Douglas Murray: Britain's New Mainstream Racists?
The British Labour party is currently led by a man, Jeremy Corbyn, who has described Hamas and Hezbollah as "friends" and has spent his years in the political wilderness with Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, terrorist-sympathisers and all manner of other undesirables. Now that he is the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, he has tried to present himself as a more moderate force by stressing that he has spent his life fighting racism and anti-Semitism. In fact, he appears to have spent his life being remarkably content with exponents of both.Why Mandela Would Be Run Out of Ramallah Today
His Shadow Chancellor spent the same period in similar company, but with an even more fervent devotion to the terrorists of the Irish Republican Army.
The communications chief of this whole disastrous enterprise is one Seamus Milne, who devoted his career at The Guardian to keeping the scent around Joseph Stalin rosier than it ever ought to have been. If a fish, as the saying goes, rots from the top, who can be surprised if there is rot also from the tail up?
Last week it was the turn of the Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) to throw their wares open for public view. Thanks to the unusually principled resignation of the co-chair of the organization, Alex Chalmers, we now know that apparently a large proportion of the youth branch of the party also has "problems with Jews." Indeed, it appears that anti-Semitism has moved from the margins to the very centre of University Labour life.
According to Chalmers, among the delights of the organization from which he resigned was that the OULC decided to endorse Israel Apartheid Week. This is the annual anti-Semitic hate-fest that takes place across university campuses in the West. Racist students build fake security walls, stage "die-ins" and pretend that murderers who carry out terrorist attacks against Israelis are instead the suffering victims of gratuitous aggression.
I’m scratching my head over The Guardian.Renowned British Historian: Anti-Semitism Causes Anti-Zionism
How can the same people who blew up innocent civilians in cafes and buses have the gall to claim Nelson Mandela’s legacy?
As the Christian Science Monitor aptly pointed out, the Palestinians embrace of Mandela’s mantle is very, very limited.
But much of Palestinians’ praise is for how Mandela pushed back against an apartheid regime, rather than on how he embraced the language, literature, and leaders of that regime in a search for national reconciliation.
After the 1995 Rugby World Cup, Mandela famously donned Springbok gear to present a trophy to the Afrikaaner team. South Africans still talk about it as a big moment in national reconciliation.
In contrast, just getting Israelis and Palestinians onto the same soccer field today means overcoming the powerful Palestinian anti–normalization campaign.
Reconciliation? Mandela would’ve been run out of Ramallah for using that dirty word.
The antipathy displayed by many on the Left towards Israel is not an example of anti-Zionism morphing into anti-Semitism, but a sign that anti-Zionism is caused by anti-Semitism, the distinguished British historian Simon Schama argued in the Financial Times Friday.
Schama noted the escalation of anti-Israel events in the UK in recent months. Most notably, former Israeli intelligence chief Ami Ayalon’s speech at the Kings College London Israel Society was “violently interrupted by a chair-hurling, window-smashing crowd.” The resulting atmosphere of intolerance towards Israel prompted Alex Chalmers to resign as co-chair of the Oxford University Labour Club, saying that the student Left “have some kind of problem with Jews.”
Schama observed that some on the Left, such as Guardian columnist Owen Jones, have made efforts to “confront this demon head on.” However, “criticism of Israeli policies has mutated into a rejection of Israel’s right to exist.”
He cited a number of examples. French Jews can’t walk outside wearing a yarmulke without fear of assault; Holocaust memorial posters have been defaced; Former MP George Galloway declared in 2014 that his district was “an Israel-free zone.” These incidents exemplify what the professor Alan Johnson called “anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.”
Schama observed that the terrorist who killed four Jews in a Paris supermarket last year didn’t ask if their victims supported the Israeli government, “because in the attacker’s poisoned mind all Jews are indivisibly incriminated” as oppressors of the Palestinians. The international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement disregards any Israeli claim of self-defense and singles out Israel for its outrage. But they remain silent about the Russian destruction of Syria.