RosieBell

Jeremy the Activist

 From the Jewish Chronicle:

There is growing unrest within Jeremy Corbyn's campaign team over his approach to dealing with issues of concern to the Jewish community, the JC can reveal.

One well-placed source within his team said that the unwillingness to deal "head-on" with these issues had come from Mr Corbyn himself.

The reluctance, according to the source, was because the frontrunner in the Labour leadership campaign was "partly casual about Jewish concerns, partly [because he knows] hostility to 'Zionist neocons' plays well to his constituency".

Media interest in Mr Corbyn's association with Holocaust deniers, antisemites and other extreme figures has grown in the past three weeks since the JC posed a series of questions for him to answer.

Another senior Corbyn campaign member indicated this week that the issues raised by this newspaper were not being taken seriously by Mr Corbyn and his team and said some within the team have grown concerned at the Islington North MP's reluctance to speak in more depth publicly about the Jewish community's concerns.

"This comes from Corbyn himself," the source said.

 (After Eliot's Macavity the Mystery Cat)

Our Jeremy's an activist, he is the brand new hope,
As he pushes Labour to the edge of a slippery slope,
He is the Blairites' nemesis, the Moderates' despair
But when you try and pin him down, Our Jeremy's not there. 

Our Jeremy, Our Jeremy, opposer of austerity,
His rivals are so timid, and he's full of temerity,
But when his friends say, Stone the Gays, he doesn't really care
He suddenly goes deaf and dumb, no Jeremy's not there,
Islamist mates say “Holohoax”, and he's not au contraire,
They're anti Israel, that's enough, and Jeremy's not there.

Our Jeremy's not besuited, no he's not poshly dressed,
His shirt lies open for us to see the collar of his vest,
He is the man of Islington, and when he's holding forth,
His is the stripped pine wisdom that pours from London North,
His world view's very simple, all wars are Nato's fault,
And as for intervention – no, he will call a halt.

Our Jeremy, our Jeremy, there's no one quite like Jeremy,
His followers worship him, yea, amen and verily,
You can see him on a podium, cursing Tony Blair,
But getting a straight answer – our Jeremy's not there.

 He doesn't live it large at all, politicking is his life,
He doesn't go out giggng, or dining with his wife,
His idea of an evening off or joyous holiday,
Is standing at a rally, to damn the USA,
His mother marched down Cable Street, so he boasts with pride,
But he won't detect a Fascist if a Fascist's on his side,
At shirts of black and swastikas, his rants will fill the air,
But put them in a keffiyeh, and Jeremy's not there.

Our Jeremy, Our Jeremy, aghastness from posterity,
That eager young politicos were dazzled by sincerity,
His beard is prophetic white, his frame ascetic spare,
But query his alliances, Our Jeremy's not there.
And they say that all the Andies, Lizzes and Yvettes,
Will be cordoned in a hollow square and stripped of red rosettes,
And the old team of door knockers will be promptly chucked
And social democracy is well and truly fucked. 

Waiting for the Fascists

What a lot there has been about the turning of Tommy Robinson, once leader of the EDL. 

I don't want to make light of the fear the EDL inspired in Asian shopkeepers who were victims of their haphazard campaign against Islamic extremism, but I always thought they were a feeble lot compared to the real horrible Eurofascists like Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece.  Not even Fascists in fact, a bunch of thuggish nationalists with a football hooligan element.

It is to the credit of the UK that (a) it has a history of being very poor at producing full blown Fascist movements and (b) that the stated aims of the EDL were not Fascist but a kind cultural conservatism, of a very British kind, that is, an invented one, like investing the Prince of Wales or Victorian Christmases.  The EDL were of course outraged at the lack of respect and patriotism shown by the poppy-burning Islamists,  but also at their antisemitism, homophobia and sex inequality - and getting upset at the last three is a fairly recent invention - post 70s I'd say.

