab villages that blocked the route were either taken or destroyed, and the Jewish forces were victorious in all their engagements.”
And: “From December 1947 to January 1948, around 70,000 Arabs fled,[63] and, by the end of March, that number had grown to around 100,000.[39]”
And: “Deir Yassin is a village located 5 kilometres west of Jerusalem. On 9 April 1948, independently of operation Nachshon, around 120 Irgun and Lehi men attacked the village and ran into resistance, capturing it after a fierce battle with Palmach help. The Irgun and Lehi lost 4 dead and 35 wounded. Between 100 and 120 inhabitants of the village were killed in the attack, mostly civilians.[154] The Haganah had approved the attack and assisted in it.[154]”
And: “In the context of Plan Dalet[citation needed], mixed urban centres, or those on the borders of the Jewish state, were attacked and besieged by Jewish forces. Tiberias was attacked on 10 April and fell six days later; Haifa fell on 23 April, after only one day of combat (Operation Bi'ur Hametz), and Jaffa was attacked on 27 April but fell only after the British abandoned it (Operation Hametz). Safed and Beisan (Operation Gideon) fell on 11 May and 13 May respectively, within the framework of Operation Yitfah, and Acre fell on 17 May, within the framework of Operation Ben-Ami.
“The Arab inhabitants of these towns fled or were expelled en masse. In these 6 cities, only 13,000 of the total of 177,000 Arab inhabitants remained by the end of May. This phenomenon ricocheted also in the suburbs and the majority of the zone's Arab villages.”
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
Calamitous ratings. It is doing so badly they are potentially shelving the planned trilogy
Ill-considered remake flunks - blame the Wokes!
It really is the Wokeness that has ruined it. Do try and keep up
"there’s a weird underlying Kumbaya quality to the whole thing. The Catholic Church, represented by the disappointingly wimpy Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), has opted out, stating that it favors treating the girls with psychiatric methods. (Hello? Is this the Vatican talking?) And a theme of “community” is introduced — the idea that what can save these girls isn’t just an exorcist but the spirit of everyone working together. (Hello? Is this the Joe Biden administration talking?) "
Snow White and Seven Magical Beings is turning out to be such a clusterfuck that it may never be released, despite Disney sinking hundreds of millions into it.
Good art, literature, TV, or film is necessarily offensive to someone. Otherwise, it is not good.
It wasn't about infidelity in this case, but a deeply weird and disturbing campaign of bullying through verbal, physical, and sexual conduct conducted by Bone against a young (as it happens male) employee. From the report:
"In the first place it is remarkable that a senior MP in his 60s should think it appropriate that he should be sharing a bedroom and bathroom with his employee, and an employee in his early 20s. That in itself rings alarm bells. But from an objective standpoint, the respondent’s conduct in exposing himself in this way, with his genitals close to this young employee’s face, in an unwanted intimate context in a confined space, was not mere nudity. It was indecent exposure. There can be no doubt about it. Once the complainant’s account was believed, which it was, the outcome was inevitable. Objectively, this was sexual misconduct: it was conduct of a sexual nature which was non-consensual; it was unwanted behaviour which was perceived by the complainant as sexual, and rightly so, and it was intimidating."
"This case is all about the exercise of power and control over a young employee, both in the bullying and sexual misconduct. The investigator described the respondent’s position as a ‘significant position of power’. In our view, there was a complete imbalance of power between them which the respondent deliberately exploited over months. It is said that the respondent disliked the complainant and believed him to be weak. That was no excuse for targeting him with a concerted campaign of bullying and an incident of sexual misconduct."
This is not the first case in recent times of this sort of behaviour by MPs, of more than one party. That an internal complaint in the Conservative Party went nowhere for five years is a concern. There will need to be significant reform of the way staff welfare is managed in Parliament - there are some great MPs to work for, but this sort of thing happens far too often.
Ah come on. Who hasn't accidentally and entirely innocently thrust their genitals into the face of someone much younger.
I know I have
It sounds from the report as if what really did for Peter Bone is his unequivocal denial, initially at least, that anything had happened at all. By his account, he had never raised his voice to anyone, nor did he do or say anything inappropriate at any time, and his office was universally a wonderful place to work.
