Verbal

It is not anti-Semitic to criticise the actions and policies of the Israeli government - especially with the vicious Netanyahu in power. It is anti-Semitic to question the 'Englishness' of a Jew or some Jews. That's what Corbyn did - which makes him a rather old fashioned, straight down-the-line anti-Semite. As the Tebbit Test is to Pakistanis, so Corbyn's Irony Test is to Jews. You're making the same mistake as Corbyn makes - call it the virtue delusion, which states: If I am good, I can do no wrong. Of course, 'good' is self-defining. So when Corbyn and his cult whine on about how they can't possibly be anti-Semitic simply on the grounds that they are virtuously anti-racist, you might see how this might be a problem.

Or Tory party rules about new members and votes.

You didn't read the article, did you. Or if you did, you didn't understand it.

This is a myth. Even in Labour seats where voters voted Leave, the majority of LABOUR voters voted to remain. Overall, about two-thirds of Labour voters voted to remain, so chasing the leavers voting for the party would be a disastrous policy. There's a small chance even Corbyn understands this. The myth persists presumably because people forget that Labour voters are not the only voters in Labour constituencies. There are lots of Tories and kippers too. Here John Curtice on the subject: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/is-labours-brexit-dilemma-being-misunderstood/

I don't think Zionism is a parallel with nationalism - it IS a form of nationalism. And whatever the concerns about crises in Zionism (and I accept many of the arguments about this), the one historical fact that places it in the forefront of the vast majority of Jews' minds is the Holocaust. Before the rise of Hitler, European Jews, as well as Jews in the Middle East (of which there were a large number in Palestine long before 1948), Zionists were in a clear and very small minority. Jews were, by and large, assimilators. But the Nazis' genocide changed that for good. The fact that some variants of Zionism have now morphed into the extremism you hear from Netanyahu and the settlers doesn't alter the equally certain fact that Zionism - the right of Israel to exist - is a bedrock belief for the most liberal of Jews (obviously with a small number of exceptions), both in Israel and outside. Nationalism has long interested me. As an undergraduate I once got to talk with Ernest Gellner his idea that nationalism was historically a weak political force (and tied, in his theory, to modernisation), anad we discussed the outliers of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism (outliers because they polarise religious beliefs and because they lay claims to incredibly scarce land - the Israelis seeking land and security and the Palestinians land and state-viability). But this isn't really the issue with Corbyn. He's always fought a battle which in his mind is a good-vs-evil struggle between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism - screening out of his mind the religious dimension (including the murderous Islamism of Hamas). It's also 'ironic' that he fails to grasp the other 'history' of the Palestinians - their severe and repeated oppression by Arab states. Remember, Black September was formed as a response to actions by the Jordanian government, not the Israelis, and the first victim of Black September was the Jordanian prime minister. Palestinians have been second-class citizens in Jordan (where they make up 75% of the population), Lebanon (where Christian Arabs murdered them en masse at Sabra and Chatilla under the eyes of the Israeli army), Kuwait (where their treatment by was so bad that they cheered when Saddam invaded), and Syria (I've witnessed this first hand, but there's a long history to this). How much does Corbyn talk about this oppression? I don't think he ever has - although anyone is welcome to show me otherwise. He's only interested in those damned Jews. But as I've said, given the frightening scarcity of land being fought over, no solution whatsoever is possible without Israeli support, or indeed from British Jews and others who support the two-state solution. As Stephen Bush says: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/08/jeremy-corbyn-anti-semitism-remarks-british-zionists-offensive Corbyn seems a million miles from grasping this - and it's no longer that he resembles a straight-up Jew hater (only approving of a few 'good Jews'); he actually is one. His cretinous fans can scream 'smear' all they like. But when their hero attracts the approving support of two of the most reptilian racists around - David Duke, the 'grand wizard' of the Ku Klux Klan, and Nick Griffin - then you'd think it might give them at least a moment's pause.

Christ almighty. You do know that Stalin and Hitler were different people. Right? Just in case... Stalin - communist (the Great Terror) Hitler - Nazi (Holocaust).