They were bigged up a good deal by the activist class, who you could see got a real charge at having something that was tangibly fascist-like to confront. I remember when their Scottish equivalent, the SDL, were supposed to march in Edinburgh.  The SWP and other groups turned out.  There was a rally in Princes Street Gardens.  As it happened, the police bundled the 40 or so of them into a pub and sent them off, and the activist websites were buzzing with their overwhelming victory. 

I found myself nodding along with an article in Spike by Patrick Hayes:-

The EDL has been a spent political force for a couple of years. In 2011, when it was at its peak, it could get together several thousand people for its demos; today, it is hard pushed to reach triple digits. In fact, you’ll find fewer EDL supporters than police officers on a typical EDL demo today, the police’s primary role being to keep the EDL away from the ranks of anti-fascist protesters that trail around after the EDL like aggressive groupies. The EDL doesn’t even have any real membership base to speak of, often referring to the number of ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page as evidence of its alleged popularity

. . .

Robinson’s sudden self-rebranding as a moderate has been as much of a shock to anti-fascist protesters as it has been to his loyal ‘soldiers’ in the EDL. Having spent the past couple of years waving banners comparing Robinson to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik – ‘different face, same evil’ – anti-fascist commentators are now absurdly claiming that Robinson’s latest move is part of a fascist conspiracy to gain mainstream acceptance. . .

. . .it seems the people who would be most upset if ‘Nazi’ street groups such as the EDL disappeared are the activists, community workers and professional politicians who make a living or gain a sense of moral purpose from ostentatiously standing against such ‘fascism in our midst’. They wildly talk up the EDL’s threat because without the EDL their own political lives would become meaningless.

Cavafy's famous poem Waiting for the Barbarians, comes to mind.  I have updated for contemporary relevance:-

What are we waiting for, assembled in the streets?
 
            The Fascists are due here today.
 
 Why are we tense and bracing ourselves?
Why is everyone hiding stones and bottles?
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today.
            What else can we do but resist them?
            Once the Fascists are here, then we'll start the struggle.
 
 Why are they there, the newspaper sellers?
Just now, when no-one reads newspapers?
Crying, Smash Capitalism, Smash Fascism!
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today
            and this is a time for them to recruit.
            It's known that when the Fascists come
            You can sign up so many supporters.
 
Why have they come out, those speakers?
Crying Islamophobia and anti-imperialist?
Why do they shout, it's Cable Street again
Why the raised clenched fists, the No Pasarans?
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today
            and things like that frighten the Fascists.
 
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
 
            Because night has fallen and the Fascists have not come.
            They are on Facebook and watching X-Factor,
            they are in the pubs cheering football on Sky.
 
 And now, what’s going to happen to us without the Fascists?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Upmarket Veils

You very rarely see a niqab in Edinburgh but today I was in Princes Street and a couple of women walked by who were wearing them, and rather elegant ones, with a neat piece of light grey cloth over the bottom half of the face and a smooth grey scarf covering the forehead.  Their clothes weren’t billowy chadors or tent-like but straight and severe, in the same light grey. They looked well-dressed and stylish and I imagine were tourists.  They did cause a slight stir though. One  young bloke said to another, “They shouldn’t be legal, those clothes.”   The publicity that burqa banning is getting is bound to lead to racist attacks.

You're a nationalist, it's not okay

A while ago I posted on the song Tomorrow Belongs to Me from the musical Cabaret.  It had come into the news after the death of Jorge Haider, whose acolytes used to sing it on country excursions.

So now when someone searches for Tomorrow Belongs to Me my post turns up in the Google list.  Other sites turn up as well, and this caught my eye:-

The German folk song "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" that predates the nazi era was adapted and slightly altered for that movie. I have a German version of the song. Most know of the version made famous by the band Skrewdriver from his album "hail the new dawn". If you want the Cabaret version they do sell the original musical score. The song is about nature, optimism and faith.

From a piece of rhyming slang on Stormfront.  I’m not going to link to the exchange but there’s some debate about whether it is a German folk song or not – obviously the preference is that it should be so rather than it should be written by Ebb and Karder (American Jews) in the 1960’s, for Cabaret, a film which the pieces of rhyming slang of Stormfront hate. 

