Is this anti-semitism?

as has been pointed out already, I think, the Jewish community in the UK hasn't been very left wing for a long time.

my Twitter feed suggests oth-- ah, never mind!

i guess the antisemitic vote mostly. "i apologize for the ways labour under my watch has failed to take accusations of antisemitism seriously enough" would not immediately become "corbyn admits to hating jews"

mordy, what do you think of the column Corbyn wrote in 2018? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/03/jeremy-corbyn-antisemitism-labour-party

i've read it before i hope you don't mind if i don't read it again (just have a lot on my plate and posting to this thread in between generating paperwork) - i think it's pretty troubling all the antisemitic friends and acquaintances he has that he has defended and protected which makes his "they do not speak for me" somewhat hollow in my eyes.

Those JC polls are tiny! Also, their political editor is a former colleague of mine who was engaged in very dodgy dealings while freelancing, which I witnessed, and he turned that to his advantage when he joined the tabloid press at the end of the ‘90s and suddenly there were all these exclusives about celebrity addicts he’d known in the years leading up to his change in jobs. In 2015 he was arrested for suspected phone hacking and was very lucky not to be charged, and left his tabloid job under a massive cloud. I cannot think of a person in the media I trust less, and it amuses me greatly to see he offers private clients ‘reputation management’.

He has apologised before for various incidents - why do it again when that would just feed the BBC's narrative? It's a lose-lose but hopefully the line of attack is being seen as increasingly desperate and weirdly blind to the bigotries of the right

I don't know much about this but the allegations in the wikipedia article seem awfully weak to me. none of them even come close to the Trump campaign Star of David tweet situation IMO, or Omar's coded speech (for which she's apologized but I find her apologies fairly weak as well).

The reason there are a few paragraphs of "allegations" in the wikipedia article is precisely that there has been a years long smear campaign against Corbyn and the left, and those "allegations" are simply the accumulated smears. You can't just point to a wikpedia article and say "There's a lot in here so it must be meaningful."

goes from whitewashing the kashmir lockdown to quoting the niemoller poem, the most cynical shit i've seen in while

LATEST: The Hindu Council has now written to the Chief Rabbi to express their support and to accuse the Labour Party of also becoming anti-Hindu. Major interventions in this election today from pretty much every major faith in Britain. Astonishing. pic.twitter.com/J4fRtvIOLw

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) November 26, 2019

https://t.co/JkRwUevQIrhttps://t.co/lzf3ujhmemhttps://t.co/wQjF0tYzZD

Here are three separate times he apologised last year alone

— 🌹 ellun 🌹 (@ellnlvll) November 26, 2019

so why refuse to do it in that interview lj posted? just reflexive oppositional "i won't do what you tell me"?

How many times do you want someone to apologize? Does he have to apologize in every interview he gives?

BBC spin clearly working.

See we are still not taking Roma seriously so again.

anti-roma pogroms and ghettoisation in their actual manifesto but tories will be continuing to make holocaust jokes directed at the labour party

— tony blair electric chair (@internetratbag) November 26, 2019

i don't care if he apologizes or not but i'd think he'd do better if when the BBC guy was like "so will you apologize," he said, "I've actually apologized multiple times and have no problem doing so again," or something along those lines. He does seem a bit "I won't give in to what you want" there which may be understandable but also probably plays better to his base (yeah! show up that wicked BBC!).

that’s not my twitter btw I just stole the dn (xp)

I agree w/mordy re the apology. andrew neil is a fud but the story was going to be perpetuated either way - better to do the right thing. the party clearly still has a long way to go and we need to be seen to be listening to the jewish community.

And hey presto another Con politician grandstanding against a respected historian of Nazi Germany. Playing political football on this like no problem

History teaches us where a failure to stand up to anti-semitism leads - which is why it is all the sadder to see this historian of the twentieth century fail to heed its lessons https://t.co/uglhrWu6bA

— Michael Gove (@michaelgove) November 25, 2019

Can't win - apologise on demand and it supports the implication that he hadn't previously / apologise and mention having done so before and it can easily look petty and as if he's making it about himself. xp

I don't know much about this but the allegations in the wikipedia article seem awfully weak to me. none of them even come close to the Trump campaign Star of David tweet situation IMO, or Omar's coded speech (for which she's apologized but I find her apologies fairly weak as well).

― akm, Tuesday, November 26, 2019 7:41 PM (twenty-three minutes ago)

i agree w/ this. the evidence for corbyn's "anti-semitism" seems astonishingly weak to me.

I agree w/mordy re the apology. andrew neil is a fud but the story was going to be perpetuated either way - better to do the right thing. the party clearly still has a long way to go and we need to be seen to be listening to the jewish community.

― tony blair electric chair (||||||||), Tuesday, 26 November 2019 bookmarkflaglink

OTM actually. No need to make a big song and dance about it. Just quick and straightforward.

goes from whitewashing the kashmir lockdown to quoting the niemoller poem, the most cynical shit i've seen in while

"Whitewashing" is an understatement. I can hardly believe how angry this letter made me.

i've read it before i hope you don't mind if i don't read it again (just have a lot on my plate and posting to this thread in between generating paperwork) - i think it's pretty troubling all the antisemitic friends and acquaintances he has that he has defended and protected which makes his "they do not speak for me" somewhat hollow in my eyes.

