The Rule of Law and Assassination in Turkey (Part 1)

On Monday the 19^th of December a Turkish police officer, smartly dressed in civilian clothes, walked up to Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey. As the ambassador spoke at the opening of an art exhibition in Ankara the off-duty policemen calmly murdered him. The killer said in his native Turkish “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria. Unless our towns are secure, you won’t enjoy security. Only death can take me from here. Everyone who is involved in this suffering will pay a price.”

He also shouted in Arabic: “We are the one who pledged allegiance to Muhammad, to wage jihad.”

(Ynet news 19-20/12/2016)

It is a sad but timely reminder that Islamist Turkey can as much be trusted as theocratic, traditionalist Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Is that fair? Political murders have taken place in Britain, Sweden, Norway, the USA and Israel to name just a few of the Western countries afflicted by acts of political violence against the state and its civilian population. Italy had the Red Brigade, Germany had Baader-Meinhoff and Japan had the Red Army.

Assassinations and atrocities against civilians have always been part of revolutionary politics. The difference today is that radicals, progressives and others on the fringe of Western society try to justify the immorality of their cause (s) through their control of the electronic media. They are able to then embrace the war crimes committed by those terrorists they choose to call “friend,” to move peripheral political ideology into the centre.

They share a contempt for the rule of law which must be bent to accommodate their political vision and ignored when it fails to conform to their ignorance and their prejudice.

What makes the new fascist Left no different to the Inquisitors and Jihad-is of previous generations is their blind obedience to the Cause. They daily demonstrate this latter fealty by controlling the narrative. And they control it by their suppression of freedom of speech and association, occasionally by violent means but with increased frequency as their successes grow.

What makes this generation empowered in ways that previous generations were not is that the internet has enabled the every-man and every-woman with any talent for exploiting the electronic media to spread so much poison that no-one is safe. Because there is no regulation there is no difference between the lie and the truth and because the fascist (left) has no respect for the inconvenient truth they will use every means to suppress it. Unfortunately, our inability to internalise this lesson is our great failure.

Mevlut Mert Altin said “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria. Unless our towns are secure, you won’t enjoy security.” The Russians have been bombing rebels which will include supporters of Islamic State. The issue for the Turkish Islamist is that many of them support the aims of Islamic State. When Altin shouted in Arabic: “We are the one who pledged allegiance to Muhammad, to wage jihad” he was declaring that “WE” (Turkey) will judge you. It is one of those truly frightening declarations of fanaticism that mark out radical, fascist movements. Altin may or may not have been acting alone but Turkey is the ideal incubator for the creation of regional, if not global instability. Its size, population and theological indifference to genocide ensure that there are far more people like Altin, many of them sitting within the Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

We have a dishonourable expression in the English world: “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” to that I would add that “One man’s Serial Killer is another man’s Warrior for God (or the Prophet).” The latter is the Turkish view of their “glorious” history. But the history of modern Turkey is an execrable one (and I will explain why in my next blog).

The US-Turkey partnership was a product of the Cold War. The two nations never shared a special affinity but both feared the communist enemy. Turkey has changed in terms of strategic orientation and national purpose since that partnership was formalised in 1947 with the passage of the Truman Doctrine. It has gone from being a secular but racist and jingoistic society to one that is dedicated to an Islamic neo-Ottoman revival. America has failed to recognise the threat Islamist Turkey poses to world peace. It has tried to pacify the Muslim threat through policies of appeasement while doing everything possible to antagonise Russia. Instead of focussing its energies on bringing Russia into a European-Western alliance that would isolate the Islamists it has managed to re-invigorate the Cold War and give them a European champion.

Turkey is not Europe. It will not accept the view that the original sin of its creation myths are not just soaked but also nourished in rivers of blood. It is violently opposed to granting human rights to its minorities. It persecutes its Kurds. Christians and Jews fear for their lives and are occasionally murdered because they are hostages to Islamic mood swings of intolerance and conditional benevolence. Turkey will once again reassert it’s hegemonic geopolitical ambitions.

The strategic partnership between Israel and Turkey was inspired by pragmatism. And this is where the problem lies. An Islamic nation with its historic legacy of ridicule for its minorities, conquest, domination and human slavery is continuously reinforcing an internalized image of God-given superiority over its non-Muslim neighbours. It is a world view that is not congruent with any relationship of equality.

Israel and not just Israel must not trust Turkey.

The issue that defines the problem separating western political violence from Turkey’s problem is that the outlier (the radical, ‘progressive’ or the extremist) does not define the relationship within Western orientated nations (even if they are trying to make it so). With Turkey it does. Turkey’s past is one of genocide, ethnic cleansing and fascism. Any crime is justified through the prism of Islamic triumphalism and an irredentist philosophy. Islamic fundamentalists do not desire peace, what they do desire is glory and at any cost to those that oppose them.

