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Related: About this forumIf the Labour right KEEPS trying to remove Corbyn after this, they'll do nothing but damage.
They just need to accept reality, work with the guy, and actually try to win the damn election.
It's not possible to depose Jeremy after REPEATED challenges, put someone else in in his place, and then still have any chance of uniting the party around the newly imposed leader(and the Owen Smith thing proves, there simply ISN'T anyone else in the party that represents a better alternative at this point).
Why would anyone think otherwise?
It's enough that Corbyn submitted to the challenge and was re-elected.
The only decent thing to do is to leave it at that.
Doing anything else is simply reinventing the National Government or the SDP.
If you care about the people Labour was founded to fight for, please stop dividing the party and please stop trying to undermine the leader the overwhelming majority of the party SUPPORTS.
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iandhr
(6,852 posts)He has called Hamas and Hezbollah agents of “long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region,” and once invited to Parliament a Palestinian Islamist, Raed Salah, who has suggested Jews were absent from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Corbyn called him an “honored citizen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/opinion/an-anti-semitism-of-the-left.html?_r=1
• Written a letter defending Stephen Sizer, the vicar disciplined by the Church of England for linking to an article on social media entitled 9/11: Israel Did It;
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/13/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-foreign-policy-antisemitism
There is a reason why anti-Semites are flocking to Labour the leadership of Corbyn. It is the same reason why white supremacists are flocking to Donald Trump.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)And all Corbyn was trying to do was get Hamas to be part of a reconciliation process.
What's the alternative to working for negotiations?
It's not possible to defeat them or Fatah militarily.
T_i_B
(14,737 posts)He is no friend of Israel. I've seen him give speeches on the subject and he is very hostile towards the state of Israel.
And because of that he has managed to attract a few anti-semites to his cause, and supporters of Israel such as John Mann are among his most virulent critics. There's a reason why Corbyn's poll numbers among our Jewish friends are abysmal.
Labour has so far been able to keep the worst of the Israel / Palestine bullshit at bay. However, at it's worst, Momentum has engaged in pure dog whistle politics over Israel.
LeftishBrit
(41,205 posts)However, I think that his supporter base comes from all sorts of sometimes unconventional places, and he isn't very good at keeping track of all his supporters' actions and opinions. And too many (well, any is too many!) undoubtedly do subscribe to anti-Semitic views.
However, this is not exclusive to the Labour Party, and we may remember Aidan Burley and his Nazi-themed stag party, and the Oxford student Conservatives who got drunk and sang a highly anti-Semitic parody of 'Jingle Bells' at one of their meetings. As for UKIP, while its anti-Semitism has perhaps been overshadowed by its other forms of racism, there was a poll that showed that 50% of its members would never vote for a Jewish political candidate.
As for John Mann, I don't think that Israel is the only reason he doesn't like Corbyn; he is just generally on the right of the party. I may forgive some Labour MPs who voted for the Iraq war if their subsequent record has been good; I may forgive Labour MPs who supported Brexit as part of a general anti-globalist sentiment (e.g. Dennis Skinner); but I will not forgive a Labour MP who supported both the Iraq War and Brexit, and Mann is one of just 5 in this category.
Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)If that government stopped constantly inflicting collective punishment on ALL Palestinians for the actions of a violent few, he might be friendlier.
The problem is that the government of Israel...ESPECIALLY under the leading figures of the Likud Ascendancy(Israeli poliltics since 1977)have drawn too deeply on the shame associated with the betrayals of the European Jewish community by the European, British and North American countries in the 1933-1945 era(betrayals which are unforgiveable and which still haven't been PROPERLY addressed by those countries, since an appropriate response would be to admit that it was indefensible to bar Jewish refugees from Hitler and that redress for that choice should have been made exclusively by those countries undertaking a program of acknowledgment, apologies and compensation, as well as by the immediate acceptance of all Jewish residents of Europe
., rather than by aiding in the dispossession of another people on another continent who bore no responsibility aiding and abetting what Hitler and Co. did) as a means of emotionally blackmailing those countries into, until very recently, unquestioning support for things like the West Bank and former Gaza occupation
And I suspect that Corbyn and a lot of those around him would support the two-state model if it hadn't been for the fact that until 1994 the Israeli government and those who presented themselves as its supporters totally anathemized the two-state idea. Any acknowledgment, prior to that date, that Palestinians were a nation and a people and deserved the same right to self-determination all other peoples have was equated to anti-Zionism and, essentially, to outright antisemitism.