― Mordy, Tuesday, November 26, 2019 11:23 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

right, but are there other anti-semites publishing long detailed denunciations of anti-semitism? are there any politicians in any of our countries writing these kinds of pieces? is there anything in corbyn's article you actually disagree with (when you have a moment)?

this might be a slight exaggeration, but the PM of Israel has defended just as many antisemites as corbyn ever has

article on all of the measures that the party have undertaken:
https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/opinion-jennie-formby-chief-rabbi-can-criticise-but-heres-why-hes-wrong/

[Shomrim chairman, Rabbi Herschel] Gluck confirmed that Corbyn “phoned to find out what happened and to express his shock and empathy with the community”.

He added: “We deeply appreciate his concern. He sounded extremely genuine. He was the only party leader who called." https://t.co/Rp90BYTQVn

— Dimi Reider (@reider) December 2, 2019

Ok. I’ve written about this before but after the intervention yesterday of the chief Rabbi, and a few weeks ago of my great aunt’s Rabbi, I feel compelled to write again. Antisemitism and the Labour Party. A (long) thread.

— Lily Einhorn (@madewithstring) November 26, 2019

Independently even of the political content, I loved introduction of that thread as a very concise Jewish family story.

It's estimated that the Gates foundation has saved 6 million lives, and this was a few years back. They've basically undone the holocaust. Yeah, I'm ok with calling him a hero, Scott.

— Podracer (@StonksOnHigh) November 7, 2019

that's not antisemitism, it's just dumb as shit

as if figure-skating wasn't already ludicrous enough
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/A-Holocaust-costume-It-s-just-figure-skating-s-14880663.php

I saw that on Twitter and was agog

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs.yimg.com%2Fny%2Fapi%2Fres%2F1.2%2FeYPoC0VkD5ohz7K1J.v2UA--~A%2FYXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjtzbT0xO3c9ODAw%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fmedia-mbst-pub-ue1.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fcreatr-uploaded-images%2F2019-12%2F874d7010-1608-11ea-a7bf-b23329a03b5b&f=1&nofb=1

I mean it's obviously in horrible taste/probably anti-semitic but it's also just so stupid I have to laugh

woooooooow

oh no

ice is beautiful

uh

Idek which part of this is the worst

The International Skating Union has issued an apology after it allegedly accidentally nominated a Holocaust-themed outfit for a best costume prize at its upcoming awards ceremony.

The outfit in question was worn by Russian figure skater Anton Shulepov, and featured elements of prisoner and guard uniforms from Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp in which more than one million people were killed during World War II.

Shulepov, 23, skated to the musical theme of Holocaust-set movie Schindler’s List while wearing the costume, which featured a yellow Star of David and stripes. He wore the outfit first in November at the Internationaux de France, and again later that month at a competition in Japan, according to NBC News.

the prisoner/guard combo is the part i can't quite get my head around. what are you trying to say with that?

dramatizing the universal struggle within us all between Nazi officers and hapless Jews through the glorious medium of FIGURESKATING

I guess?

my inner Nazi wants to do a Besti squat, but my inner Jew wants to do a Lutz Jump

Yeah that's bad taste, but sometimes I wonder why it isn't also bad taste to make a movie like Life is Beautiful. Or maybe you could even make the argument against Schindler's List. Most holocaust-themed "art" involves some kind of sentimentalizing that doesn't really do the horror justice. No art really does horror justice. How much do we gatekeep the efforts? A lot of this seems to stem from olympic figure skating just not being taken very seriously as an "artform."

Schindler’s list being a wintry tale of, er, conflict between two groups of people? No fuck it, no idea.

My guess, in any case, is that it was well-intentioned.

The entire point of Life Is Beautiful, as I remember it, is a father's desperate attempt to keep his son alive and shield him from the mounting horrors around him, which makes it a good bit more nuanced than a figure skating costume.

Yeah that's bad taste, but sometimes I wonder why it isn't also bad taste to make a movie like Life is Beautiful. Or maybe you could even make the argument against Schindler's List. Most holocaust-themed "art" involves some kind of sentimentalizing that doesn't really do the horror justice. No art really does horror justice. How much do we gatekeep the efforts? A lot of this seems to stem from olympic figure skating just not being taken very seriously as an "artform."

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, December 4, 2019 9:59 AM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i dislike both life is beautiful and schindler's list for these reasons. life is beautiful is fucking egregious imo. schnidler's list is just a little too hollywood to reckon with the holocaust (think it's hard to reckon with the holocaust via fiction just generally tho)

Life is Beautiful is a bit different in terms of tone and author from Schindler’s List, though? I mean, I don’t think Benigni himself was even Jewish, is he? Either way I think his perspective is probably not going to be be judged the same as Spielberg’s. It’s not his history.

What do you mean, “too Hollywood”? The scenes with the little girl in the red coat?

it's just generally quite schmaltzy and sentimental. feels like doing violence to the holocaust when you use stock beats and narrative arcs to show it. it was absolute horror and abnegation of humanity

I would counter that the Holocaust was absolute horror and a terrifying expression of what humanity is capable of doing to itself; calling it "abnegation" distances us from the possibility of it happening again.

iirc the only schmaltzy + sentimental part of schindler's list is arguably at the end when they show the live footage of the survivors visiting the gravesite but it has been a long long time since i've watched it so maybe there are narratively schmaltz beats i'm forgetting.

I'm probably just been awkward. i just struggle with anything about the holocaust, nothing seems to grasp the horror or the enormity enough - but if someone made a holocaust movie that was very realistic and abject i would probably find that exploitative. i guess i can just stick with shoah and if this is a man