Unless Turkey is willing to banish fundamentalism forever (and not as an expedient to maintain full access to Europe and America) it cannot be trusted, not as an economic partner or, as a strategic military ally.

Andrei Karlov’s assassin represents the activist for the new Turkey. We’ve been warned.

Shimon Peres and the Arab Apartheid Issue

Shimon Peres, Israel’s ninth president, was laid to rest at Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem on Friday 30th September 2016. Writing in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Achranot, David Grossman said: “Peres’s entire being stood facing the future. In a country that is being sucked ever deeper into a mythological, religious and tribal narrative, he turned towards the universal, towards science, rationality and the democracy of open information. He cast himself as an anchor on the seabed of the future, the distant, invisible, imagined, utopian and optimistic future, and began tugging himself towards it.” (The article was also featured in the UK’s major anti-Zionist media outlet, The Guardian).

Shimon Peres was a contradiction.  Secular but respectful of religious faith he was humble to the detriment of his political ambitions.  He was a private individual in a job that celebrated public participation. His staff made sure that his every move was posted to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. He relentlessly pursued the fulfillment of his ideas on economics, science and defense, along the way helping to build Israel into a stable and strong country. But he was viewed in Israel as secretive, and therefore untrustworthy.  Ridiculed at home he was admired abroad; described as an international statesman in the same class as Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II.  Domestically, he was a serial loser whose first electoral victory, at the age of 84, occurred when he was elected President of Israel.

If Shimon Peres was contentious, what has emerged from his death and funeral is the work that Israel must urgently undertake to marginalize and exclude the Arab apartheid activists, their Israeli fellow travelers on the far left and those foreign critics for whom, we can do no good.

There are those people who live to remember his failures (and ours) and their hatred is not just our problem but the world’s.  In their eternal denigration of “our kind” this type of person will forgive every abomination the anti-Zionist or antisemite commits while rarely, if ever, acknowledging our shared humanity.

According to the headline in a Times of Israel article published the day of Shimon Peres’s funeral, Ayman Odeh, head of the 13-MK (member of the Knesset) anti-Zionist political bloc the “Joint (Arab) List” extended condolences to the late president’s family but also made it emphatically clear that his group had ‘no place’ in this ‘day of national mourning’

Like every nation, the Arab world has its problems.  The first is a racial ideology that places “the Arab” above all other human beings. Most Arab countries reflect this prejudice within their national legal system.  Not just the Arab nations.  Many Muslim countries are in competition with the Arab world in providing proof of their religious purity.  They are disadvantaged in terms of theological credibility because of their Jonny-come-lately status vis-à-vis their “post-Arab” adoption of Muslim faith.

The second issue is a theological conquest narrative ordained by the Prophet that gives each Muslim the task of not simply defeating the infidel but also humiliating them along the way.  Then the victor refashions their conquered foes history to claim ownership of any good done by their dishonored enemy.

For much of the last two and a half centuries and especially in the 21st Century the Islamist message has been incongruent with a Western (and now) a secular, pluralistic and internationalist outlook that continues to spread its gospel across the globe.  A modern, Western, democratic and secular orientated model for human society stands in contradistinction to an Islamist theology.  And yet, the multiculturalists choose inexplicably, to ignore any misbehavior, to excuse every atrocity carried out in the name of Islam, or worse, to explain away such behavior.  Islamism has given the world Wahhabism (18th Century), Salafism (19th Century), the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda (20th Century) and now in the 21sth Century, Islamic State.  Human misery and death is their shared and unbroken legacy.

Modern Israel was founded along Zionist lines of secular, universal, utopian principles meant to benefit all people.  Being secular, Israel’s Jewish pioneers failed to see and they then failed to acknowledge the religious and racial dimensions of Arab opposition to Jewish self-determination.  They did not appreciate the historical baggage that the Arab conquest narrative endowed them with.  It blinded most Arabs to ever considering an accommodation with the inferior Jew.  That same Arab blindness rules opposition to the state of Israel more so now than before.  This lack of understanding was and remains Zionism’s failure because it prevents us from confronting it.

Post 1948, some of the early Arab Israeli leaders not only accommodated but also embraced the nascent state of Israel.  Their children, people such as Basel Ghattas (Christian) and Haneen Zoabi (Sunni Muslim) went in the opposite direction.

