Verbal

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.

Well, well, well. It is interesting. And you have completely misunderstood it. Stern's point, even in the selected quotes, is that the IHRA definition was never intended to chill free speech. He was NOT advocating amending the definition but rather protesting against the way some University campuses in the US and the UK have used it to ban certain ideas. The example he gives - equating the Israeli state with apartheid ideology - is indeed not 'banned' by the definition, even though it's been interpreted that way by a few. To get the full sense of what Stern is saying, in a very nuanced and well argued submission, you need to read it in full. Here it is: https://judiciary.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Stern-Testimony-11.07.17.pdf But the essence of it is this: You also seem to be a little lost on what the IHRA definition actually is. Here it is: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/working-definition-antisemitism And yes, the Corbynista 'redefinition' makes adjustments to get the most common form of Corbynist anti-Semitism off the hook - especially the accusation that Jews have a greater loyalty to Israel than to their own country.

Given the content of this thread, you might want to look up the meaning of 'libel'.

Yet that's exactly what he did, with his longest stint in a first team, at Fulham. He played very successfully in a back four that tightened up when he was added to it. He was a key ingredient in the 23-game winning streak that started when he and Mitrovic joined.

The initial idea for giving his new 'some Jews are fine' speech was to do it at the Jewish Museum on Friday night. Brilliant.

It is anti-Semitic, plain and simple, and it's worrying, but utterly predictable, that you don't see that. I happen to know the JLM well. As an organisation, it's one of the longest-affiliated of groups to the Labour party and can date its commitment to socialist internationalism back to the 1930s. It has long supported the two-state solution, the Oslo Accords, and protested violence and human rights abuses directed at Palestinians. It's also the organisation that had this said about it in the official minutes of the Birkenhead CLP “Diversity and equality training to be offered by the NEC. The proposed training by the Jewish Labour Group is not going ahead due to possible links with ISIS and the Israeli government." These kinds of anti-Semitic slurs are so common now, but to attack the JLM in particular - and it's been the target of abuse of months now by Labour activists - is not just anti-Semitic. It's deeply corrosive within the Labour party itself. Anyone looking in from the outside would think that the real Trojan horses were occupied by the anti-Semites in Labour. They are destroying the party from within, while they cling to their Jew-hating fantasies about how fellow Labour activists are Israeli government agents and apologists for ISIS. Have the balls to face up to this, instead of using weasel words about how all parties have a problem. Start with this: how do you justify equating the JLM with 'Israeli lobby groups'? My reading of this is that you clearly need some of that equality and diversity training from the ISIS/Mossad agents of JLM.

Here's the problem in a hilarious (and depressing) nutshell. A bunch of Momentum supporters in Liverpool (where else?) got together last night and got all riled up about the 'ruling class's' smears and how it's all to do St Jeremy down. The anti-Semitism charge is a 'sinister', the chief rabbler Chris Williamson (A Corbyn loyalist MP) told them. 'Activists in the Labour party,' he said, 'I don't believe...are anti-Semites.' At which point one of the rabble got up and complained about Jews being, I quote, 'Israeli foot soldiers.' Brilliant. So maybe fanboy and Bexy can offer a word of advice to their fellow Corbynistas. When complaining about the 'smear' of anti-Semitism, don't express it anti-Semitically. Oh, and the source for this story is the Jewish Chronicle. Fire away anti-Semites....I mean, Labour party activists! https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/jeremy-corbyn-ally-chris-williamson-defends-labour-members-language-antisemitic-1.467849

I watched him quite a bit too (Craven Cottage is just round the corner.) He played well throughout the half-season, with a few MoM awards. He worked really effectively with Sessignon ahead of him - probably he's the sort of player who thrives with this kind of partner. The main feature of his time at Fulham was his excellent - often very inventive - final ball (the nutmeg pass for the second goal yesterday reminded me of the sorts of clever things he worked with RS.)