That's such a risky defence. If your starting position is that your accuser is a malicious fantasist, then you're in a world of trouble if they come across as credible and have corroboration for at least some of their claims. Far better to say things may have been misconstrued, and you probably are a bit sharp with people under pressure now and then but do apologise etc. And, if you're 60-something and book a hotel room with a 20-something employee, don't be surprised if people later decide you're probably the weirdo.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
Yes. And of course that famous poem by T S Eliot
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto. The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once. The rats are underneath the piles. The jew is underneath the lot
I find much by Evelyn Waugh very funny, but he included some awful slurs (mainly directed at blacks).
It's interesting to speculate how this will pan out in future, ie what is it that we casually think and do now, which our descendants will find bewilderingly wrong? Because this moral evolution always happens
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
Good question. I'd suggest where the wokists lead the rest of us follow but I know you won't want to hear that.
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
I’m not at all convinced that society is kinder than in 1960.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
Nah. I think society and culture are both a lot more tolerant and understanding of difference.
So it is not Moorcock's Dancers at the Time but is is still a hell of at lot more diverse and welcoming of diversity than it was even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s
I think society is much more tolerant of difference in some ways (racial, gender, transgender, clothing, etc.) but less tolerant in other ways (opinions, some anti-social habits such as littering or drunk driving, etc.). There's also much less deference to strangers than there used to be.
I mean, the history of that phrase is not one of exterminationist intent. "Palestine will be free / From the river to the sea" specifically is considered to come from the refusal to accept the partition of the land and the creation of the separate states - not a claim about exterminating Jewish people in the land at all.
History of the phrase is irrelevant - its what it has come to mean that counts.
I mean if the phrase has a continual usage not related to exterminationist views, which it has, I think it is quite relevant when making the claim that it would be "intellectually dishonest to claim [it] means anything other than the mass killing of Jews". Again, because I also know many Jewish people happy to chant it who understand it to mean no such thing!
"Many". Those are very much outliers.
It does not make their views less valid.
And indeed only viewing the "right" kinds of Jewish people as being "real" Jews is a big problem (especially in the Labour party):
Labour had a genuine problem with anti-semitism under Corbyn. For a time I even had a local Labour councillor (Hightown, Luton) who was an admirer of Hitler (and former Anti-Racism Officer at Warwick University). People like that thought Labour was their home.
Were there some anti-Semitic Labour party members? Yes. Was it institutionally racist - perhaps. Is throwing out left wing Jewish people who criticise Israel because that is apparently anti-Semitic actually sincere policing of anti-Semitism? No.
I would also argue all political parties have anti-Semites in, and bigots of other kinds, and that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic. I would also point to the many people who have noted that Conservative anti-Muslim prejudices are not treated with any seriousness, to the point where ex Tory ministers and members of the EHRC have mentioned it - with no mainstream acceptance that it is an issue or that Islamophobia is bad.
I would disagree absolutely with the assertion that British culture is inherently anti-Semitic in either the specific (Jewish) or general (including Arabic and other ME cultures) definitions. And having travelled very extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East for the last 35 years it is always a relief to come back to a country where overt anti-Jewish or anti-Arabic sentiment is so rare and so quickly condemned.
Anit-Semitic tropes are still pretty common at low levels amongst the British public. I wouldn't say there are many "hard-core" anti-Semites (holocaust denial, raging hatred of Jews, etc.) but the tropey stuff (Jewish people are greedy, insular, dual loyalty) alongside how much general conspiracism ends up leading to anti-Semitic views.
Who are you talking to for goodness sake? This does not match my experience of British life.
There IS a low level anti-Semitism in British society. Fortunately, nearly all of the time it remains exactly that - a quiet background murmur of tiny slurs, about them being clannish, cunning and wealthy. it's not just Britain. You can find it in almost every western society, if not all around the world
But other groups experience the same - blacks, Muslims, rich whites, poor whites (chavs!), gays, the English in Scotland, it is human nature
What makes anti-Semitism troubling amongst these many prejudices is that in certain groups it (uniquely?) metamorphosises into a potentially violent hatred - on the far right, the Corbynite left, and within radical Islam
For me the most shocking act of antisemitism from a current/past party leader during my lifetime wasn't anything Corbyn said but when Harold MacMillan said about Thatcher appointing so many Jews to her cabinet was
'The thing about Margaret’s Cabinet is that it includes more Old Estonians than it does Old Etonians.'
I am generally a fan of SuperMac but eesh.
Is that anti-Semitic or just clever wordplay expressing a truth? It can be viewed either way. Tricky one
Corbyn's shite is much worse. The mural? Really? He didn't notice? What a load of bollocks
A lot of pre-war novels can make you wince a bit, when you read stuff about Jews.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I'm reminded of John Buchan. But I'd need to check back whether such comments are by the bad guys or about their attitudes* as opposed to being by the good guys. And he was also pro-Zionist and worked with Balfour, and condemned Nazi persecutions.
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
We've now come a kind of bizarre full circle where authors aren't even allowed to have racist characters, even as villains - such is the aversion to racism in any form
It's why whoever it was said they enjoyed making zombie movies because, like WWII films and the nazis, you could kill as many of them as you wanted to, in ever more creative ways, and there was no moral issue with it at all.
Apparently the new remake of the Exorcist has been Woked, and it is a catastrophe
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
Calamitous ratings. It is doing so badly they are potentially shelving the planned trilogy
Ill-considered remake flunks - blame the Wokes!
It really is the Wokeness that has ruined it. Do try and keep up
"there’s a weird underlying Kumbaya quality to the whole thing. The Catholic Church, represented by the disappointingly wimpy Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), has opted out, stating that it favors treating the girls with psychiatric methods. (Hello? Is this the Vatican talking?) And a theme of “community” is introduced — the idea that what can save these girls isn’t just an exorcist but the spirit of everyone working together. (Hello? Is this the Joe Biden administration talking?) "
Most blues, jazz and disco would probably be called "woke" if it came out now... Again, when people say "you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today" I am always amazed because (outside of the end use of the f-slur) is very much "woke". It centres a black "cowboy" and his friend, makes fun of racism and white people (I love the whole "sing us some n-word songs" and they start singing Nat King Cole) and is pretty radical in it's humour. It wouldn't be "cancelled" for the use of the n-word (or likely even the f-slur) - it would be "cancelled" for being "woke"!
Comments
https://wingsoverscotland.com/down-the-pipe/#more-140104
Although you do have to sit thru the lecture about how the steel is folded in on itself a thousand times. At which point you do want to die, so there's...that.
“The room was full of Jews, of the wrong sort.”
“He could not endure his girl marrying this swarthy son of Judah, whose father was likely selling matchsticks in Whitechapel.”
“Mark my words. Behind every conspiracy, there’s a little white-faced Jew, with an eye like a rattlesnake.”
I believe Corbyn is quite dim, I don't believe he is THAT dim and I don't believe that he has never seen Nazi anti-Semitic imagery
The best "excuse" I can think of, for that incident, is that the Jezbollah has moved for so long in casually anti-Semitic far left circles that he now fails to notice ithis prejudice, as it is ubiquitous. To return to a prior analogy, it's like someone who lives next to a busy street, they won't suddenly notice a lorry going past, as they hear them all the time
There was a report from a few years back (which I think at the time I shared here) that had around a third of British people holding what they considered "soft" anti-Semitic views. Indeed, I think I remember their being quite some interest in it because Conservative voters were more likely to express agreement with anti-Semitic statements than Labour voters, whilst also reporting that Jewish people perceived the Labour party as more anti-Semitic.
Edit: found the link to the report I was talking about - https://antisemitism.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Antisemitism-Barometer-2017.pdf
https://twitter.com/Direthoughts/status/1713863299391959232
From:
Burbank With A Baedeker
Bleistein With A Cigar
A lustreless protrusive eye
Stares from the protozoic slime
At a perspective of Canaletto.
The smoky candle end of time
Declines. On the Rialto once.
The rats are underneath the piles.
The jew is underneath the lot
It would have to be embargoed on pain of death to stop an editor doing something with the news.
I know I have
The limiting factor was people having choice and checking quality. The houses that have survived from that period were the good ones. Plenty of references from that period of new houses being unsold as shoddy, ugly etc. - they were often knocked down, having never been occupied.
Today we have the problem that any crap sells. There is massive under Weren’t those protests (against 19th cent. immigration to Australia) because lots of the immigrants were Italian and Greek? Which was seen by certain types as a bit… ethnic
What they tried to argue there (which I strongly disagree with) is that any idea that "rich people control the world" is a form of "Jewish people control the world" which in my mind ignores a very clear criticism of capitalism and the world we live in - that of the "class interests" of the wealthy. This idea boils down to the fact that there doesn't have to be a smoky backroom where rich people make all the real decisions, or a "cabal" of Jewish people pulling the strings, but that people who get into elite positions of power will automatically already have the "correct" ideology for serving power because that is what is rewarded in our society. (This idea is also expressed by Chomsky in an interview I cba to look for now).
