Thousands of pages of evidence have been provided to the EHRC. The party is currently, according to the EHRC, withholding evidence.

It's looking like anything between a hung Parliament and a Tory majority of 40-60. Nobody knows.

Jewish anti-Semitism is a thing. There were German Jews who supported Hitler because they were nationalists who'd served in the Great War and just hated England.

Well, he's a massive idiot, so there's that.

Isn't the modern standard, pushed particularly by the political left, that it's the recipient of the comments who decides if they were racist or not? Surely the investigation should be being done by the Board of Deputies of British Jews - or just any Jewish person who wants to do it.

Should be a doddle for someone to finally post some in this thread then.

Only something an idiot could say.

Yup, except when 87% of British Jews think someone's anti-Semitic. Then it's totally different.

If you think it's been handled terribly but Racist Grandpa isn't actually racist ... then, fine. But when you say it's all made up, a hoax, an "operation", whatever ... you're saying 87% of British Jews are part of this hoax. You're saying claims of anti-Semitisn are ... a Jewish conspiracy. So you can **** right off. Claiming 87% of British Jews are deliberately smearing an innocent man is anti-Semitic as ****. And just because you say "it's a conspiracy" and don't directly label it a Jewish conspiracy doesn't make it cool.

I have zero obligation to reply to such racist crap. But I will start a post, after the EHRC reports, dunking on each and every one of you.

Avram Noam Chomsky... Born to working-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky

Indeed, they were called zionists. Is that an anti semitic thing to say? I've lost track of what is/isn't.

They were German Nationalists called Verband nationaldeutscher Juden and Der deutsche Vortrupp among others.

Describing the Jews who fled Nazi Germany to Mandatory Palestine as Hitler supporting is obviously anti-Semitic, yes. Livingstone claimed Hitler supported Zionism - even he did go as far as to (falsely) affirm the reverse.

WTF is wrong with this thread??

Meanwhile...





Famous for describing Hitler's treatment of Jews as "a welcome solution to the world's problem", among other tory things.

I believe her flirtation with Hitler long preceded the Final Solution but yeah, not great. Astor was also fanatically anti-Catholic.

Everyone who bleats on about pernicious left wing anti-semitism should have to describe what they think will happen to Jews under a corbyn government. Say the polls are way off and labour wins a massive majority. What happens to Britain’s Jews?

Right, the livingstone thing regarding the haavara agreement. If this was the basis for saying Hitler supported zionism then the reverse is implied since this was an agreement, ie both sides are in support.

In any case let's see what chomsky himself has said, interview from 1992 but still very interesting

QUESTION: There’s tremendous support for Israel in the United States at least in elite groups. There’s also on another level a very steady, virulent anti-Semitism that goes on. Can you talk about that?

CHOMSKY: Anti-Semitism has changed, during my lifetime at least. Where I grew up we were virtually the only Jewish family, I think there was one other. Of course being the only Jewish family in a largely Irish-Catholic and German-Catholic community–

QUESTION: In Philadelphia?

CHOMSKY: In Philadelphia. And the anti-Semitism was very real. There were certain paths I could take to walk to the store without getting beaten up. It was the late 1930s and the area was openly pro-Nazi. I remember beer parties when Paris fell and things like that. It’s not like living under Hitler, but it’s a very unpleasant thing. There was a really rabid anti-Semitism in that neighborhood where I grew up as a kid and it continued. By the time I got to Harvard in the early 1950s there was still very detectable anti-Semitism. It wasn’t that they beat you up on the way to school or something, but other ways, kind of WASP-ish anti-Semitism. There were very few Jewish professors on the faculty at that time. There was beginning to be a scattering of them, but still very few. This was the tail end of a long time of WASP-ish anti-Semitism at the elite institutions. Over the last thirty years that’s changed very radically. Anti-Semitism undoubtedly exists, but it’s now on a par, in my view, with other kinds of prejudice of all sorts. I don’t think it’s more than anti-Italianism or anti-Irishism, and that’s been a very significant change in the last generation, one that I’ve experienced myself in my own life, and it’s very visible throughout the society.

https://chomsky.info/dissent01/

If chomsky is an anti semite he hides it brilliantly.

That isn't my point at all. I'm just pointing out how amusing it is that a political movement which has always pushed this "victim decides" thing over objective standards of behaviour suddenly doesn't like it when they are judged by the same standards. Particularly amusing for those of us who've been called racist over Brexit.

As to what I think about it - any open mass participation movement is going to have a mix of different people in it - the real question is how they deal with those people.

As for excessively criticising Israel over other countries. There are two kinds of that:
Type 1 - along the lines of Baroness Tonge calling for an investigation into IDF organ harvesting programme in Haiti - is almost certainly motivated by antisemitism - the person wouldn't be saying this if Israel was not a Jewish state.

There is also a type 2, which I'd compare to the situation around Trump. Bercow was criticised for being unwilling to host Trump when he was willing to host Xi. It's not because he genuinely thinks Trump's America is more repressive than Xi's China, it's because he sees America as a similar country to the UK and that encourages people to take a more activist line about it - so British people will often criticise Trump even though he's probably in the top half of most democratic leaders in the world. Israel, with a large part of its population made up of migrants from Europe and the US and their children, is obviously somewhere we feel more linked to than e.g. Burma which might be doing worse things. If anything that's the opposite of anti-semitism.