I’m not going to go through your whole list because it would make for a post that would be even more tediously long than this already is… But as for the first one on your list, it genuinely astonishes me that you appear to think that might not be anti-Semitic. That accusation, in only a slightly modified way, was at the heart of Hitler’s loathing of the Jews after the first world war. Israel didn’t exist then, but loyalty to their ‘own kind’ to the exclusion of good and true, ethnically pure Germans was at the heart of a paranoiac rage that led all the way to the gas chambers. In its more literal sense, the ‘greater loyalty to Israel’ accusation is the core of anti-Semitism on the Left. This is rooted in Stalinism but has become generalised among the Left, especially in the bad-faith form of ‘there’s a difference between being anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic’. Throughout his rule, Stalin had shown plenty of evidence of wild paranoia directed at Jews and in particular Jewish rivals (such as Trotsky) for leadership. But after the formation of Israel, his Jew-thing went into overdrive. He was the first to coin the term ‘anti-Zionist’, and he used it to describe Jews he hated. He did this to level the accusation at them that they had a greater loyalty to Israel than to the USSR. They were enemies of the people and, and anyone labelled a ‘Zionist’ was inevitably destroyed. The result was a pogrom in the early 1950s that wiped out thousands of Russian Jews – all ‘Zionists’, so all traitors to the cause, deserving of death. Ironically, this idea of divided loyalties as a code for Jew-hatred morphed over to other parts of the radical left, including Troskyists, and it exists today, in its most virulent form, on the Corbynist left. This is why you can have a Corbynista like the proudly ‘anti-Zionist’ Damien Enticott calling for the execution of all Jews, and Corbynistas like our friend fanboy call it merely ‘minging’ (you’ll never hear him – or many other Corbynistas – concede examples of anti-Semitism, because they hug their comfort blanket of ‘it’s all smears’ as if there were no tomorrow). That’s history, this is politics: if you’re forced into saying that your argument is anti-Zionist not anti-Semitic, then it’s not just that you don’t see the problem. You are the problem. ‘Zionism’ is so broad an ideology that only a very tiny number of the world’s Jewish population would accept the label of anti-Zionist. To be anti-Zionist is to be against the idea – the very idea – of a Jewish homeland. And it’s not just Jews who’s be covered by the ‘Zionist’ label. Anyone – including Fatah – who advances the idea of the two-state solution is acknowledging that right to exist, and is therefore in the strictest sense ‘Zionist’. So when someone says they are ‘anti-Zionist’ they are ‘anti’ practically all Jews, and millions of others besides. Which is why there’s often a close affinity between saying one is ‘anti-Zionist’ and actually being ‘anti-Semitic’. Now you might say: who cares? The reality is that a solution to the Palestinian question cannot be accomplished without support from large numbers of Israelis, and many others. So why demonise them – especially as many in Israel are thoroughly opposed to the actions of their government. You surely want to enlist their support, not push them away with coded Jew-hating rhetoric. Does this mean you can’t criticise Israel? This is the claim of the most dim-witted of Corbynistas. But it’s complete bullsh it. You can, for example, do exactly as Gerald Kaufman did, in the quote that fanboy wanted to show was somehow anti-Semitic. It’s not, because it attacks the Israeli government, and not some amorphous, widely held belief in a right to exist. But Corbynistas can’t help themselves. They always want to insist on inserting the terms ‘Zionist’ or ‘anti-Zionist’ into every insult they launch at the Israeli state. They do this because it makes themselves feel good. But in doing it, they move a settlement for the Palestinians that little bit further away. Actual, effective critics of the Netanyahu regime call it that; they don’t drape anti-Jewish code-phrases around it. It’s perfectly possible, and justified, to criticise Netanyahu’s gang for the terrible atrocities it’s committed, and for the overtly racist recent changes to citizenship, which in a single act has constitutionally redefined a fifth of Israel’s population as second-class citizens. But no, Corbynistas will continue to believe the self-regarding conspiracy theory that the whole anti-Semitism charge is a total fake – a ‘smear’ to stop St Jeremy ascending to the throne. Even when some of their number are caught out calling for the extermination of Jews! (Remember: ‘minging’, not actually anti-Semitic.) That they co-opt the plight of the Palestinians into this narcissistic argument says everything you need to know about a corrupted and brain-dead politics.

No, it isn't. I wonder if, as a rabid Corbynista, you can see why it isn't? I've highlighted a rather large clue. (Pop the word 'Jews' in there instead and Bob's your uncle). And no, for the same reason which I doubt you can spot, it isn't at odds with the IHRA definition. Which - despite your swivel-eyed fantasies - does not grant the actions of the Israeli state, especially against the Palestinians, any protections from criticism.