It was no-one’s fault. Israel was a wasteland that had been abused and desolated by over a thousand years of willful neglect. Arab and Bedouin marauders destroyed any possibility for material or physical progress; the Ottoman Empire in its last few hundred years was relentlessly corrupt and just let the gangs get on with extorting whatever they could from whoever they could.  “To a very large extent Palestinian Arab middle and professional classes ‘emigrated’ with most of their property as soon as it was proposed that a Jewish state should be established in the country.” (“Whose Land” by James Parkes). The issue here is that a group of people without leadership soon descends into anarchy. Leaderless, the people will listen with eagerness to any demagogue who will offer them a way, any way. If they were told to flee by their Arab brethren, they would do so.

Israel in 1948 had a nation to build, with few resources and always under threat of violence from its Arab enemies. Israel had to find a way to feed and protect its people against a bellicose enemy.  That enemy talked itself out of any peaceful debate through its perceived hostility.  The Arab world used triumphal and irredentist rhetoric and religious bigotry to preclude debate with their Jewish enemy (as Palestinians continue to do today) and it ethnically cleansed all its Jewish citizens.  A people who, just a few years earlier, had suffered the slaughter of a third of their number was threatened by the Arab world with “finishing the job.” Consolidation and protection took precedence over creating an integrated society.  Israel’s mutually antagonistic ethnic groups incrementally grew more distant with each passing decade. The dominant Ashkenazi Jews dictated government policy while doing nothing to discourage separate non-inclusive identification. A melting pot takes multiple generations, a collective will to integrate and it requires a national dialogue which with one exception (Mizrachi-Sephardi society) did not exist.

Religious groups remained wholly uninterested in integration and therefore accommodated each other only to the degree that self-interest dictated their engagement with the state.

It is therefore hardly surprising that the Joint (Arab) List as referred to earlier is primarily interested in sowing discord between Israeli Arab and Israeli Jew.  A person born in Israel is an Israeli by nationality, whether they are ethnically Arab, Circassian, Jewish, or anything else.  The politics of division is meant to create a fractured society that will become unstable and inevitably ungovernable.

Arab MKs like Ghattas and Zoabi and religious leaders such as Raed Salah of the Islamic Movement’s Northern Chapter preach division. They want separate education, cultural autonomy and administrative independence from the Jewish state. Arabs live throughout the state. A Jew could only ever aspire to live among the Arabs if he or she first converts to Islam. Violence is the Arab response to physical co-existence with Jews.  The apartheid that exists in Israel is Muslim, it is Arab and it is essentially unchanged from its pre-1948 prejudiced origins. It is the same bigotry that greeted The First Aliyah (between 1882 and 1903).  It is the same religious hatred that has greeted successive waves of Jewish immigration to the Holy land for over one thousand years.

In 1948 and beyond, the State of Israel had neither financial resources nor the concentrated intellectual focus to address the integration issues of all its citizens. Many of them were waiting for the state to fail and the victorious Arab armies to destroy the Jewish Republic.  Suspicion, fear and the politics of sectarian advantage dominated the first phase of development.

While Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews now intermarry at a rate that is greater than 50% there will always be those people who will want to point out that the cup is almost half empty rather than greater than half full. Dissatisfaction and discord encourages the bureaucracy of state to buy off the professional malcontent.

Israel may not be able to solve the intractable conflict between the Jewish state and Arab Palestine but it must address the Jews as well as Arabs who sow discord in society by emphasizing our differences. The MKs who refused to participate in Israel’s day of national mourning did so but their excuses are mendacious at best. They could not forgive a Jewish state its existence if it was located on the dwarf-planet Pluto.

The next phase in the development of the state must address prejudice and inequality from every quarter of society and that includes the ultra-orthodox bigots who deny Mizrachi children places in their schools, as well as the people who fear the Arab moving in next door.  It includes the racist who chants abuse in football matches and MKs who rejoice at our enemies’ successes against us.

The MK who urges separation from Israel and subsumation into the greater Arab world does not desire peace or justice but the next phase in an Arab conquest story that should shame them but only inspires them to greater degrees of prejudice.  The Jew who wants to keep the faithful loyal to a narrowly interpreted sectarian image of circumscribed piety does not care for the survival of the state but only for his own narrowly tribalistic and dysfunctional world view that can only, counter-intuitively inhibit Jewish spiritual growth in the reborn Jewish state.

The next phase in Israel’s development must see every effort made to integrate all sections of society into a Zionist state for all its citizens.  That is what the dreamers saw, on both Left and Right, in the original Zionist vision.  Shimon Peres would smile at that.

Shanah Tovah to everyone.

Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu and the War of Words

A key indicator that Israel has lost the current (and probably the next) generation of public opinion was brought home to me when I was recently asked, rhetorically, if I sympathized with the Palestinians.  My questioner then added “after all, they are treated unfairly by Israel.”

I had no pithy one line response because the way the question was raised meant that anything I said was going to be irrelevant. In our mass communication age, pictures and instantly recalled memes are all the average attention span can tolerate.

