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  1. #81
    Silver Poster fred41's Avatar
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    Default Re: Nutjobs Continue to Rule GOP

    Just reread the articles with a sober eye and I realize there is only so much I can glean from an article or two. Obviously there are going to be cultural differences in politics ,some based on history...and I assume it also depends on different regions of the U.K. I look forward to some of your comments on Thursdays, perhaps in one of the other threads Stavros...

    on another note , what has been obvious for a while now is pretty much official - Trump's the presumptive nominee

    want to write more, but I'm stuck doing it on my phone and it's frustrating



  2. #82
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    Default Re: Nutjobs Continue to Rule GOP

    Jeez, CNN is the best Reality Show on TV now.
    Too bad the Revolution won't be televised.

    One name I haven't heard on the news shows is Ken Starr, but to me, he is the reason I can't wait for Hillary.
    Ken Starr took a family problem, and turned it into a lurid peep show, and probably sealed the 2000 election for Bush, along with Scalia.
    Those kinds of wounds don't heal, and now it's PAYBACK time for the GOP.
    And Hillary is just the vindictive bitch to do the job.

    Trump, on the other hand, he doesn't even really belong to the GOP, and the juicy question now is going to be which LEGITIMATE Politician will flush his good name down the toilet and be Trump's VP.
    Stockdale?

    Of all the Republican Clowns, I'm glad Trump gets the nomination, because if anything, the USA is a TEST to see how much shit you can throw at it and still have Old Glory waving after the smoke clears. This is not good. It is GREAT!!!!!!!



    World Class Asshole

  3. #83
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    Default Re: Nutjobs Continue to Rule GOP

    Quote Originally Posted by fred41 View Post
    ...and I am always interested in hearing your views - so please share them...
    On Israel and the Labour Party I would say that across the last 100 years you can see that there was an Old Left that took a positive view of Israel, and the emergence in the crucial 'long decade' 1967-1979 of a New Left which has consistently attacked it. The Old Left was forged on the anvil of the anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s, fighting Mosley's British Union of Fascists at home, fighting for or supporting the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and supporting anti-imperial movements, such as Gandhi and Indian independence. For the Old Left that was committed to Parliamentary politics and made up of people such as Michael Foot, Ian Mikardo, Richard Crossman and Jo Richardson, along with liberal moderates like Harold Wilson, the creation of Israel in 1948 was an act of liberation and justice, and crucially, through David Ben-Gurion's Mapai party (a fraternal party to Labour in the Socialist International) it was Labour Zionism that triumphed. Thus the Old Left supported Israel for humanitarian reasons in the aftermath of the War and the revelations about the Holocaust, but also because they saw Israel as the first Socialist state in the Middle East, a state that would use agriculture -think Kibbutz and Moshav- as the collective endeavour for a renewal of Jewish life in a Jewish state. The ugly circumstances in which the British had been fought in Palestine, and the manner in which Israel was created was glossed over in favour of the socialist dream, just as this Old Left supposedly committed to an internationalist movement in effect supported nationalism through its support for national liberation movements, a contradiction the left in general has never been able to deal with.
    This all changed in that 'long decade' 1967-1979 which saw the crushing defeat of the Arabs in 1967 and the commitment of the USA to Israel's defence, intensifying the Cold War in the region; the emergence of the Palestinian 'resistance' movement; the nationalisation of the region's oil resources, and the consolidation of military dictatorships in Libya, Algeria, Egypt, Syria and Iraq; and latterly the emergence of Political Islam, crystallised in the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.
    By this time, the Labour Party had seen an influx of the New Left, mostly Trotskyists who had abandoned small agit-prop groups to focus on the 'authentic voice of the working class' in an attempt, at which they succeeded, to take the party to the left and provide leadership for the workers.
    Ken Livingstone was in fact outside the small cell of Trotskyists who engineered the left turn in the 1970s-1980s (the Chartists or Socialist Charter group from the London School of Economics) but was identified as leadership material as he stood out in local politics in the London Borough of Camden, and became part of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy in the 1970s which sought to return the party to its 'grass-roots' at the expense of the Parliamentary Party -a movement that is fundamental to Corbyn's present strategy.

