"oh you don't get me I'm the end of the union": lol brexit is how we're all gonna die

I think there are some parts of the north that hasn't seen jewish ppl since the clifford's tower massacre.

That's true of the UK in general, outside of London and the Home Counties and some of the major cities.

Idk if the presence of minorities is generally required for anti-minority views to flourish tbf. Leaving aside the far-right, anti-Jewish stereotypes are fairly well engrained in British culture, imo. This is more common where there are large communities, like North London, but the background hum (which Labour tapped in to with the Michael Howard stuff, and the Tories with Miliband) has always been there. The idea that Jewish communities are insular, foreign, untrustworthy, etc has been around for hundreds of years - even if it doesn’t always manifest as hatred. The flip side of that is what Michael Segalov calls ‘creepy philosemitism’ - where negative tropes are actively embraced by non-Jewish ppl as positives in a way that still stereotypes harmfully (cf Julie Burchill, any of the thousands of hard-right anti-Muslim conservatives who have pivoted to being performatively pro-Israel over the last few years).

As with the far-right, there has always been a conspiracist element on the left engaging with fantasies about Jewish control of the world, or at least trading in some of the same imagery. However, the way this has been spun as endemic to the Labour movement is pretty disgraceful and absolutely overlaps with dog-whistle Islamophobia in places.

I was reading about the Cheetham Hill riots of 1947 and I was shocked how far back the trope of blaming Jewish people for the actions of Israel dates. Though ofc post war British Jews are recorded as coming home from war to see fascists on the streets of home too, so hardly in an isolated environment (43 group: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/43_Group)

Cheetham Hill: https://www.newstatesman.com/2012/05/britains-last-anti-jewish-riots

the judeo-bolshevik myth was another bit of AS euro-history that wasn't just the work of nazis and white russians. I was reading a review of a book about it the other and can't recall the title. I think some ppl still believed in it even after Stalin's own AS purges, just before he dropped dead.

Oh and I will never forget being in the car with my mother a few years back as we travelled through somewhere in Essex & passed a big Jewish cemetery - which of course had tons of security. The community in the UK & Ireland is mostly within a few areas of each country and so if you don’t know any Jewish people you might never realise what the lived experience is. We found it pretty shocking - it was just a normal cemetery.

know it’s been posted before but this is really good:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-elastic-view-of-antisemitism/

At the core of an ‘elastic’ view is the notion that one cannot measure the prevalence of antisemitism using just one number. All three figures appearing in Figure 1 are meaningful in their own right. The power of these figures is their capacity to capture the different intensities of negativity towards Jews. From the Jewish point of view, Jews come in contact with the entire spectrum of negativity towards them, and more often than not, they will have an imperfect knowledge about which part of the spectrum any given antisemitic view arises. It can arise from the segment holding a very weak and hesitant form of negativity towards Jews. However, there is only so much that a given Jew can do in the course of regular social interaction to clarify this.

Oh and I will never forget being in the car with my mother a few years back as we travelled through somewhere in Essex & passed a big Jewish cemetery - which of course had tons of security. The community in the UK & Ireland is mostly within a few areas of each country and so if you don’t know any Jewish people you might never realise what the lived experience is. We found it pretty shocking - it was just a normal cemetery.

Totally. Always security guards posted up outside the school in Stamford Hill. Which seems reasonable, considering the hate crime against the guy in Islington a couple of days ago...

Same with the school I walk past near Brent Cross sometimes. The security seemed to be stepped up there in the wake of the wave of Jihadist terrorist attacks a couple of years ago, so I guess they're expecting trouble to come from a few different directions.

The lawyer for the family of 19-year-old Shamima Begum who left east London to join Islamic State four years ago says he has "strong but as yet unconfirmed reports" that her baby has died adding "he was a British citizen"

— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) March 8, 2019

Can see the Sun headline tomorrow, "GOTCHA!"

The fucking comments under that. Twitter cesspit strikes again.

banner week for conservative party idiocy continues with mark francois staring out will self on the daily politics

UPDATE: Sky Sources have contradicted this earlier report and say Shamima Begum's son is alive and healthy

I don't know how that's gonna fit in with the twats view that she's made up the whole baby thing.

i'm british and i don't know and have never known a jewish person as far as i am aware

― oscar bravo, Friday, March 8, 2019 2:51 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sheesh, it's quite shocking to me (USian) that this is possible, though of course it's also more than possible here

I think the key word is 'unaware' here.

I have spoken with several hundred Jewish people but I am a privately-schooled Londoner who works as a tutor

great bunch of lads

growing up in glasgow suburbs and glasgow i didn't have any jewish friends, classmates, or acquaintances until i was 24/25 and had a jewish coworker. my family had close jewish friends but not in the uk

bring back national service sez Chuka!

He said national service, which ended in the early 1960s, ‘brought people from an array of different backgrounds and different parts of the country together in a way like no other.’