So here are a few ideas for when and if we finally do begin to respond in a meaningful way to our aggressors and the press hounds that disseminate their global propaganda:

1)     Palestinians are in the first instance Arabs and the Arabs have been ethnically cleansing Jews (among every other minority) for 1,400 years.

2)     Palestinian Arabs desire a return to Arab apartheid against Jews and you blame us for rejecting the offer?

3)     The German people admired the British nation so much so that after they offered Briton “Peace in our Time” they opted for conquest instead.  Palestinians are the modern era’s Aryan (German) nation.

4)     The British were not heartless nor in World War 2 did it stop Briton from leveling their German mortal enemy’s cities.

5)     Look at the genocide of non-Arabs in Iraq, Syria and the Sudan. This is what Palestinian Arabs have openly preached against Jews since the struggle for Jewish independence began.

6)     The United Nations (UN) has done nothing to prevent even a single case of ethnic cleansing or genocide in its 71 years of existence. And yet uniquely, it is the Jewish nation that you demand gives its trust to Palestinians who in their entire history have only ever preached ethno-religious hatred as an ethnic Arab right!

7)     A constant of Palestinians aspirations has been cultural genocide.  They have always preached it against Jews and where possible practiced it.

I could continue as I am sure you all can. We are constantly placed onto the defensive by our opponents, even by those people who are not yet our enemy.

If they have any tolerance at all for us, it is wearing thin as time progresses and it is doing so because we are not fighting back.  It is not sufficient to assert our rights when on university campuses across the globe it is with unchallenged aggression that our pleas for civilized debate are not unsurprisingly met with derision and even violence.

The chauvinist is incapable of accepting essential equality because it will always collide with his or her narrow world view.

The Arab and Islamist world uses its maximalist, colonialist and exclusive political-religious theology to justify its crimes against humanity and through its manipulation of the UN it stifles, even prevents any debate about its own guilt.  It is an axiom of racial politics that any truth which collides with the accepted narrative must be suppressed.

It is this hegemonic behavior that is at the heart of modern political division.  Identity politics, intersectionality, hierarchical victimhood are all symptoms of a damaged and fascistic mindset.  See the apartheid Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement as the perfect example.

The racists in the Western World will gravitate towards anyone whose twisted narrative validates their bigotry against Jewish independence in Israel or even, (and the British Labour Party is the perfect example of this) against Jewish equality in the Diaspora.

A strong nation requires a focused, competent and well funded Department of State that will direct foreign policy irrespective of the fitness of the political party in power.  It must have a dedicated political master. Instead, Israel has Benjamin Netanyahu for head of state and he has undermined Israel’s most important ministry of government because he is incapable of delegating power.  That makes him a bad Prime Minister.  In the government that was sworn in May 2015 he retained control over 4 separate ministries, all crucial to the health of the nation. It is inconceivable that the prime minister of a minority or coalition government would hang onto such an important department, as State is, while also trying to run the country. 

Under Netanyahu’s’ tutelage foreign policy has lurched from one crisis to another and the bureaucracy of State has been incrementally undermined.  When the state’s enemies openly boast of their intent to keep Israel in an existentially precarious state (as Hassan Nasrallah did only a few weeks ago) a full-time Foreign Minister with a well funded department is the minimum that is needed.

We are fighting BDS (which always focuses on the message no matter how many lies it contains) without support from the primary target of that boycott and I blame this situation on the prime minister of Israel.

Zionism and the Jewish State

“Except for two periods when Palestine was its correct political title it has usually been called the Land of Israel, the Promised Land, the Holy Land.  It was called Palestine from the second Jewish War with Rome to the conquest, when it formed the province of Palestina, and the second time during the British Mandate Arab for Palestine.”  (Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine by James Parkes)

To the first generation of fair minded people who came after the Second World War the Shoah proved the wisdom, not just the need for a Jewish safe haven.   It  is therefore all  the more ironic that it was the United Nations with its 1975 General Assembly Resolution equating Zionism with racism that signaled the first volley in  a relentless assault on Jewish legitimacy (and a stepped return  to organized anti-Semitic bigotry).  Then, Jews and their Christian supporters may not have missed the message but by dropping their guard they certainly neglected the long-term threat which eased the infiltration of Islamists and their neo-McCarthyist collaborators on the political Left into every aspect of public life.

McCarthyism was anti-internationalist in tone which naturally led it into antisemitic territory by virtue of accusations often leveled at Jews for dual-loyalty and their ‘cosmopolitan outlook’.  Soviet antisemitic vitriol usually came with a reference to cosmopolitanism, a meme everyone understood to be synonymous with Judaism. Again this is ironic, given communism’s claim to an egalitarian communalism and its international efforts for cross border legitimacy.    Today, Islamic and neo-McCarthyist radicals use classic antisemitic tropes to silence any criticism of their own history and their contemporary use of past antisemitic tactics.