Another Stormfront ascribes the song to Mussolini’s fascists:-

Actually, as far as I can remember this song is Italian, originally 'Il domani appartiene a noi', which I think originated with the Italian troops fighting in the Alps in WW1, and then had its lyrics changed somewhat and was then used by Mussolini.

Excellent translation! In truth, I prefer the Italian lyrics to the English ones...the song is being cleansed...we are making it our own. Salve!

So white supremacists and nationalists can’t even make up decent songs for themselves and have to pretend they are “cleansing” other people’s songs?  That is so uncreative.

I had a look at some BNP songs on YouTube.  There was one, called Don’t Unpack Your [sic] Going Back

Someone in the comments thread points out:-

The lyrics betray a mindset of a teenager, the music is cringeworthy, and NOBODY I have ever come across that supports the BNP can spell !

You all love England so much that you don't learn your mother tongue ?

Someone else says:-

Why can nobody in the BNP write music? They're all just covers with new lyrics...

(I don’t recognise the song myself but I’ll take it that that commenter knows what s/he is talking  about).

There does seem to be a dearth of good BNP songs.  So here’s an offering for them, especially now they are trying to look like a nice normal patriotic party.  It is written in the tradition of setting lyrics to someone else’s music and it’s an easy three chord tune that everyone knows:-  

I’m a nationalist and I’m your man,
I love my mum and I love my gran
(He’s a nationalist and he’s our man
He loves his mum and he loves his gran!)

I win local elections
I’m not a fascist creep
I go to Council meetings
And there I fall asleep

(He wins local elections
He’s not a fascist creep
He goes to Council meetings
And there he falls asleep)

I’m a nationalist, I’m not a thug
I haven’t spent much time in jug
(He’s a nationalist, he’s not a thug
He hasn’t spent much time in jug)

I aim to look respectable
And not a violent cock
The last time when I wore a suit
Was standing in the dock

(He aims to look respectable etc)

I’m a nationalist, I’ll take no shite
I want this country pure and white
(He’s a nationalist, he’ll take no shite
He wants this country pure and white)

I wear a shirt with clean long sleeves
To hide Nazi tattoos
I wish I could kick Asians,
And blacks, and wogs and Jews.

(He wears a shirt etc)

 

What you find under the suit - ex Lincs BNP Organiser and Bodyguard to Nick Griffin Mick Holmes

If you’ve watched the Monty Python video imagine the mounties as deluded supporters listening with dawning concern and outrage and the young ringletted woman wailing, And I thought you weren’t a racist!

It’s all yours, guys.  Feel free to sing it.  Take it away. 

And remember:-

You’re a nationalist and you are thick
You make folk puke and you make folk sick.

Notes on Seven Jewish Children

After watching Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children, via The Guardian:-

• It’s a morality play.   It is not a play about characters as individuals.  The seven characters are seven aspects of a nationality (Jewish/Israeli).  The trajectory of the narrative is that, in the way that a child who was sexually abused grows up to sexually abuse children himself, so Jews, who were innocent victims of pogroms in Europe, have become monsters in Israel who have turned Palestinians into innocent victims.   (In the film Manhunter, the serial killer was an abused child and the hero who is looking for the serial killer says, "This man wasn't born a monster; he was made one. And while I cry for the child who suffered so much, the rest of me wants to blow the sick fuck out of his socks.") That’s the story of Seven Jewish Children – that the earlier suffering is now an excuse for a cruel and callous triumphalism. 
  
• It’s a piece of polemic.  How you react to it would be based on how much you agree whether that narrative is an accurate account of the history of the founding of Israel and of the present attitudes of Israeli citizens. If you think your typical Israeli citizen regards Palestinians as “animals” whom they want to wipe out (as the final diatribe says) that would reinforce your ideas about them.  If not, you would find it slanderous and disturbing that they should be presented in that way.
  
• Harry’s Place has a thread on the play where someone says:-

Would anyone (who considers themselves to be an anti-racist) be happy with a play entitled, 7 black children, 7 gypsy children, 7 Arab children or 7 Muslim children, etc which then proceeds to essentalise those kids and their parents, and all those connected to them, putting crude words in their mouth along the way?

I can’t imagine the Royal Court producing a play on those lines but I can imagine something like Seven Australian Children, about white Australians who begin as unwilling convicts transported to Botany Bay for stealing a loaf of bread and in the end are joyfully wiping out aborigines. Seven Pakeha (white New Zealander) Children, would say:-

Tell her they’re primitive.  Tell her they are wonderful at sculpture.   Don’t tell her how we got that land,

“they” being the Maori.  

I would guess that there have been anti British colonialism plays written by eg Howard Brenton (The Romans in Britain is like that).  Seven Jewish Children strikes me as an anti-colonial play, with the Israelis as kind of honorary British.In my New Zealand example, New Zealanders would be highly affronted if a foreigner wrote about their nation from the outside in that manner, saying what do you know about it?  You haven’t lived here and the situation is far more complicated than your cartoon.  I daresay Israelis would feel the same about Caryl Churchill.

• Israel is a foreign country to most Royal Court theatre goers, yet Caryl Churchill was evidently sure that the audience would know a rough outline history – from pogrom, immigration, displacement of Arabs, wars, settlements, infitada, Gaza. And indeed we do.  Could something be written of any other foreign country, which would be recognisable from such scanty references to time and place?  She mentions “Jerusalem” and “Arab” about once, and that’s all.  Israel has been stamped onto our consciousness. 
  
• Anti-semitic?  I don’t suppose anyone left that theatre after this play feeling better disposed towards Jews and I can imagine quite a few knowing nods during the chosen people and the land God gave us bits. Presenting a people who in their evolution end up laughing at the enemy’s death and wishing them to be wiped out is pretty damning. Two writers whom I greatly respect, Howard Jacobson  and Norman Geras, certainly see it in that light and are outraged by it.
  
• The first scene of the play, where the mother is hiding the child from a pogrom (the Nazis?), is poignant.  But then anything about hiding children from evil doers is poignant.  It’s about the easiest effect to pull off.  (I have to say I hate almost all films and other fictional works based around the Holocaust for that reason. You have a handy menace, an unspeakable evil that someone escapes, or that gets someone into its clutches.  It’s a ready to wear villainy that you don’t have to run up yourself.)

The Minor Voice

I heard on yesterday morning’s news that, following Anjem Choudary’s antics of waving placards and shouting abuse at the Royal Anglian Regiment marching through Luton, Muslims in the town were getting a hard time from racists.  A bloke in a mosque said that the kind of abuse they are getting would die down in six months or year.  It’s crap they have to put up with it.  (By the way, is there anyone like Ken Loach out there who says it’s “understandable” that there is rise of hostility towards Muslims in Luton?)

It’s tough being in a minority.  When the madder fringes of the animal rights groups desecrate graves or commit acts of arson against suppliers of animals for laboratories no-one thinks any the worse of PETA or the RSPCA.  It’s clear in people’s minds that there are (a) violent animal liberation nutters; (b) vegan moralists who think eating meat is wrong but will not turn to violence – the worst they will do is preach at you; and (c) a broad mass of animal lovers.  Bad behaviour by group (a) does not cast suspicion on groups (b) and (c).  But when Choudary gets going, though he is in the Muslim equivalent of (b) above he reminds the public of group (a) (the 7/7 bombers and their ilk) and throws suspicion on group (c) i.e. your ordinary mosque goer. 

The tabloids, and the Daily Telegraph too, have been making too much of Choudary. 

In the Observer's letters page today:

Cohen needs to find a new column to write. Yet again last Sunday, he declaimed that the liberal-left has failed to engage or support liberal Muslims, asserting that leading voices and institutions refuse to challenge Islamist extremism as well as opposing the BNP. But this is nonsense. It can be easily disproved by what we have all said and done.