With a few horrific exceptions, left anti-Semitism attempts to steer clear of using the word ‘Jews’, always – as Corbyn does – using the word ‘Zionists’ instead. They then play their favourite word game – claiming that being anti-Zionist is not being anti-Semitic, and that to claim otherwise is a ‘smear’ and an attempt to shut down debate. That, in the vast majority of cases, is nonsense. Let’s compare Zionism with apartheid. The latter is explicitly a white supremacist creed: blacks should have ‘separate development’ because they are intellectually inferior. The most extreme form of Zionism – the kind you hear among the settlers – is not much different. It is explicitly a nasty form of racism. However, unlike apartheid, Zionism is a very broad ideology which encompasses people across a wide political spectrum. The minimal definition for a Zionist is someone who believes that the state of Israel has a right to exist. That view is held by about 98% of Jewish Israelis and the vast majority of Jews elsewhere. Of course there are a few Jews who are opposed to the state of Israel’s right to exist, but they are a tiny minority (usually found on platforms with Corbyn, as it happens). So what does it mean when Corbyn complains of ‘Zionists’? He’s talking about Jews. He makes that plain by his sneering reference to their not being in some way native to Britain, and how they lack a capability to understand ‘irony’. He’s playing to his audience (which naturally includes those who advocate terror and deny the Holocaust). And it’s music to their ears because it’s dog-whistle Jew-hating – these Jew weirdos, ‘thankfully silent’, who don’t get irony. The depressing reality is that it’s so EASY to criticise Israeli governments without resorting to straight-up (or barely disguised) Jew hating. When people protested and campaigned against the apartheid regime is South Africa, they attacked with the word, meaning and practice of ‘apartheid’. No one was thinking up irrelevant comparators, not least because, in Israel, it deflects from the specific horrors of the Netanyahu gang. But also because it tarnishes the vast majority of Jews, in whose name Netanyahu is not acting, but who believe nonetheless in the right of Israel to exist. So, no, I’m not going to give Corbyn a free pass. He’s a Jew hater in the old Stalinist sense – Uncle Joe loved nothing more to cap a few thousand Jews with the claim that they had loyalties to another state. Corbyn’s ‘irony’ comment belongs to the same species of rhetoric – those damned Jews don’t ‘get’ us because no matter how long they’ve been here they’ll never really assimilate to our way of thinking. I say all of this as someone who thinks of himself as pro-Palestinian – something, incidentally, I act upon, unlike a few on here who pipe up with their little pearls of wisdom.

So now we know (as if anyone couldn't guess)... Jezza is a flat-out Jew hater. 'Zionists' - a euphemism for Jews in this country - are an alien breed in Britain, unable to assimilate even simple national traits as irony. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6087783/Jeremy-Corbyn-said-British-Zionists-no-sense-English-irony.html

This is the work of the self-styled 'cyber-communist', Richard Barbrook, he of the pork-pie hats. http://theconversation.com/corbyns-digital-meh-nifesto-is-too-rooted-in-the-past-to-offer-much-for-the-future-65003

Part and parcel of what, exactly?

Williamson himself is now in hot water (or maybe lukewarm water, given this is Corbyn's party) for enthusiastically endorsing a speech given by an Assad-loving conspiracy theorist who is on record as describing murdered Labour MP Jo Cox as a 'warmongering al Qaeda advocate.' Venessa Beeley is a hero among the most cretinous extremists in the Corbyn cult because of her Assad-sponsored endorsement of mass murder: her campaign against the White Helmets (also 'al Qaeda') and her convenient description of all people within Islamist-controlled areas in Syria as 'legitimate targets'. Her Jew-hating also makes her particularly popular amongst the more lunatic cultists: she's described France as being ruled by 'Zionists'. Williamson is now being 'looked into'. But he's a Corbyn loyalist so nothing will come of it. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-mp-chris-williamson-vanessa-beeley_uk_5b7adee4e4b018b93e963784

The probation service is privatised. A vast loss-making, target-missing, care-avoiding private enterprise.

Are the Corbynista cultists being ironic when they mock Hodge's Nazi comparisons? Or do they just lack self awareness?

1. Not 'near' - next to. And they were in a shared endeavour, a small group of men, laying a wreath at a plaque commemorating leading members of Black September. 2. Given Corbyn's detailed knowledge of Palestinian politics, how both knew perfectly well that he was laying a wreath honouring Black September leaders and that he was standing next to and talking with a senior PFLP leader. 3. Corbyn has a long and thoroughly consistent history of only sharing platforms with people he agrees with. Still waiting to hear how the expenses scandal he's also now embroiled in will play out.

Just when you think it couldn't get any worse... One of the men Corbyn stood with while he did/did not lay a wreath was a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Just a month after Corbyn shared the wreath-laying with this man, and stood miming his prayer for the fallen of Black September, the PFLP claimed responsibility for the axe murder of a British rabbi in Jerusalem.

Brexit, as we'll look back on it from our sunlit uplands...a brief but apposite documentary on how we got where we always knew we'd go.

And so the vastly incompetent cover-up continues. Corbyn has not made a declaration on the Commons register for his 2014 trip to the Black September memorial and wreath-laying ceremony in which he both didn't lay a wreath and was photographed laying a wreath (is this some Jezza version of Schrodinger's cat?) His office say this is because the cost is 'below the reporting threshold'. Unless St Jez hitch-hiked to Tunis and stayed in a tent, that's impossible. I suspect it's going to take no more than a few days to unearth the truth about where the money came from, and it'll be yet another clusterfu ck.

