O/T Rebecca Long Bailey

The crazy world of Arthur Brown - for an impromptu busked session of "fire"? Just a guess.

 

I thought I’d let it go but couldn’t. You are wrong. Your opinion is plain wrong, he didn’t call hamas specifically friends. It’s pointless all this when you can’t even understand facts.

 

I don’t mind being told I’m wrong, I’m perfectly happy to be put right when I am, I was wrong about All Lives Matter until Jamdrop explained why I was wrong. But don’t tell me that Corbyn didn’t describe HAMAS as friends at the stop the war event he was speaking at because its well documented. Don't tell me that he didn't invite the IRA to tea at Westminster just two weeks after the Brighton bombings because he did. It was a despicable act of taking the pyss out if those injured and killed because he campaigned for a united ireland. In my opinion he’s a horrible barsteward. You may well have a different view. But please stop banging on about me getting my facts wrong when both examples are well documented.

 

Here’s a quote from himself, not a report or option, here’s what he said.

“Corbyn later told Channel 4 News that he had used the word “friends” in a “collective way”, adding: “I’m saying that people I talk to, I use it in a collective way, saying our friends are prepared to talk. Does it mean I agree with Hamas and what it does? No.”

The IRA were and are a banned terrorist organisation. Did they just wander into the Houses of Parliament? or was it sinnfein, a legitimate, if somewhat ideologically unsound political party? You may conflate the two but simple facts mean they aren’t singular.

another quote “Corbyn has never claimed to be neutral on this issue  -  and there are many who would hotly contest his point of view ”, but that does not mean he has “ever had any sympathy for IRA terrorist tactics”, Davies concludes.

Have an opinion by all means but basing it on fact would be a start. Anyway this thread isn’t about JC. What about ery has taken it off point in an attack against labour as usual.

 

Ye but no but ye but thats what he said but not what he meant. Aye alreet.

 

Glad to see dodging the points made is still a debating technique.

 

Seems to get you elected to the Premiership of the land.

A lifetime dedicated to reasoned campaigning and peaceful diplomacy to advance the cause of oppressed peoples gets you pilloried.

 

Well lets get back to it then. Apparently Momentum have started a petition to get her re instated backed (surprisingly) by Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott. They may see nothing wrong in casual antisemitism, after all, Peake’s tweet links Israel with what amounts to murder. But then, as alleged there’s nothing new in certain sections of the hard left within labour pointing a derisive finger toward Israel is there ?

 

I suspect the Israeli secret police have murdered people. I also think that the KGB, MI6, Stasi and the CIA have murdered people. That's kind of what secret services do - it's one of the reasons they exist.

 

1. It was an interview in a newspaper which quoted Peake. Not a tweet as you say. Have you read it?

2. The derisive finger towards Israel in this case is not anti-semitism. It is questioning the practices of a nation state.

 

Well lets get back to it then. Apparently Momentum have started a petition to get her re instated backed (surprisingly) by Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott. They may see nothing wrong in casual antisemitism, after all, Peake’s tweet links Israel with whats amounts to murder. But then, as alleged there’s nothing new in certain sections of the hard left pointing a

So of all the worlds special forces and secret agencies Peake names Israel and corbynista RLB repeats it. And you can’t see why there’s a perceived issue with the labour party. ??

 

Saying that all muslims are terrorists would be racism by proxy just as linking Israel to a potential murder by a police man in America is antisemitic. It’s no surprise at all that some folk on here can’t see it.

 

But Corbyn

7 months old Article

Last week Jeremy Corbyn was branded a “terrorist sympathiser” by a heckler in Glasgow, who demanded to know where his “Islamic jihad scarf” could be found.

The moment, gleefully covered by the rightwing press, lost some of its lustre when it emerged that the heckler, a Church of Scotland minister called Richard Cameron, allegedly had a back catalogue of Islamophobic and homophobic tweets. But the reverend’s terrorist sympathiser insult did not come out of nowhere. David Cameron, then serving as prime minister, denounced Corbyn and his colleagues in precisely the same terms when he opposedairstrikes in Syria in December 2015. And Boris Johnson accused Jeremy Corbyn of seeking to “legitimate the actions of terrorists” in his speech after the 2017 Manchester bombing.