For example no-one questions from where Arab-Muslim and radical left-wing funds originate, particularly when they are used to assault ‘Zionists’ and Jews who may be suspected of having Zionist sympathies. But Rothschild conspiracies and the ‘undue influence’ of any Jewish donors are oft-repeated accusations leveled against the Jewish community here in the UK.  The press will often publish articles that skirt and even cross the border between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, very rarely publishing a retraction when found to have erred. Debate around the influence of Islam and its obvious literary impact on antizionism as antisemitism is banished as Islamaphobic.

The extreme left’s antisemitism has been debated within the right-wing British press since Jeremy Corbyn notoriously became leader of the Labour opposition in the British parliament but even then that debate is very much circumscribed within parameters set by examining the Corbyn phenomena in British politics.  Little, if any examination is provided to the Left’s antisemitic origins or its contemporary racist bedfellows.

If Zionism and Judaism are forces for good they must be able to explain themselves in a world that is simultaneously inundated with and at war with a world of competing ideas. Zionism, as a Universalist and utopian Jewish idea is attacked by Muslims for denying Arab Particularism and its conquest narrative yet another victory but also Zionism is attacked because the State represents living proof of Islam’s failure to dominate all geographical areas with its exclusive Universalism.

Persistent attacks by Muslim and fascist proponents of an end to the Jewish National Homeland have rendered the gains made by advocates of Jewish autonomy subject to doubt and questioning which is unprecedented with respect to any other community. Moreover, the negative reinforcement of anti-Zionist and antisemitic Western propaganda has assailed Jewish self-confidence as perhaps never before in history.  As a way out, it has never been easier to cease to be Jewish.

Zionism has been a support for Jewish faith.  It has also been a weapon that antisemites use to bludgeon the ignorant and to assault Jewish faith.  The current crisis in Jewish identity has much to do with the bad press that Israel and the established Jewish communities failed to fight against with adequate vigor.

Identity, nationalism and religion are all weighty and conflicted subjects that so many of us do not want to discuss or even to define.  And yet a state of all its citizens must retain characteristics that give it an identity which differentiates it from its neighbors; unless of course we are all to be subsumed by a singular, neutralized identity, devoid of personality and character.   Ze’ev Maghen pointed out in an essay in “New Essays on Zionism (2006)” that “We all love preferentially.”   Preferential love is equal to sociocultural diversity; universal love is the death of intimacy without which all the great questions are without relevance.   An identity is crucial for self-expression; you cannot reach for the stars if you possess no passion for engagement. Our identity drives us to search for, to demand answers to the questions we have seen the urgency to ask.

Nora Sternfeld has written that Universalism is generally attributed to the majority society – both within its own paternalistic discourses and amongst a large proportion of its critics. She continues that it is possible to offer another perspective on this: the appropriation of a strategically universal perspective from the marginalized side, a perspective that steps out of the position of the victim and the object, and that takes pride in its capacity to act in solidarity with others.

However, choosing one minority position of oppression over another creates its own oppressive dialogue.  Just because we view a minority as disadvantaged it does not have to follow that their cultural tradition is worth supporting. Not all cultural narratives are equal in validity.

There is a reason that the Muslim world has a history of despotism and malevolent dictatorship. To question is to engage with the divine.  In the practice of a religion of submission one can only acquiesce. In the fourteen hundred years that is the lifespan of Islamic history there has only ever been exploitation by rulers who profited from those to whom submission as an article of faith meant unquestioning acceptance of a ruler’s fiat.  But at least according to Islamic theology, it also follows that even the most impoverished Muslim is superior to the Christian, Jew, or ‘other’ in their midst.  And that creates painfully dissonant questioning as to why the superior race is not in charge.

Therein is the origin of many conspiracy theories and hate filled diatribes against ‘a smart but perfidious enemy’ whether that enemy is Zionism, Capitalism, America, Israel, Western civilization, Crusader (Christianity) or Judaism!

If fear has meant that minorities failed to stand up to their persecutors, the last five years have signaled an end to any accommodation that non-Muslim minorities thought would keep their tormentors from oppressing them.  Islamic State (or Daesh) has nothing to do with either an Israel-Palestine conflict or Zionism, unless we now explain away the Arab Spring as inspired, not by Arab despotism, but by the success of Jewish self-determination (as expressed in the political independence of the nation-state of Israel).