Yet there are three photographs. The first one shows him actually holding the wreath. The second shows the wreath in position behind the tombstone commemorating three Black September leaders who organised the Munich massacre. And the third, hilariously, shows Corbyn attempting to mime a Muslim prayer. He knew exactly what he was doing. It's a transparent lie. He's not interested in 'dialogue' between opposing sides in conflict - only in standing on platforms with people he agrees with. As these people have included Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, reactionary terrorist groups like Hamas and the provos, and the media platforms of the clerical-fascist regime in Iran and the violent gangsters around Putin, you get a measure of our supposed future prime minister.

Saint Jez is in even more trouble now. The Mail's expose about his wreath-laying could easily, and lazily, be dismissed as a 'classic MSM smear'. But Corbyn has now been caught in a hugely damaging lie. His reaction to the Mail article is to say that he was definitely not laying a wreath to anyone but the victims of the Israeli bombing, on 1 October 1986, of the PLO HQ in Tunis. But that's not what he said himself, in an article he personally wrote for the Morning Star immediately after the ceremony. https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-98de-palestine-united-1 Who were these 'others'? Members of the Black September leadership directly involved in the planning and execution of the massacre at Munich (a massacre conducted with arms supplied by German neo-Nazis). Damning details here: https://twitter.com/JBickertonUK/status/1028325785889894401

It's substantial enough, not least because 20% of the country's population is Arab. Then there's Labour (even Gabbay's version) plus a number of smaller parties in a ferociously complicated party-political system. This, though, is impressive -if only St Jez and his anti-Semitic acolytes could build some support and solidarity around it... https://twitter.com/stephane_ulrich/status/1028337699743309826

I suspect the high numbers reflect the Corbynista flashmobbing from supporters of the anti-Semitic gerontocracy around Corbyn.

Leaving aside hypo's preposterous claims about Islamophobia being invented yesterday 'by Islamists', and his desire to play the white man, I just wonder how long it's going to take before the physical assaults against Muslim women begin. I would be surprised if BoJo hasn't wound up his 'base' into a vengeful rage.

There must be a reason he's suddenly keeping shtum about the pound's trading value. Whatever might that be? Still, if the pound has by some weird accident crashed against the dollar, it must be soaring against that failed Euro, right?

Why does that not surprise me?

No definitions are perfect but you're in some danger of Jewsplaining with this. It's become accepted practice - and with good reason - to allow the victims of racism to say what that racism is and how it impacts them. Besides, both your points relate to Israel, which is where Labour gets mostly into its tangles (although some Corbynistas are just out-and-out Jew-haters in the Hitler mould). And it's weird because criticising Israel without being anti-Semitic is incredibly easy. You just don't make lazy comments about the 'Zionists' doing this and that, for the simple reason that 'the Zionists' encompasses about 99% of all Jews. As for 1. Please see my earlier post on where this accusation comes from: it is a classic anti-Semitic trope with a murderous past, espeically on the Left. Clearly, if someone declares they are more 'loyal' to Israel than to the UK then to say they are is not an accusation. But to accuse him/her/them of it is anti-Semitic. You can't generalise this to 'the Jewish people' without giving a free pass for actual Jew-haters to make individual accusations (as many Corbynistas do). Also, talking of loose drafting, what is a 'Jewish' citizen' - there's some place called Jewville? And 2. The Nazi comparison thing has a blatantly obvious subtext, and I'm surprised you don't see that. As awful as Israeli government policy currently is, I don't think anyone is claiming with any evidence that there are gas chambers in Hebron busily wiping out all Palestinians. The Nazi comparison is designed to wound Jews - hence it's anti-Semitic. In any case, nothing about Netanyahu's behaviour requires comparison - it is singularly and uniquely awful. Even from the tactical point of view, the Nazi comparison conceals far more than it reveals - it's terrible politics, and has only one benefit, which is to allow the accuser to vent virtuously and impotently. I'm more surprised that for all the virtue signalling among Corbynistas - all those declaring their 'solidarity' - that no one has offered the technical (legal drafting) assistance to Palestinians so that they have their own codified definition of racism against them as an ethnic and religious group. Reading through the controversy as it's gone on all these months, it's striking how little Corbynistas seem to know of the Middle East itself. If you've never been there, I can tell you it's TINY. (You can stand on a rather nice beach in Aqaba and take in the view of four countries with less than a 180-degree turn - Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel). If you know how small it is, you can more easily imagine why land is so ferociously fought over. And if you can more easily imagine that, then it's also easier to understand why there will be no lasting peace that doesn't involve the Israelis. So what political supporters of the Palestinians need to do - and have signally failed to do - is to enlist Israeli popular opinion, at least of the very substantial minority of Israelis who do seek a lasting peaceful settlement with the Palestinians and are appalled by the Netanyahu gang. Can you see Corbyn ever doing that? He couldn't even write a simple letter to the Israeli Labour party - long affiliated with the Labour party in the UK - when they invited him over. Can you see Corbynistas doing it? They are the quickest to condemn and vilify the minute anyone departs from the holy vow that Jews/Israel are merely the enemy. Just look at the furore over the preposterously bewigged gerontocrat Peter Willsman.