I'm not really convinced that Corbyn's anti-Israeli positions are different to type 2, perhaps strengthened by his general knee-jerk opposition to anything allied to the US.

FWIW my tweet was directed at the clowns who claims there's zero smoke, zero fire and it's all a (((conspiracy))). Who, as you say, insist that if any other gender, sexuality, religious or racial minority complains of bigotry you must believe them. You must listen to them. You must never lecture to them. That a male objecting however rationally and politely with a female on matters of sexism is mansplaining. And who have spent the past 4.5 years ignoring Jews (or promoting the ~0.1% who think it's all conspiracy), lecturing Jews on what's "real anti-Semitism" and so on. What you said is fine.

Has the evidence been posted yet?

Also has someone been an idiot and used the word conspiracy again?

I wonder what principled anti-racist Tory campaigner PGUK makes of a Tory MP who defaces his own material with swastikas, presumably to gain electoral sympathy?

Hey still waiting on this answer.

^I'm not one of those people and in any case the answer is clearly "nothing", but I will say you're using a pretty different standard to the one we usually apply when someone is accused of being prejudiced against a particular group.

There's zero anti-Semitism in Labour. It's all a Zionist smear!

Why are they being investigated by a Labour-founded, Labour-supported left-wing institution? And why was it, this week, leaked that the EHRC won't publish until at least July 2019? Fourteen months seems like a long time to investigate zero examples......

Labour won't send Jews to the gas chambers. Stop being hysterical!

Who mentioned gas chambers?

No I don’t think that’s true at all, lektor. When I think we accuse republicans of being racist against blacks for instance, we imply that they’ll impose tougher sentences on certain communities or reduce funding to minority institutions and districts. Their prejudice will affect policy. In the same way we could predict that calling Mexicans rapists would predict the further weaponization of ice and lead to punitive measures against migrants at the southern border.

He’s claimed that there is widespread, structural anti-semitism in the Labour Party. So I think it’s important to see what he thinks will happen. Then he just starts moaning about gas chambers showing he’s not serious about this at all and it’s just a convenient smear to hurt labour.

I'm gonna write one last thing cause frankly that's about all I care and it's not like we're doing anything but talking past each other anyways.

It's no secret that the limitation of liberal social justice language that isn't rooted in a class analysis is that it can be weaponized against anyone. It's pretty clear that this is what is occurring in the UK. You've got the tories who don't want to run on their legacy of austerity and the deaths caused by cuts to public services, so it serves them to make this a referendum on brexit and labour anti-semitism. It doesn't matter if labour is actually anti-semitic, because they have the support of an ideologically allied media that can amplify this claim. I don't think anyone can look at how the BBC has acted in the past few months and deny that they are aiding the tories. I don't know what the EHRC thing is, but I can't imagine why they'd be reticent to help with something that will obviously be used against them, immaterial of what it actually says. Lastly, this smear is given even more credibility by the amplification of the Blairites who have vehemently fought the takeover of the labour party of Corbynism. It makes sense that a lot of the right-wing of the Labour party would use this a cudgel against Corbyn faction. (I assume that with PGUK's both-sideism this is where he falls on the spectrum.)

And the last thing, people love to feel like victims. You always see rich liberal women who grew up in Connecticut and had a hedge-fund father using the term "women and POC" like somehow they're centering themselves in the struggle with a kid in Camden with a dad in jail. How often do you see conservatives bleating on about how the straight white male is the most persecuted person in today's society. 75% of republicans think that Christians are the most persecuted group in American society. Obviously none of these people are actually victims of society and, I'm sorry, you don't get to center your own feelings in narratives of victimhood if the evidence isn't there to support it. The last thing, you keep mentioning 87% of British Jews who claim labour is anti-semitic (I'd also like to see the wording and methodology for this). But again this makes sense. British society is more structured on class than America, so Jews tend to overwhelmingly vote conservative. When almost 3/4 vote Tory, it's not hard to imagine why they'd use this cudgel against their political opponents. In America, our political parties are aligned on cultural sensibilities, so the anti-Semitic smear doesn't work as well against the democrats when ~80% of Jews vote democrat. Again, it's a very smart electoral strategy for the conservative to push this as the number 2 issue for this election. However, it's just not based in facts no matter how many triple parentheses you'd like to use or how histrionically you bring up the holocaust.

57 On Red

Left wing institutions are going to take such an accusation very seriously, as being anti racism is integral to left wing politics. Its a given that if the accusation is made strongly enough that Labour would do some kind of in house investigation.

You must know this?

Its not just the evidence everyone is certain off but cant provide, which is mind blowing in its lack of integrity and intellectual honesty, its aslo the blatantly obvious desperate argumentation, so utterly weak that the person making them must realise how weak they are.

All posters pushing this so hard without being able to deliver on the request for evidence should hang their heads in deep shame.

Naz Shah: My words were anti-Semitic

OAFK: