Maybe Mother was right...
Jul. 12th, 2019 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustMy mother, a long-time constituent of Jeremy Corbyn, repeatedly complained that he was antisemitic. But her evidence for this always had us replying "No, Skip, he's pro-Palestinian. It's not the same thing..." She wasn't convinced.
Last night we watched the Panorama report on antisemitism in the Labour Party, and I begin to wonder if the Skipper was right all along. At what point does supporting the rights of Palestinians, and being critical of Israel (with which I have no problem) move through supporting specific Palestinian organisations in their struggle against Israel (about which I am wary) and become a general hostility to Israel, expressed as am unfriendly attitude to Jews in general (ouch!)? Panorama made a convincing case that influential sections of the Labour Party (at least) had gone a step too far (at least) along this spectrum.
It would have been just as easy - it would have been considerably easier - to make the case that the Conservative Party is inherently anti-Islamic: the Panorama report did not, even in passing, mention this. Even so, we apply a higher standard to the Labour Party.
Likewise, the Party disputes the conclusions of the report, and a number of denials were included in the programme: if they weren't entirely convincing, does that show weakness in the denials, or bias at the BBC? Or both, of course, that's always possible. Certainly, you can brush off one or two whistleblowers as "disgruntled former staff members", but it gets harder as the disputes team, including two successive heads of the department, are leaving en masse, several of them signed off by their doctors for stress and anxiety. Something is clearly wrong there, and while the Panorama diagnosis may or may not be correct, Non-Disclosure Agreements are not the way to solve it.
Tomorrow Jeremy Corbyn will be in Durham, speaking at the Miners' Gala. So will Shami Chakrabarti, who ran the Party's internal enqury into antisemitism. I don't know what to anticipate from this...
Last night we watched the Panorama report on antisemitism in the Labour Party, and I begin to wonder if the Skipper was right all along. At what point does supporting the rights of Palestinians, and being critical of Israel (with which I have no problem) move through supporting specific Palestinian organisations in their struggle against Israel (about which I am wary) and become a general hostility to Israel, expressed as am unfriendly attitude to Jews in general (ouch!)? Panorama made a convincing case that influential sections of the Labour Party (at least) had gone a step too far (at least) along this spectrum.
It would have been just as easy - it would have been considerably easier - to make the case that the Conservative Party is inherently anti-Islamic: the Panorama report did not, even in passing, mention this. Even so, we apply a higher standard to the Labour Party.
Likewise, the Party disputes the conclusions of the report, and a number of denials were included in the programme: if they weren't entirely convincing, does that show weakness in the denials, or bias at the BBC? Or both, of course, that's always possible. Certainly, you can brush off one or two whistleblowers as "disgruntled former staff members", but it gets harder as the disputes team, including two successive heads of the department, are leaving en masse, several of them signed off by their doctors for stress and anxiety. Something is clearly wrong there, and while the Panorama diagnosis may or may not be correct, Non-Disclosure Agreements are not the way to solve it.
Tomorrow Jeremy Corbyn will be in Durham, speaking at the Miners' Gala. So will Shami Chakrabarti, who ran the Party's internal enqury into antisemitism. I don't know what to anticipate from this...