I'm sure being involved in the mau mau counterinsurgency and the concentration camps of kenya was character building stuff and sent many young men onto the path of "progressive" liberal minded politics and voting remain :p

The Jewish community in Glasgow used to be a lot bigger but there's still a fair few hanging on in there.

xp Chuka's National Service (like almost everything he suggests seems more like a reboot of something Tony or Dave came up with before, in this case the National Citizens Service but this time it's compulsory. Would love to see how that would work out irl. What, for instance would be the punishment for not doing yr month's service? Two months service presumably.

Good to see Chuka believes in socialized labour as long as it doesn't interfere with capital

Aren’t there loads? I tease a Jewish friend of mine from the south Glasgow suburbs that I come from the Midwestern answer to Newton Mearns.

newton mearns and neighboring giffnock have a large proportion of the jewish people in scotland - around a quarter.

there are however only 6500 jewish people in scotland.

🐦[The lawyer for the family of 19-year-old Shamima Begum who left east London to join Islamic State four years ago says he has "strong but as yet unconfirmed reports" that her baby has died adding "he was a British citizen"
— Sky News Breaking (@SkyNewsBreak) March 8, 2019🕸]🐦

fuck

Christ, such an abundance of people to feel haunted by this death - which is maybe more commonplace than we know.

Being nicknamed 'Milk Snatcher' never did Thatcher any harm so maybe Sajid 'Baby Killer' Javid's leadership ambitions won't be unduly affected.

People cared about the milk though.

The Home Office statement is pretty much ‘it’s sad but we tell people don’t go to Syria’ and I can’t see that being particularly far from the general public mood.

Interesting compare-and-contrast here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/02/we-arent-dangerous-why-chechnya-has-welcomed-women-who-joined-isis

There is something about @jessphillips that I find irresistible. I would walk over hot coals for her. And yes she would be a great Prime Minister. https://t.co/IEr4Mwu7Nn

— Nick Boles MP (@NickBoles) March 9, 2019

Good lord.

I could see both Boles and Philips breaking away to TIG but it’s going to lead to some awkward Nando’s dinners if they do.

Aaah, that piece though.

“I live by the Katy Perry lyric, ‘If you stand for nothing, you fall for everything,’” she tells me.

The Corbynistas boast that they could never be friends with a Conservative, but Phillips says, “I know Jacob Rees-Mogg better than Jeremy Corbyn. I don’t want to just talk to the people who agree with me. That would be really boring.”

People who aren’t materially affected by politics LOVE the idea of politicians from opposing parties getting on, because they don’t have to deal with the fallout from what happens when everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet.

Boles is gay, so presumably finds Phillips irresistible in a purely platonic fashion, but it's still a little weird

“The purity is totally on their terms, so if Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t give jobs to women that’s not because Jeremy Corbyn is a man who has had privilege his entire life, it’s because he’s made a good choice. There’s one set of rules for them and another set of rules for everybody else and that’s just elitist and hypocritical.”

Phillips once told Diane Abbott to “f*** off” in an argument about the number of women in the shadow cabinet.

Phillips has never suffered from sexual harassment at “Pestminster”. “I’m not vulnerable enough,” she says. “There is no one who has power over me because I reject the hierarchy.”

Yes, that is straight-up victim blaming,

From all I can gather, Jess Phillips is allll about the connections she makes in green rooms up and down the land. I think people are wary of party politicians having pals from other parties, in an ‘all in it together’ way.

Jess makes it a point of pride that she's a slimey professional politician. A true believer.

The media fawning of Jess Phillips is just another in a long line of examples of what @joekennedy81 wrote about in his book Authentocrats. She performs the role with great attention to detail. She has just enough of a regional accent but not too much. Family background is just...

— Funny Tinge; Tendence Black (@judeinlondon2) March 9, 2019

You can be friends with who you want tbh, happy to judge MPs purely on their political activity

noodle vague massively otm

The flip side of that is that "some of my best friends are repulsive shit bags who strive to make the world crueller for the marginalized" doesn't make you some great sage either

I don’t have a problem with judging her for being friends with JRM, who’s meeting with Steve Bannon & defending his opposition to abortion on the news. How is that not political? The only person benefiting from this is JRM, it makes him seem more palatable.

xxp
I wouldn't say that if I saw someone taking a grinning selfie with Livingstone/Galloway or even Tommy Robinson. I'd say there are limits to who you can be friends with when you are public office and fuck anyone who doesn't want to see Mogg burnt alive tbh.

Both fair points well made

otm and otm

Nobody would know she was friends with JRM if she hadn’t made such a big thing out of it for explicitly political reasons - partly to trash Laura Pidcock

if I was an MP* I'd be in the Lords and Commons cricket team alongside all sorts of bastards and I'd be thoroughly civil, try not to drop too many catches off their bowling etc, but I'd vote left on everything in Parliament, and of course not get too close or refer to these bastards as friends, which is her error. civility is perfectly fine though

*lol

I mean you say “lol”, but, like, Michael O’ Halloran. Simon Danczuk.

excuse me if I don’t want to be friends w JRM

Dear @AmberRuddHR , I’ve just had 40% of my constituents at advice surgery today tell me they’re ready to end their lives because of the misery your Universal Credit system.

Letter to follow with the individual cases, but ultimately the system is failing. pic.twitter.com/xc8SV1P9WL

— Cat Smith (@CatSmithMP) March 8, 2019