Johnson seemed confident that public opinion would share his view of Corbyn’s speech as “absolutely monstrous”. But pollssuggested that the majority of people agreed with the Labour leader that terrorist attacks on British soil were connected, at least in part, to the country’s foreign policy. The “terrorist sympathiser” label appears to be as subjective as the word “terrorist” itself.

Much of the criticism directed at Corbyn focuses on his relationship with Sinn Féin in the 1980s and 90s. During the 2017 general election campaign, Boris Johnson tweeted a photo of Corbyn with Martin McGuinness in 1995, deriding his claim to have never met the IRA: “You cannot trust this man!” By the time that photo was taken, the Sinn Féin leader, Gerry Adams, had already shaken hands with the then US president, Bill Clinton; two years later, McGuinness would be a guest in Downing Street. It has been widely reported that Adams and McGuinness were still members of the IRA’s army council at the time. But Clinton, Tony Blair and the Unionist leader David Trimble all held talks with them in their capacity as Sinn Féin politicians – a distinction vital for the entire peace process.
While successive prime ministers insisted publicly that they would never “talk with terrorists”, there was in fact discreet contact between British government officials and the IRA throughout the conflict. William Whitelaw, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland at the time, even negotiated directly with the IRA leadershipduring the truce of 1972. Pragmatic considerations trumped any sense of moral outrage.
Corbyn’s critics insist that his record of engagement with Irish republicans is very different, because he supported their political goals. It’s quite true that leading voices of the British Labour left argued for Irish unity in the 1980s, much to the displeasure of unionists in Britain and Northern Ireland alike. Corbyn himself wasn’t a prominent figure at the time, and became an MP only in 1983; Ken Livingstone, then head of the Greater London Council, was much better known, and his comments on the Northern Irish conflict attracted a great deal of controversy. If support for a united Ireland made Corbyn and Livingstone into fellow travellers of the IRA, by the same logic, those who defended the union with Britain shared a political objective with the loyalist paramilitaries responsible for hundreds of deaths during the Troubles. The argument of guilt by association can easily backfire on those who deploy it.

The Labour leader has also faced sharp criticism for his meeting with representatives of Hamas in 2009. But even Mike Gapes, the former Labour MP who is one of Corbyn’s fiercest critics, had called for talks with the “moderate” elements of Hamas in 2007, and Tony Blair later described the boycott of Hamas after it won the 2006 Palestinian elections as a mistake. Blair himself met in private the Hamas leaders Khaled Meshaal and Ismail Haniyeh only four years ago. And while Corbyn expressed “regret” for using the term “friends” in reference to delegates from Hamas – after it elicited an indignant response from critics – there was no such outrage when Conservative and Labour politicians referred to the Saudi royal family as valued “friends”, allies and partners of the UK in the course of a parliamentary debate on continued arms sales for the Yemen war, which those MPs supported. It is certainly difficult to imagine a consistent set of principles for a prospective British prime minister that would put Hamas beyond the pale yet allow for a close relationship with the Saudi Arabian monarchy, given the UK’s support for its war in Yemen, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians.

Of course, violence against civilians – from the Isis-inspired massacres in France to the deliberate targeting of civilians in Yemen – is a crime in all circumstances. But the way we talk about terrorism, and the application of the “terrorist” label by governments, has always been arbitrary and self-serving. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan denounced the African National Congress in South Africa as terrorists, while supporting insurgent groups elsewhere whose record of violence against civilians was incomparably worse, from Angola to Afghanistan, Cambodia to Nicaragua. The Clinton administration initially branded the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as a terrorist organisation, before enlisting it as an ally against Slobodan Milosevic. In recent years, the US and the UK have kept the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on their list of proscribed terrorist groups, but accepted Syrian groups closely linked with the PKK as partners in the war against Isis. “Terrorism”, in this sense, is simply the use of violence by non-state groups without the blessing of the US State Department.