This is the hole I think Corbyn falls in - I think he clearly stands on the "class interest" side of this divide, but some things (like that mural) stood on the other side. I think you could naively view that mural as a general anti-elitist sentiment; I also think someone who is leader of the Labour Party should not be naïve in that way. It is noticeable that even Bernie Sanders was accused of anti-Semitism for many of the main reasons Corbyn was - his defence of Palestinians, his rhetoric against the wealthy elites and the 1% - but that this didn't stick a) because he didn't win the nomination and therefore it was no longer useful to propagate and b) his Jewish heritage obviously made it a lot more difficult to stick.
My coat? Why, thank you.
I suspect our treatment of animals will come under scrutiny. From keeping pets to factory farming
But maybe that's fairly obvious. What else?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n04/christopher-tayler/the-manners-of-a-hog
*Of course, sometimes those reflect wider society even if not the author personally.
shifted, especially as Nazism came to the
fore.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67121456
If a by-election in Wellingborough is incoming, will Lib and Lab come to a mutual understanding as to who the leading challenger is?
But, my god, the massive shift in public opinion over my lifetime (63 years) in the areas of diversity and inclusion, race, homosexuality, sexism, the treatment of animals, class prejudice, and - particularly noticeable to me - disability...
That massive shift has all been towards a kinder, gentler, more accepting society.
(And yes I know there are plenty of challenges still left, plenty of areas of improvement, areas of the world not seeing these benefits, and risks that we in the West could through this freedom away. But on the long view there has been enormous progress - no reason why it cannot continue if we will it.)
'mainstream British culture which I am part of' is ending a sentence with a preposition.
A dangling participle is something like: 'Drinking throughout the afternoon, the local pub was a wonderful place to be.' Because a participle needs to be attached to a noun, this creates the absurdity that it is the pub doing the drinking. Such constructions should be avoided.
There is no endless "liberal progression"
Have things changed that much? I have a Jewish American friend who spent some time in, I think, Surrey in the 80s/90s and said she encountered a lot of antisemitism among well off middle class people there.
I give you disabled driving c 1970:
Abortion as a concept is currently considered acceptable because of women's rights and historical oppression of women's bodies, yada yada. You know the talking points. But imagine a society in 300 years time where that isn't an issue, but the destruction of any life (hence, vegetarianism) is.
Partly down to the economics of keeping the economically inactive alive being unbearable, masked as "freedom of choice".
I am absolutely saying that on account of such successes they decided to clear out those villages. I'm not disputing that it happened, I am saying it occurred during the war and that the war was launched by the Arab world on the day that Israel declared independence.
The same old cruelties, same old scandals, same old attitudes, come up again and again, even if they are repackaged in different form.
"The nature of Sam Bankman-Fried “genius” has come to light in his thoughts of Shakespeare, against whose genius he applies statistical reasoning:
I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare…but really I shouldn’t need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote, almost all Europeans were busy farming and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favourable."
https://www.takimag.com/article/the-literary-financier/
So it is not Moorcock's Dancers at the Time but is is still a hell of at lot more diverse and welcoming of diversity than it was even when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s
"Hollywood greed combines with outlandish stupidity here to create an Exorcist sequel that swaps primal scares for a more inclusive, less offensive version of demonic possession. In this high-profile instalment from David Gordon Green (he made the Halloween reboots), two teenage girls from suburban Georgia are suddenly, after dabbling with the dark arts, possessed by the Devil. Their families don’t call a priest, however, because priests, the franchise veteran Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) explains, are “part of the patriarchy”. And the patriarchy, as Barbie revealed this year, is worse than the Devil."
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-exorcist-believer-review-it-s-enough-to-make-your-head-spin-rl9dzw2wt
Calamitous ratings. It is doing so badly they are potentially shelving the planned trilogy
Reading any nineteenth century novel brings home with a massive jolt just how much attitudes have changed.
And I think most of us have learned stuff too. I look back on the attitudes that I had even 20 years ago - e.g. the gay couples couldn't fulfill parenthood as well - and think "Really, did I actually think that?!"
To some extent we do need to cut people a bit of slack for things they just don't much think about. I remember being puzzled by the mural fuss as it had struck me as obviously about wicked capitalists. I literally never think about whether someone is Jewish (I was surprised to learn that Michael Howard is, or for that matter that I am, as a relation told me a few years ago) so the connection didn't occur to me. In the same way, people who will casually use a phrase like "welshing on a deal" aren't really expressing anti-Welsh prejudice, but simply aren't in the habit of checking their vocabulary. If they persist after being told, that's different.