    In that crucial decade the left in general was demonstrating against apartheid South Africa and the bomb, but critically the US and its involvement in Vietnam, and just as the Old Left had opposed British imperialism and fascism in the 1930s, the New Left attacked the US and because it supported Israel the New Left viewed the Jewish State (and Iran) as outposts of American imperialism in the Middle East. The problem for the New Left in the 1970s was that the Palestinian resistance, which adopted the armed struggle late in 1967 used aeroplane hi-jackings, bombings and assassinations to fight back against Israel but in the process lost any friends they might have had across the world. For the New Left, however, the 'armed struggle' -and to the Palestinian cause you can add Northern Ireland- became the military component of revolutionary politics of the kind associated with Cuba and Vietnam, regardless of what was created when the revolution was won in those countries -given that this New Left constantly derided others on the left as 'Stalinists' without seeing the connection between Stalinist administrations and the political movements they supported.
    The problem with Israel deepened in 1977 when Menachem Begin's Likud Party smashed the Labour Party's grip on Israel and in effect began dismantling the socialist elements of the country -these days a Kibbutz is not so much a building bloc of Israeli society as a commercial farm- and took a more aggressive approach to settlement building in the Occupied Territories, and the pursuit of Israel's enemies abroad.
    It is from this period that a confusion arises over the critique of Zionism as an ideology or construct -the problem being that Zionism is not one thing but a collection of attitudes and policies- while the disaster of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, attempting to manage up to a million hostile Arabs, caused deep splits within Israel as well as in those supporters of Israel across the world.
    In the 1980s the tide turned against Israel because of the war in Lebanon and the first Intifada, and this undoubtedly generated more interest in the Palestinian cause and led to an attempt to go back in history and look again at Zionism and how it developed. Israel for the Left, thus switched from being an expression of justice and humanity -Old Left- to an outpost of American imperialism -New Left- that had been created through violence and intimidation by groups associated with Fascism and whose Nationalist aspirations were wrapped up in Biblical justification. To a degree, Likud fostered this aggressive view of Israel by giving licence to settlement activity by small groups whose attitudes have opened up a rift between the coastal, Liberal Israel of beach-life and high tech industry, to the West Bank of biblical zealots, indeed, bigots with appalling attitudes to women who think all the Arabs, indeed, all non-Jews should be expelled from the country.
    Thus the New Left has now had a history of offering political support to the Palestinian 'resistance' -which to some is equivalent to supporting terrorists- but has done so because of its pathological need to be seen as the avant garde of revolutionary politics without bothering too much with the details. It was thus possible for the New Left to offer political support to Sinn Fein in the 1980s claiming that it was a socialist party, even though it was blatantly nationalist, the political wing of the IRA and opposed to the Labour Party as part of the British establishment. Similarly, the defence of HAMAS as a component of the Palestinian resistance ignores completely the origins of the movement and its connections to the Muslim Brotherhood in favour of a longer term strategy of supporting the revolutionary option. Incredible as it seems, the Socialist Worker's Party in the UK produced a banner headline in their weekly paper in 1979 which read something like 'All The Way with the Ayatollahs' on the basis that the Iranian left would be able to use the popular revolution to steer Iran in the 'right' direction, for the New Left is obsessed with the Bolshevik Revolution and the view that even a tiny Leninist party can take advantage of the revolutionary moment and achieve an improbable victory, and improbable as it seems, Corbyn, John McDonnell and others still see this as an option in the UK and abroad, although there are rumours that McDonnell has fallen out with Corbyn, McDonnell having fallen out with Livingstone in the 1980s.

    I realise now that this doesn't actually address anti-semitism in the Labour Party, not least because the New Left may be there in the leadership, but not the membership as a whole, and the party is still a broad if declining coalition of interests. I think the confused messages over Israel, the Occupied West Bank, and the reluctance to deal with religious bigots on all sides is part of the confusion, just as blanket atheism which denounces religions as fantasies about sky-gods and miracles itself enables anti-semites to attack Israel and Jews. In Livingstone's case, relying on analogies of Zionism and the Third Reich to me is intellectial laziness -Livingstone read a book he agrees with (Trotskyst Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983) and sees no reason to change his mind. He has made himself look foolish but can't see it, and the media which has enjoyed taking him for a ride for more than 30 years now is just as much to blame as their long term objective is to weaken the Labour Party usig any means necessary, as if the media needed to do what the party is managing to do all by itself, much as the Republican Party has got itself into an ideological hole and can't stop digging.

    Maybe it is time to begin the difficult and uncertain process of creating new political parties to suit the emerging 21st century and to ditch the tired old political positions that have yielded so little in real terms where the issues that really do matter are jobs, housing, health and education, not the Bible, revolution or the sword.


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  4. #84
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    Default Re: Nutjobs Continue to Rule GOP

    Hi Fred,
    I have also followed the anti-semitism scandal in Labour. Although I do not know much about Labour's history regarding Israel, many of the comments of late only ostensibly relate to Israel and do not offer a broad or coherent critique of Israel's policies but involve outright anti-semitism, historical revisionism, and other packaged anti-semitism that is more directed at Jewish stereotypes than human rights.

    Vicki Kirby was suspended from Labour for writing about Jewish noses and saying that Hitler was the Zionist God. Gerry Downing was suspended for wanting to solve "the Jewish question", another person for asking why we have to continuously hear about Hitler's murder of the zionists (of course Hitler did not care whether the Jews he killed were zionists or not). Then there are the controversial comments by Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone, which again were ostensibly directed at Israel but were unusually extreme. Naz Shah posted a graphic that basically called for the transfer of all Jews to the United States and another graphic with Hitler in it that said, "everything Hitler did during WWII was legal......therefore oppose Israeli apartheid." Of course, I don't believe that the Reichstag had actually passed laws calling for the murder of Jews, the Roma, homosexuals and political prisoners but I could be wrong.

    Then Ken Livingstone came to Naz Shah's defense and claimed that she was only being vilified by zionists. Apropos of nothing, he claimed that Hitler was a supporter of Zionism. Many eminent historians have weighed in on this claim, and said it is excruciatingly misleading. Zionists wanted to help get Jews out of Germany before it was obvious they were going to be murdered, and the Germans did consider cooperating with them to expel their Jewish population. Hitler did not support the aim of establishing a Jewish state but did consider Palestine as one of several places to transport Jews out of Germany. The only time Hitler discussed the actual creation of a Jewish state was years before the Haavara agreement, in Mein Kampf, where he said it would be a convenient place from which Jews could carry out their swindles on the rest of the world and so he opposed its creation.

    Jeremy Corbyn and others in the Labour party have spent a good deal of time claiming that the only people who would oppose these comments are Tories, Blairites, or Zionists. There have been some other unusual quirks I want to briefly mention.

    When someone makes a comment that has not much to do with Zionism but is directed at Jews, the stock response of many in Labour is, "there is a difference between anti-zionism and anti-semitism". While this may be true, they will say it without regard to the comments being contested. So this would be a standard response to someone saying, "The Jews love money and have big noses".

    The other thing is that anyone who makes an earnest attempt to combat the problem of anti-semitism in the party is seen as a traitor to Jeremy Corbyn. John Mann, an MP, aggressively went after Ken Livingstone after he made his Hitler comments and called him a bigot of some kind. He was aggressive and perhaps his actions can be seen a breach of decorum, though fairly minor. As of today, 20,000 people have signed a petition calling for him to be suspended from the party because of his "bullying behavior." However, most of these same people believe Ken Livingstone did nothing wrong and in my view are just upset that he has given the Tories fodder by opposing antisemitism within their party.

    Other relevant topics: Jeremy Corbyn's letter in defense of Stephen Sizer, the use of the good Jews/bad Jews trope, and the many strange things Piers Corbyn, Jeremy's brother has posted on his twitter account. While one cannot be held to account for one's brother's views, Piers Corbyn posted a graphic of a Holocaust survivor on Twitter saying "an antisemite used to be someone who hates Jews, now it's someone the Jews hate." The implications are several fold: 1. If a Holocaust survivor says something that very few Jews would agree with, it's credible because he is a Jew revealing the secrets of the Jews; 2. real anti-semitism is obsolete as a prejudice; and 3. the Jews are a vindictive cabal who now use manufactured claims of antisemitism to undermine the gentile.

