If Trump is fine with Nazis is Jeremy Corbyn ok with other types of anti-Semites?
Caitlin Moran has been writing in the Times about Donald Trump and his cheerleader, Piers Morgan. It’s a snappy read, taking in Nazis and Jews.
This week, however, Morgan… faced the big dilemma, which is, in the words of Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, “When are you gonna come down? When are you going to land?” Trump’s disturbed press conference on Charlottesville — “There were some fine people there” ABOUT A NAZI RALLY — seemed to make Morgan realise that Jimmy Kimmel’s words were true: “When you’re with people who are chanting things like ‘Jews will not replace us’ and you don’t immediately leave, you’re not ‘a very fine person’.”
A “very fine person” leaves when the anti-Semites turn up. That’s “true”. But Trump is an “entrenched old bastard”. He stays.
Mindful of that, see if you can make the link between the next two images:
A) Jeremy Corbyn is not all that far from a man holding the Hezbollah flag, a group the Labour Party leader called “friends” after inviting them and Hamas to Parliament for a chat.
As reported in the Guardian:
The leader of the Labour party has defended supporters of every variety of ancient prejudice: the Palestinian activist who revived the medieval libel that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make bread; the Anglican vicar who promoted the views of modern neo-Nazis that the Jewish conspiracy was now so malign and supernaturally powerful it was responsible for 9/11. After reviving old prejudices, Labour members adopt new ones just for fun. Jews were the chief financiers of the slave trade, they say as they repeat a fantasy promoted by the US race-huckster Louis Farrakhan. Jews collaborated with Hitler, they continue as they repeat the fantasies of 20th-century Marxist‑Leninis
The Jewish Chronicle also questioned the banners at the Stop The War Coalition sponsored Al Quds Day rallies where Corbyn regularly speaks. Corbyn is also chair of the Stop The War Coalition. I have been to these racist rallies where Hezbollah flags are proudly waved and banners, which I have photographed, state: “Israel is a disease we are the cure” and “For world peace Israel must be destroyed”, “Israel your days are numbered”, “Death to Israel” and “The world stopped Nazism and Apartheid the world must stop Zionism”.
B) Vote Jeremy Corbyn.
Do we judge people by the company they keep?
Corbyn later added on Hamas, a group that calls for all Jews to be murdered (“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him” – Hamas covenant) and Hezbollah:
“I use (the word ‘friends’) in a collective way, saying our friends are prepared to talk. Does it mean I agree with Hamas and what it does? No. Does it mean I agree with Hezbollah and what they do? No. What it means is that I think to bring about a peace process, you have to talk to people with whom you may profoundly disagree.”
Was Trump just enabling the peace, enlarging the conversation, when he blamed both sides for the violence in Charlottesville? Was he doing a Corbyn?
I don’t believe Corbyn is an anti-Semite nor Trump a Nazi. But to the sensitive and morally right who offer no excuses for bigotry and profess to know it when they see it, not voting for Corbyn makes you a “cunt” and voting for Trump means supporting a “bastard”.
Were that a Confederate flag or Nazi banner behind Corbyn, what then? Of course, the modern day Nazi party is, thank god, relatively amateur when it comes to mass murder. Islamists remain the current market leaders in barbaric anti-Semitism.
Brendan O’Neill muses:
I just wish the people rightly shocked by the anti-Semitism on the Charlottesville march had been equally shocked by the big London demo against Israel’s war with Gaza a few years ago at which I saw loads of swastikas (“Israel is Nazi”), placards making accusations of collective Jewish guilt for crimes against humanity, and a man in a grotesque “Jew mask” pretending to eat a doll covered in blood while young Arab kids laughed their heads off. Some of the leftists furious over Charlottesville were on that march. People need to clean out their own stables too. Anti-Semitism is a serious problem and it exists on the right and the left.
Such are the facts.
Posted: 19th, August 2017 | In: News, Politicians Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
