I suppose I am trying to suggest that I see it all as the same thing. Hating Israel means being pro-Palestine, which means being pro-arab, which means pro-Muslim, which means anti-semite. Loving Israel means being anti-Palestine, anti Arab, anti muslim and loving jews.
We are being asked to pick sides on something that most of dont care about and dont fully understand. It is total horse**** from start to finish but it seems to me that if one is appalled by one prejudice one should be appalled by the other. Unless one would rather choose sides, of course.
Having been closely involved with theLabour Party all my life, and having never witnessed so much as an anti-semitic joke, it is difficult to accept the current view of my party. Largely because I know it is *******s.
I'm drawing the distinction between loathing people's beliefs and loathing them as individuals. I despise socialism, but find some socialists to be almost tolerable if you try not to think about the crap they believe. Similarly, I think Islam is a foul, savage and evil belief system, but that does not mean I necessarily believe muslims to be foul, savage and evil. That's quite different to anti-semitism, which is an actual hatred of people based on their race regardless of what they believe. The two are not comparable.
As someone pointed out last week, there are many, many worse countries in the world than Israel with vastly worse records of oppression and subjugation. And yet the left is obsessed with Israel rather than any of these others. Israel...the only Jewish state in the world.
It's legitimate to wonder why that might be and to wonder why it should be that, of all the peoples in the world with a grievance, the Palestinians should have found such fertile ground for their cause in the western left. The conclusion isn't hard to draw.
Traditionally, the left hated Israel because of american involvement, particularly in funding their military. THis was a legitimate prejudice as,lets face it, lefties hate the yanks and, in the post war years, for good and well established reasons.
It seems to have changed but I agree with you- I dont really see why a british labour movement should be so pre-occupied with an issue that doesnt concern 99% of british people and is not even a particularly significant part of british foreign policy.
I think you'll find, old chap, that those hook-nosed money-grasping bankers have conspired with Amerika to downpress the poor workers for years now. Why even Our Karl Marx and Our Adolf Hitler knew it!
The Left's anti-semitism: where cultural bigotry meets whackjob conspiracy theory.
You have said on here that you would love to have ensured that no muslims ever came to britain. Had anyone said that about jews would you have considered it anti-semitic?
The two are directly comparable. We cant trade beliefs and say 'I only hate him cos of his religion, not cos of his race'.
Prejudice is prejudice and if we can separate one entity from the individual we can separate the other. Judaism is after all a faith.