Also, the motivations of the Arab countries involved were mixed. Jordan, who brought the most significant military force, wanted to annex the West Bank and was happy to leave Israel within the 1947 proposed borders, whereas other Arab countries wanted to create a unitary (majority Arab-speaking) Palestinian state
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/nato-warns-putin-could-freeze-the-war-at-any-time/ar-AA1ifcgf
NATO warns: Putin could freeze the War at any time
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warns that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be planning to put the war against Ukraine on hold, according to a report by RBC Ukraine.
The NATO Secretary-General acknowledges that there is always a certain risk that President Putin may take measures to prevent Ukraine from regaining its territory.
"there’s a weird underlying Kumbaya quality to the whole thing. The Catholic Church, represented by the disappointingly wimpy Father Maddox (E.J. Bonilla), has opted out, stating that it favors treating the girls with psychiatric methods. (Hello? Is this the Vatican talking?) And a theme of “community” is introduced — the idea that what can save these girls isn’t just an exorcist but the spirit of everyone working together. (Hello? Is this the Joe Biden administration talking?) "
https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/the-exorcist-believer-review-ellen-burstyn-leslie-odom-jr-1235743386/
Woke Art is shit. There is no room for discussion
Wikipedia on the 47-48 civil war says the death toll was about 2,00 total, split roughly evenly between the two sides. It makes no mention of any villages being "ethnically cleansed", because it never happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947–1948_civil_war_in_Mandatory_Palestine#Death_toll
Anyway, it wasn't exactly a secret that the regular Arab armies were going to attack as soon as the Mandate expired (in Transjordan's case, they actually attacked some days before). So any military successes over the local Arab population would always have been expected to be transient.
The limiting factor was people having choice and checking quality. The houses that have survived from that period were the good ones. Plenty of references from that period of new houses being unsold as shoddy, ugly etc. - they were often knocked down, having never been occupied.
Today we have the problem that any crap sells. There is massive under Damascus steel is cultural appropriation.
With Ninjas that’s cultural imperialist mixing as well.
Plus ninjas are rather offensive in Japanese culture.
So you need to cancel yourself.
I'm not accusing you of being as dim as Corbyn, but you do strike me as someone who is quite phenomenally lacking in perception, at times
It's fine. I'm really bad at ice skating and algebra - and much, much else - we all have our faults
And: “From December 1947 to January 1948, around 70,000 Arabs fled,[63] and, by the end of March, that number had grown to around 100,000.[39]”
And: “Deir Yassin is a village located 5 kilometres west of Jerusalem. On 9 April 1948, independently of operation Nachshon, around 120 Irgun and Lehi men attacked the village and ran into resistance, capturing it after a fierce battle with Palmach help. The Irgun and Lehi lost 4 dead and 35 wounded. Between 100 and 120 inhabitants of the village were killed in the attack, mostly civilians.[154] The Haganah had approved the attack and assisted in it.[154]”
And: “In the context of Plan Dalet[citation needed], mixed urban centres, or those on the borders of the Jewish state, were attacked and besieged by Jewish forces. Tiberias was attacked on 10 April and fell six days later; Haifa fell on 23 April, after only one day of combat (Operation Bi'ur Hametz), and Jaffa was attacked on 27 April but fell only after the British abandoned it (Operation Hametz). Safed and Beisan (Operation Gideon) fell on 11 May and 13 May respectively, within the framework of Operation Yitfah, and Acre fell on 17 May, within the framework of Operation Ben-Ami.
“The Arab inhabitants of these towns fled or were expelled en masse. In these 6 cities, only 13,000 of the total of 177,000 Arab inhabitants remained by the end of May. This phenomenon ricocheted also in the suburbs and the majority of the zone's Arab villages.”
Good art, literature, TV, or film is necessarily offensive to someone. Otherwise, it is not good.
That's such a risky defence. If your starting position is that your accuser is a malicious fantasist, then you're in a world of trouble if they come across as credible and have corroboration for at least some of their claims. Far better to say things may have been misconstrued, and you probably are a bit sharp with people under pressure now and then but do apologise etc. And, if you're 60-something and book a hotel room with a 20-something employee, don't be surprised if people later decide you're probably the weirdo.