    I realize this is off-topic, but it is relevant I suppose as to how people waste energy instead of focusing on issues important to the public.


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    Last edited by broncofan; 05-05-2016 at 03:39 PM.

  5. #85
    Silver Poster fred41's Avatar
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    Default Re: Nutjobs Continue to Rule GOP

    Thanks Stavros, for the fairly detailed post on Labour's history dealing with Israel. As an aside, I have to admit to a bit of envy - I wish to God I could write like you without a single edit.

    It's interesting how, from an anecdotal point of view - dealing with articles/editorials I have read and people I have spoken to in every day conversations, there is a slight difference in political viewpoint as to why they may be anti-Israel.
    From what you have written, it seems the main difference across the Atlantic is this:
    It at least seems in the U.K., Israel is sometimes hated because, in arguments, it is seen as a puppet of the United States. Whereas here, in our country, some of our citizens feel that we, the United States (meaning our gov't) are a puppet of Israel.

    ...and thanks, Bronco for further illumination on the individuals in the Labour Party who triggered this conversation to begin with. It's funny that , in newspaper articles, some writers/editorialists who choose to defend what was said or written by Corbyn and associates, wind up having to dissect their words and sentences like a very well payed lawyer does, during a Hail Mary defense of an obviously guilty perpetrator of a Felony crime. That's a very loud red flag. If you have to be defended with word acrobatics, then you're probably an anti-semite.

    I can understand a rational debate on Israel and it's politics...but it always comes across as disingenuous when you have to dump on a country using the egregious hyperbole, usually reserved for blood soaked butchers...without ever really addressing actual blood soaked butchers,...but in fact, often romanticizing them.

    I get it -it's cool and easy amongst some classes to unfairly castigate Israel...and sometimes Jews in general. They're often a small minority...or at the very least, they're usually perceived as white...but if a person is going to try to raise his political street cred by supporting the perceived underdog...it would be nice, to make sure, that underdog your supporting in words and deeds, isn't in fact a vicious beast. The same holds true for people who generally fall in love with any fascist, dictator or unelected ruler around the globe,....especially if they're an enemy of ones own country.

    and anyway, as both Stavros and Bronc have said...don't these politicians have more important things to consider...like governing and solving problems such as the economy?


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  6. #86
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    Default Re: Nutjobs Continue to Rule GOP

    If I were to fine tune my earlier post, it would be to stress that the New Left view was a fringe view in the Labour Party until Corbyn was elected leader. Up to this point most (I think all) Labour leaders since Harold Wilson in the 1960s have been members of the Labour Friends of Israel -Wilson wrote a passionate book The Chariot of Israel (1981), Blair and Mandelson are both fans -probably even more so than Miliband, while Gordon Brown spent many summers in Israel in the company of his clerical father. From this perspective, the attacks on Corbyn are part of a wider campaign to discredit him, though his past has let him down on this anyway, and others are discovering that in the age of social media and forensic googling, something said or written years ago is not forgotten. Corbyn's relentless attacks on the EU expose the weakness of his present position, while he has apparently abandoned a planned trip to Turkey where he was due to speak in favour of Turkey's accession to the EU, a crazy idea and a vote loser if ever there was one.
    In any case, since 1948 successive British government's have not had good relations with Israel, at best the relationship has been cool, at worst, when Begin was Prime Minister Israel was hostile enough to support Argentina during the Falklands War, and the UK has never had much of a role to play in the peace process. This may also be because for a long time the Foreign Office was viewed as 'Arabist', and the Conservatives were perceived to be closer to the Arab potentates. And to a degree, yes, the election of Corbyn is being perceived as part of this trend for parties to vacate the centre for the more extreme fringes of politics, but at the moment it is not clear how far to the left Corbyn has been able to take the party, so it may not be 'as bad' as the extent to which some Americans see the Republican Party adrift from the broad mass of American voters. Time will tell, Corbyn's primary aim is not to win power in a general election, but to radicalise the party, but I do wonder how far the tepid British voter -maybe the English voter, if we discount Scotland and Wales- wants radical politics, after all UKIP is in its own way a radical party and has little to show for it.



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