It should simply never have been argued that the only way anyone could prove they opposed antisemitism(in the post-1948 world) was to be an unquestioning supporter of everything the Israeli government did to Palestinians in the name of what it called "security".
It was never antisemitic to oppose the Occupations, it was never antisemitic to oppose the settlement project(if it had been, David Ben-Gurion would now be considered an antisemite-he spoke out so strongly against the idea of settling the West Bank that the governments of his day were forced to wait until after his death in 1973 to commence the project), and it was never antisemitic to point out that the Palestinians have been treated with indefensible brutality.
Antisemitism is hatred of Jews and the active wish that harm be done to Jews. Not dissent against Israeli security policy.
iandhr
(6,852 posts)Check this out from the Guardian.
It isn’t a peaceful negotiated solution that Hamas wants; it’s the destruction of the Jews. Here is a direct quote from Hamas’s charter: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: ‘The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!’”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/13/jeremy-corbyn-labour-leadership-foreign-policy-antisemitism
Denzil_DC
(7,233 posts)Not Bloodworth again.
...
The discussion in question concerned Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot in the head in an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen because of her public support for girls’ education. What, asked another person involved in the conversation, should we in the West do to support the rights of schoolgirls in Pakistan? “Militarily defeating the people who shoot them, first off”, was Bloodworth’s response.
...
Yousafzai further challenged Bloodworth’s militarism when she appeared on The Daily Show in the US. Asked by host Jon Stewart how she personally dealt with the death threats, she replied “You must not treat others with cruelty and that much harshly, you must fight others through peace and through dialogue and through education.” I emailed this quote to Bloodworth. His considered response? “I’m not sure Churchill would agree.” The colonial bulldog may not have agreed but the British military leadership seems to be sympathetic. “There is a common perception that the issues in Afghanistan, and indeed elsewhere around the world, can be dealt with by military means”, said Air Chief Marshall Sir Jock Stirrup in 2007. “That’s a false perception.” So, to be clear, Bloodworth, the editor of supposedly the ‘No. 1 left-wing blog’ in the UK, is a far bigger supporter of UK military aggression than the country’s most senior armed forces leader.
Despite the armchair warmongering of commentators like Bloodworth, in recent years peace talks have been going on with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, continued Western aggression has made a political settlement more, not less, difficult; according to Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the former UK special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. “I’m sure some of them are more willing to parlay”, he said in 2011. “But equally, for every dead Pashtun warrior, there will be ten pledged to revenge.”
In short, if followed through, Bloodworth’s militaristic posturing in support of more US and UK military action would mean energising and increasing the number of extremists, prolonging the conflict and therefore bringing about more violence and more deaths. Fortunately, the British public is a little smarter; over the past few years a large majority has supported the withdrawal of UK troops from Afghanistan. Unfortunately for us on the Left, however, it is Bloodworth – seemingly impervious to evidence and elementary logic – who is published in the Independent and sought-after by the BBC.
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/turning-somersaults-whip-challenging-james-bloodworths-warmongering/
I suggest you take this perennial bollocks and the words of the bloodthirsty neocon Bloodworth to the Israel/Palestine forum. It didn't fly during the Labour leadership election, and I don't think you have many takers for it here.
RogueTrooper
(4,665 posts)In what wacky universe is Hamas ever going to be in a military position to carry it out?
Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing and wholesale dissection of Palestine continues while people like you wring your hands about what speakers' platform Corbyn's shared with whom at some point in the past. While, I might add, supporting an Israeli state that had a hand in ensuring Hamas took power because it suited the Israeli government's purposes. Talk about frikkin humbug.
As I pointed out to you when you cited Bloodworth in a similar context not long ago, if you want to play guilt by association, then by your own logic both you and iandhr are presumably raging neocons because you cite Bloodworth approvingly.
What was the "charter" of the IRA when so many Americans were donating to it while bombing our cities, and which country's politicians drove the UK to the negotiating table that so far has brought about a lasting peace and seen ex-IRA figures actually end up in government?
And what of Owen Smith - who you've spoken of as a preferable leadership candidate - who, unlike Corbyn, declared his willingness to negotiate with ISIS, who are all good, misunderstood lads, I guess?
All rhetorical. If all you've got is more of the above, I have better things to do today.