If Corbyn had been willing to internalise this value system and its peculiar set of taboos, he would have attracted much less controversy in his time as Labour leader. But the foreign policy consensus works much better when it doesn’t have to be explicitly articulated by those who support it. Insults such as “terrorist sympathiser” are meant to discourage awkward questions about the double standards that govern Britain’s relationship with the outside world.

Would the daily hate papers report such findings. Absolutely not it wouldn’t serve their agenda. And Influences the gullible.

 

I think that they're the only one that have definitely been brought in to train the US police in tactics - back in 2016 according to Amnesty International.

And she didn't "repeat" it. She shared an interview with one of her constituents that happened to contain it as a line (along with a denial from the source in the very next sentence). If you want to treat retweets as endorsing anything and everything that's contained within the article in question then I'm happy to accept it - the right are on far shakier ground.

edit: changed "arcticle by" to "interview with".

 

Why is naming the Israeli secret police racism?
You've named Hammas as terrorists. They are. Is that racist?
By the way. I don't think you are but it's as valid a point.
There is no casual racism involved in what Peake said. Absolutely none. Again....widespread anti semitism in the Labour party is a myth. It's just been constructed so that the xenophobes on the right can deflect when they're called out.
I'll give you the contrast.
Maxine Peake...Israeli secret police work with US police. They do.
Boris....watermelon smiles and piccaninnies.

 

She wasn't linking all jewish people to the murder of George Floyd though was she? She absolutely 100% was not.

 

Debate is stifled on all sides now and it's totally unhelpful. The centre right (what you might call Cameron-esque one nation Conservatives, I'm not on about the BNP loonies) aren't allowed to discuss concerns around immigration levels or why they might have constitutional concerns over unelected bureaucrats making laws - they're just racists.

The centre left aren't allowed to express concerns over the fact Israel as a state is run by racists and has a terrible human rights record - they're just anti-Semites.

No one is allowed to, whilst supporting the racial equality elements of the BLM movement, raise concern over some of the non-race related hard left wing tenets of the BLM movement as stated on their website - for example the push to defund and disband the police, and therefore whether it's appropriate for the movement to have official endorsement by the Premier League - they're just racists.

Democrats in the US can't raise concerns around the involvement of Russian influence on the Trump campaign, lest they be christened Communists and be at the centre of a campaign to be "locked up".

No one is allowed to question lockdown policy and whether it has even saved one life or actually in the long run caused several thousand more deaths than if we hadn't bothered - they're rightwing conspiracy theorists.

That's not to mention that it's completely taboo to point out the massive over-representation of one particular demographic amongst the perpetrators of organised paedophilia in the UK with a means to trying to remedy this.

I know I'm about to have Stewart Lee quoted at me, but I'm not on about the morons that think we're not allowed to celebrate Christmas, I'm talking about how some topics of conversation, for both the left and right, have unfortunately become off-limits despite being extremely worthy of debate because they're just totally shut down by the opposing side with the trump card of racism or anti Semitism.

We've got ourselves in a right ******* pickle and no mistake.

 

Gladly. You’ve still not addressed any points made to you but let’s gloss over that, just keep repeating the things you heard that you agree with, that’ll do.

For someone so tolerant of others I’m glad to see you sticking up for the Jewish community.

 

The interview was about Peake's role as a Palestinian woman in a play currently showing. Israel is therefore wholly in context to the conversation. Again, have you read it?

You can't see that religion and the security arm of a nation state aren't the same thing. For clarity;

Islam = a global religion of millions of disparate followers.

Israeli police/ secret services = a state organisation separate to the diaspora of the Jewish faith

 

People need to get their definition about antisemitism correct. There is nothing wrong or malicious in pointing out that Israeli special forces have assisted US security services if in fact they have. Nothing antisemitic at all about that if it is demonstrably factual. Any antisemitism would be if trumped up inaccuracies were published in order to tarnish the image of Jewish people. As far as I can tell there has been no such slandering therefore there is no antisemitism. Therefore LB has done nothing substantively wrong other than re tweeting/ posting on an issue on which perhaps she should just have kept her proverbial gob shut. No antisemitism. Should not have been sacked. Starmer is chasing the wrong villain (and his real reasons are up for debate).