The Christian Middle East is in full flight. There are no safe-havens for any non-Muslim (non-Arab) minority, excepting in Israel.  A Jewish state is of greater importance in the Middle and greater Near-Eastern region than at any time in history.

Democracy and human rights are not universally cherished.   Israel’s status as the Jewish nation is continuously questioned by ‘liberal’ exponents of secular republicanism.  They argue for separation of synagogue and state as a means of providing focus for a more inclusive (de-Judaised) national identity.  But that is something they would never dream of demanding from any other religious faith.

If modern Israel arose out of the moral disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the catalyst to its integration into global society was not the Shoah but what preceded it, at the end of the nineteenth century.  Large scale Jewish immigration encouraged a similar wave of Arab immigration.  Legitimacy for one means legitimacy for both.  But this right is one the fascist left is unwilling to grant to Jews.  If as Ruth Gavison claims, changing circumstances affected the balance of legitimacy in favor of Jewish self-determination, a history of Arab persecution of Jews and denial of Jewish rights in the land of Israel were and remains the principle impediment to the realization of universal autonomy.

I began this blog with a quote from James Parkes.  A Jewish right to live in peace in the Land of Israel is what Ruth Gavison calls “an elemental point of religious belief”. She argues for a justification outside of religious belief in order to avoid “a pointless clash of dogmas that leaves no room for dialogue or compromise.” The most important of the universal values of any society is the right to live one’s life without fear.  On this one factor in human existence everything else pivots. Israel stands in contradistinction to every Arab, to every Muslim state.  This and this alone is the justified Zionist product that is Jewish secular nationhood. (New Essays on Zionism - 2006)

British Antisemitism and my Friendship Failure

I had a heated discussion with an acquaintance, a former ‘friend’, after the Brexit poll that recently took place.  He is a life-long Labour Party supporter who acknowledged the futility of electing Jeremy Corbyn (JC) to the post of party leader while at the same time being exhilarated by the result.  We have not been comfortable together since he told me (just prior to one of my many family trips to Israel) that one mans history is another mans mythology.  From there it was clear I was dealing with someone of ‘easy’ personal ethics, someone who chooses sides based not on historical relevance but on ideological preference.  His justification is never swayed by either reality or counter-factual evidence. In retrospect, he was a perfect JC disciple.

We are all products of our identity.  We learn from our parents, our peers, from the education system and from society – social media, television, community.  We absorb many lies and half truths. What we have learnt from our growing up years helps us to turn away from that which is not congruent with our own belief system.  A well oiled propaganda machine can change hearts and minds; it can reroute our emotional response to input data simply by repeating its message and intimidating those people who refuse to listen, thereby silencing any counter argument.  It can work slowly or quickly depending on the strength of the message, its frequency of transmission and the opposing response (or lack thereof).

The Muslim and fascist Left’s “Boycott Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) campaign is an excellent example of this.  If you have ever tried to have a rational discussion with a proponent of BDS you will be shouted down, intimidated, threatened with violence, accused of war-crimes or simply ignored.

And thus are today’s wars eventually won.

I have always valued education and appreciated the truism that you never stop learning.  There are always at least two sides to every narrative no matter how unequal they may initially appear to be. And this is the problem that the Left has with any conflict.  I will explain.  The political Right developed from entrenched ruling elites. They evolved, they adapted over centuries to changing circumstances. If the Shoah taught the political Right wing anything it was that defeat was painful and maybe, just maybe, that using people as pawns had terrible consequences.  They may not have cared, but technology had developed to the point of making conflict uneconomical for every one, including the winners.

Except that the unfortunate truth about people is this: time, given the opportunity, forgives and even more important, forgets everything.

In contrast, the political Left was born of ideology and of original sin.  Its ideas were grafted onto a social backbone imbued with poisonous hatred of the other.  In order to facilitate acceptance Karl Marx as well as many who came after him on the political Left plagiarized the most heinous prejudices of the society they inhabited.  The British Labour Party has never fully explored, repudiated or banished its antisemitism.  Followers could choose to disregard party rhetoric at their peril.  After all, a winning meme will help to elect candidates to office.  Acceptance in a monolithic movement means unquestioning obedience. The Left has rarely had a need to justify its behavior. It has usually practiced cognitive relativism which places morals in the area of human invention; do not reflect universal truths and are subject to social and cultural considerations that override the laws of society.  Put another way (according to Marcel Stoetzler “Antisemitism and the British Labour Party”) the meta-politics of antisemitism is in its simplistic but transcendent appeal.