Many of us have been working consistently together to secure the liberal and democratic values we want our shared society to promote and uphold, against erosion from every direction and extremism from every source. Innovative projects to challenge extremism and promote a shared British citizenship led by a diverse range of democratic Muslim voices such as the Radical Middle Way, Muslims for Secular Democracy, City Circle, Progressive British Muslims and New Generation Network have had strong engagement from groups such as the Fabian Society, ippr, Demos and Liberal Conspiracy, openDemocracy and Democratic Audit.

But too often, too many in the media prefer to give platforms to the most extreme, polarising and least representative voices and crowd out the mainstream conversation we believe most of our fellow citizens want to have. [my emphasis] We make a comradely call on Nick Cohen to stop shouting, to rejoin the conversation, engage with the work going on across the liberal-left and to become part of the solution.

Far too often indeed.  It’s grossly irresponsible of the media and the gainers from it are the BNP.

I don’t know how many people are actually part of the Radical Middle Way, Muslims for Secular Democracy etc but as an aggregate they would amount to a bigger following than Choudary’s, who hardly has the numbers for a cricket team.

Hat tip - Pickled Politics

I Understand

British film director Ken Loach says that a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe since the Gaza crisis is "not surprising and understandable".

He was responding to a report earlier this week by the Vienna-based agency for fundamental rights (FRA) which said cases of anti-Semitism had risen across Europe since last December.

.   .
"There does seem to be a relationship between the rise of anti-Semitism in the EU and the situation in the Middle East," said Ioannis Dimitrakopoulos, one of the paper's authors.

But, speaking in Brussels on Wednesday, Loach said, "If there has been a rise I am not surprised. In fact, it is perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism."

Loach, famous for films like Kes, Cathy Come Home and Riff Raff, stressed that "no-one can condone violence".

Understandable, eh? Here’s a sentence.  “Kate chucked a plate at Brian.  Her fury was understandable, since he had called her a big fat pig, and said he was embarrassed to be seen with her in public.”

We don’t condone Kate’s violence – Brian has a bruise on his face, and it’s not a good look for a customer facing sales consultant - but her anger is understandable.

Here’s another:-  “Brian broke Kate’s jaw and put her into hospital.  His anger was understandable, because she had put the dinner on the table ten minutes later than the usual time.”

See the difference?  If you say some action is “understandable” you half way condone it as a reasonable response to someone’s actions.  You may not condone the full expression of that response but the response itself is fine.

Here’s another.  “Brian went and kicked Wendy Brown who’s a friend of Kate’s.  This was understandable, as Kate had been flirting in an unseemly way with blokes down at the pub.”

After 9/11 a mosque and a Pakistani community centre were fire bombed in Edinburgh.  I’d dreaded something like that so like Ken Loach I wasn’t surprised.  And I understood it because I know racist thugs will be racist thugs.  But I didn’t think, it is understandable that random British Muslims (and Hindus and Sikhs who look like them) get grief because of the activities of some Saudis based in Hamburg.  Disgraceful and totally crappy were the adjectives that sprang to my mind. Something understandable is not something understood.  Something understandable is something excused.

I thought this kind of softness towards anti-semitism was a new phenomenon on the anti-imperialist left, and possibly an infection they had picked up from their new comrades, the islamists, whose ideology contains anti-semitism of Mein Kampf proportions.  But in fact it has been around for a long time.  Steve Cohen’s pamphlet, That's funny, you don't look anti-Semitic, written in 1984, gives a good potted history of the socialism of fools.  You can read it here.

But the director, who has spoken out against Israel in the past, branded the report as a "red herring" designed to "distract attention" from Israel's recent military actions.

So Jews can get kicked in Golders Green without an indignant squeak from anyone in case it “distracts” from Israel’s recent military actions?  I can’t see the distraction myself – all the time it was happening the war in Gaza was the only thing you heard or read about on the news.  The chances of Israel coming off the radar are highly remote. 

We can expect more anti-semitism, but no investigation into what is perfectly understandable after all and anyway concern about which distracts from what all attention should be totally concentrated on, i.e. the misdeeds of Israel.

I would not recommend anyone punching Ken Loach. He’s an old man, and so shouldn’t be punched.  But it would be understandable if someone did so.  Though I wouldn’t condone it, of course.