Subject: Picking your enemy.
The row about antisemitism drags on in the Labour Party. Never a day goes by without the right wing press publishing Jeremy Corbyn attending, sometimes years ago meetings and wreath laying with Palestinian groups as if the Palestinian cause were in someway a slight to democracy.
Freedom of speech and freedom of association are the building blocks of a civilised society and Jeremy Corbyn's willingness to espouse the cause of Palestine has been a life long conviction.
The 1947 creation of a homeland for the Jewish nation acknowledging their historic rights to parts of what was once called Palestine, in the Balfour declaration was an act of recognition that the Jewish diaspora who had so brutally suffered in Europe needed a home to call their own. As in so much of what was done in those Imperial days, when maps were redrawn without thought to the local inhabitants, the recreation of a Jewish or Zionist state was brought about without the views of the local Arab tribes living there being considered.
The 1947 creation of a homeland for the Jewish nation acknowledging their historic rights to parts of what was once called Palestine, in the Balfour declaration was an act of recognition that the Jewish diaspora who had so brutally suffered in Europe needed a home to call their own. As in so much of what was done in those Imperial days, when maps were redrawn without thought to the local inhabitants, the recreation of a Jewish or Zionist state was brought about without the views of the local Arab tribes living there being considered.
The history of the Jews as a tribe and the surrounding Arab tribes had not been without acrimony and the wholesale resettlement of European Jews, bolstered with American money has never made for happy bedfellows.
The Zionist government seeing the numbers and the inherent hostility have been, since inception resolute in propounding "Israel first", no matter what the means to ensure its survival and many of the means have been brutal.
The Zionist government seeing the numbers and the inherent hostility have been, since inception resolute in propounding "Israel first", no matter what the means to ensure its survival and many of the means have been brutal.
Corbyn's view and his sympathy lay towards the Palestinian. He saw the single minded might of American money, so often in our world, juxtaposed with justice for societies deemed of lesser worth, and it was of sufficient cause to examine what it meant to be a Palestinian. What he found was distasteful and he cried foul.
As a left wing leader of the Labour Party he was always a thorn in the flesh of the Blairites faction of the Labour Party, themselves caricatured as "Tory Lite". They and the Tories have been intent, since his leadership on a continual program of character assignation from the day he was elected.
The Jewish lobby in this country are powerful, holding capital and media control far in advance of their actual numbers. This drip drip disingenuous feed into the public discourse has finally settled in this row over the call to acknowledge the Holocaust Memorial Pledge which binds people to disengage from anything which could be dreamed anti Jewish as being anti Semitic.
Part of the embitterment has been the assumption that to be anti Semitic included being anti Zionist and therefore, criticising the government of Israel was being anti Semitic. Interestingly the term "Semitic" includes the Arab tribes of largely, the Middle East as well as the tribe of the Hebrews. The term should have been wholistic but seems to have been coopted by the Jews.
Corbyn's case is that by unreservedly signing all the clauses within the Holocaust Pledge (authored by the Americans) it would prevent him from criticising the Zionist government of Israel when, to the very fibre of his being, he has had sympathy for the Palestinian position.
It was never a crime to pick your enemy but in the case of Israel it seems it is.
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