The Left’s universalism and its opposition to ethnic discrimination is tempered by its need to attract converts in a world that is increasingly unstable while also being more prosperous and therefore less likely to listen to its message about the underdog. Devoid of “us and them” rhetoric the Left has difficulty attracting voters to its message of class struggle and has an even greater issue justifying its “Other” particularism. The latter, empowers a perceived underclass even when that underclass is racist, homophobic, misogynistic, antisemitic and imperialistic.  These are crimes of which the Arab and greater Muslim world is guilty.  But when Jews are viewed as part of the greater Western or American (capitalist) project they become a conduit for all that is wrong with the world.  How else to justify choosing a racist Arab Particularism over a flawed Zionist Utopianism?

There is another issue that afflicts society today.  If in the past, we were taught that to win was not the most important thing but how we “played the game,” today we are told that there is no respect, there is no honor, there is just winning.   In the short term that may be a useful yardstick for success but it is a corrosive attitude that kills innovation and destroys relationships at every level of society. It means that long term planning is unnecessary and even uneconomical. We live in a society where if results are not rapidly achievable then either other options should be explored or the journey itself cancelled.  It has made us for the most part ungracious winners and poor losers.

Think of the British campaign to exit from the European Union. The campaign was intemperate. It was unlike any I had previously encountered because usually both sides attempt to woo their opponents’ voters. This time they oozed contempt for those voters.  That disdain followed through when the losers demanded a rerun.   It was often expressed that the democratic will of the people was of no consequence because the winners were clearly too stupid to appreciate the gravity of their error or because of their advanced age, either too infirm or too greedy to understand the important issues (such as cheaper British holidays to Europe).  That contempt is an impulse towards fascism but equally, it is an intolerance that is spreading even as we pray at a multicultural altar.

To return to my acquaintance, his logic cannot be faulted for the following reasons:

• If only he is ever right then his opponent is only ever deluded, misguided, uncaring and wrong.

• If only his vision is clear, then anyone who fails to share that vision is blind (or in theological terms his soul is corrupted).

• If his narrative is the only history of consequence then everything else must be invalid, invalidated and expunged from the historical record.

It is a very dangerous mindset and one that explains our inaction when confronted with the wrong kind of genocide.  Genocide is political and therefore unexceptional, even irrelevant.  It is why the world did (does) nothing about the Syrian civil-war and its’ almost half a million dead until its instability and fragmentation negatively impacts homeland Europe.

It is why George Orwell’s concept of brainwashing, a central theme in ‘1984’, has always been with us.  It just takes longer to impact society than the book portrays.

We have been too gentle with our fascist friends. Their life is filled with the absolute certainty of their cause and it is only by rudely exposing their collaborationist philosophy that we can prevent a dystopian future.  We will not be thanked for exposing the bedrock of their beliefs to ridicule. Their indifference to you will remain unchanged and their hatred will help them to overcome any doubts that may linger on the margins of their minds-eye.   The Jeremy Corbyn’s of this world are the perfect example of a grotesque political phenomenon.  They possess an unwavering certainty in the justice of their cause alongside of an inability to comprehend their opponents’ humanity.  Their incapacity to change direction and a lopsided intellect that can explain and justify anything is buttressed by a lack of emotional facility to intuit any countervailing possibilities.

As a politician there are some things you should not do. One of those things is to be caught out with a contemptuous / idiotic response to an obvious question.  When Jeremy Corbyn had only recently been elected leader and given his controversial associations he was asked if he was antisemitic (see “Jeremy Corbyn and a Case Study for Fascism”).

http://thebilateralist.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/jeremy-corbyn-and-case-study-for-fascism.html

His answer was to ask the following question: How could I be? My father fought at the Battle of Cable Street (a legendary anti-racist fight against black-shirted fascists, fought in 1936, thirteen years before Jeremy Corbyn was born).  It makes a thief of the leader of the nation’s main opposition party – to steal someone else’s virtue as a means of disproving ones own iniquities is however, worse than theft because it sullies the memory of an honorable past with the duplicitous and detestable present.

That is what makes for a conflict between good and evil.

I feel sad.  On a personal level I now realize that someone I once called a friend, perhaps because of his life-long ideological commitment to ‘liberation theology’ (just not Jewish) or an Arab fascist agenda (Pan-Arabism), he would have as easily stabbed me in the back, as betray me to the KGB or the SS.  For my kind, is there a difference?

Institutionally Racist?

This is a guest article by Alan Melkman whose own blog can be found at the following site:

http://alanspolicyblog.wordpress.com/

While it is now dated by publication of the Shami Chakrabati report, subsequent behavior by Jeremy Corbyn’s (JC) fellow travelers in Momentum (a grassroots but influential movement of JC acolytes), his ongoing nonfeasance and dishonorable behavior at the launch of Shamis’ report simply reinforces the impression that the report into widespread allegations of antisemitism within the British Labor Party was no more than a face-saving whitewash.

The tragedy is that it distances the Labour Party even further from future electoral success because in dismissing any need to examine its own toxic antecedent history as well as contemporary antisemitic behavior it only encourages recidivist antisemitism within the Left.  As such, it can only promote further public extremism which decent people will reject along with the party that practices it.

 

Institutionally Racist?

Let’s be clear – crystal clear.

Anti-Semitism is the hatred of Jews. It is the hatred of a people, of a race, not for their beliefs, but for who they are. It is the hatred of Jews because they are Jews. It is holding them responsible for evil without any substantive evidence. It is to make them the centre of conspiracies of enslavement of the rest of the world and the instigators of unspeakable collusions. It is race hatred in its purest form.

Islamaphobia is, as its name would suggest, the fear of Islam, the religion. Adherents to the Muslim faith come in all varieties and from all races. It is a fear of the teachings of Islam which inspire a small minority to commit despicable atrocities such as: acts of indiscriminate slaughter, violations of young and not infrequently older women, intimidation of those who resist their pernicious ideology, homophobic insanities and much, much more. It is not, as antisemitism is of Jews, a hatred of Muslims because they are Muslims. It is a fear of a small minority for their outrageous religious beliefs. It is not racist.

So, if these two phenomena are entirely different, why are they so often conflated?

For example, the British Labour party is undertaking an investigation into itself, led by a member of its own party, into allegations that it, through its members, has exhibited anti-Semitic behaviors in recent years. It has created what is politely referred to as an impartial enquiry, headed by Labour party member Shami Chakrabarti who has, amongst other things, broadened the enquiry way beyond focusing solely on anti-Semitism to include an equal consideration of Islamaphobia.

These two phenomena, as explained, are completely different. It is like insisting any enquiry into bribery within World Football must include an equally hard look at endemic political corruption in Venezuela. Rationally, including Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism is totally absurd, almost laughable. So why has Shami chosen to include fear of Islam in the same brief as hatred of the Jewish race? Why has she chosen to ‘muddy the waters’?

Perhaps there are a number of reasons why Shami has decided that Islamaphobia and Jew hatred are essentially the same. Perhaps it is because their investigations will show that Islamaphobia is more widely spread than anti-Semitism, particularly among members of the Conservative party, thereby diminishing the perceived size of problem whilst putting the Conservatives ‘on the back foot’. It might be that they discover that attacks on UK Muslims and their properties, in absolute numbers, are greater than on Jews which again diminishes the perceived extent of anti-Semitism. Most importantly it conflates racism with the fear of an ideology and thereby exonerates the Labour party from the accusation that it is institutionally racist.

I suspect that most impartial observers have already had some reservations on the likely conclusion of this Labour navel gazing exercise. The veracity of their report might, and I suggest should, be judged against the following criteria for which I am indebted to Stephen Spencer Ryde stephensryde@googlemail.com who has been carrying on what appears to be an almost single handed campaign against the perversions of natural justice that the Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, is masterminding.

1.     The inquiry’s scope only covers the rules in future cases of antisemitism.  It will not examine existing cases that remain unaddressed, such as the case of Sir Gerald Kaufman. It may point out that there has been a balance of Islamaphobic inferences and this historical issue is beyond the remit of the enquiry

2.     The Labour Party’s antisemitism problem is not so acute because the rules were too lax. The enquiry might conclude the Party’s leadership and structures have failed to identify antisemitism and condemn it. But then the same comments will be made about Islamaphobia. The inquiry should then logically examine the conduct of the Party’s leadership, but it will not.

3.     The Vice Chair of the inquiry is Professor David Feldman, who has already dismissed claims of antisemitism in the Party as “baseless” and “politically motivated” in an open letter. It is ludicrous to appoint as judge and jury someone who has already made up his mind in opposition to the vast majority of British Jews. However, he will show his impartiality by putting equal weight on the Islamic scale to balance the anti-Semitic evidence.

4.     The inquiry seeks to concoct its own definition of antisemitism.  There is already a definition that is used by the Government, the College of Policing, and even foreign institutions like the EU Parliament and the US Department of State.  The definition is called the EUMC definition (presumably also used by All Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism), and it covers precisely the kind of antisemitism that has invaded Labour’s immune system: antisemitism disguised as political discourse.  The EUMC definition is not up for debate, but we know that the inquiry will not adopt it because Professor Feldman has argued for its abolition every time he has been given the opportunity. It is likely therefore that the Shami definition of anti-Semitism will be vague enough to include a completely different animal, Islamaphobia.

The report will almost certainly conclude that that mere criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic and that this label is thrown about to stop legitimate disapproval and the stifling of free speech. What it will almost certainly not conclude is that the Labour party is both institutionally racist and in deep denial of this fact.