We don't do that with any other country. When we criticise Italy we're not anti-Catholic. So what's wrong with criticising Israel but we're not anti-Semitic?
Hundreds of left-wing demonstrators have tried to block people entering a far-right party conference in the German city of Stuttgart.
Hundreds of left-wing demonstrators have tried to block people entering a right-wing party conference in the German city of Stuttgart.
Naga Munchetty: Something we've been talking about this week. we're talking about this morning as well - and something all the papers have picked up on. Jeremy Corbyn has announced changes to recognising anti-Semitism, if there is any, in the Labour Party, and this focus in The Times.
Nazir Afzal: Naga, I suspect when I was growing up - I'm older than you - in the 60s and 70s, racism and the like was so overt. Now it's much more subtle. But I think we've got complacent. You know, when I saw Ken Livingstone in the disabled toilet with journalists shouting questions about Hitler about him, I thought 'This is all surreal'. But let's not forget the important issue. The important issue is that racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, is very real to those who are suffering it, day in and day out, in this country. And I sense, maybe, now we're going to be taking it a bit more seriously than we have done. We've got complacent. We thought, 'We're doing it really well. We're handling these cases really well. We're dealing with people who may have offended in some way, shape or form'. But my sense is that this was necessary for us - not just for the Labour Party - across the board - for people to start taking this issue much more seriously.
Naga Munchetty: When you say 'take an issue much more seriously', what do you mean? Ken Livingstone has been suspended. Do you think he should be sacked?
Nazir Afzal: That's a matter for the Labour Party. I'm no long...
Naga Munchetty: In a sense of taking it seriously though?
Nazir Afzal: 'Taking it seriously' is suspending it, investigating it, and seeing if people learn. I'll give you a good example. Naz Shah was, earlier in the week...She posted something on Facebook three or four years ago. She apologised in parliament. She really means that she will act differently. Hopefully she will be a voice now for change around those who don't want to believe in equality across races, etc. So there is good that can come out of something like this. My sense is that something good has to come out of it because the Labour Party's not the only organisation that's got problems in this area.
The coverage of antisemitism in the Labour Party and antisemitism in general is still going on, but I get the sense that it’s going nowhere.
“I’ve seen antisemitism used as a political tool [..] antisemitism is not the same as disagreeing with what Israel did. It’s not the same thing.”
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| What Israel did |
“It is inconceivable that Hitler could have wanted to move Jews to Israel, because there was no such place in 1932.Using the word "Israel" when what is meant was "the British mandate of Palestine" has the unfortunate consequence of stripping away the actual historical context and putting the words "Hitler" and "Israel" in the same sentence.Hitler was not a supporter of Zionism.He believed, on the contrary, that Zionism was one of many deliberately deceptive labels that Jews placed upon what he believed to be their endless striving for global power and the extermination of the human species.”
Jeremy Corbyn has no comment when asked what he intends to do about accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party https://t.co/guqNXzPTpt— Sky News (@SkyNews) 29 April 2016
I am sorry.
For someone who knows the scourge of oppression and racism all too well, it is important that I make an unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past.
The manner and tone of what I wrote in haste is not excusable. With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them. I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence.
The language I used was wrong. It is hurtful. What’s important is the impact these posts have had on other people. I understand that referring to Israel and Hitler as I did is deeply offensive to Jewish people for which I apologise.
When the “Gaza-Israel” conflict happened I played an active role in highlighting the plight of the Palestinian people, attended demonstrations to stop the bombing and called for equality in media reporting of the issues.
Feelings were running high across the world and Bradford was no different. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and I’m shocked myself at the language I used in some instances during the Gaza-Israel conflict.
For this I apologise.
Since winning the seat of Bradford West I have made conscious efforts in areas around integration, building bridges and community development, in particular around Muslim and Jewish relations. Indeed one of my very first visits was to my local synagogue.
Only last week I was learning and sharing over an interfaith Passover seder with Reform Movement Senior Rabbi Janner-Klausner, Vice Chair of Conservatives Friends Of Israel Andrew Percy MP and others at the rabbi’s home. We all read from the Haggadah and learnt more about Passover.
I have been asked to consider joining the APPG, (All Party Parliamentary Group) on British Jews because of the work I’m doing locally, which includes building relations through my local synagogue.
If politicians put their hands up when they get something wrong it would help to restore faith in politics. I hope that by writing to those who I have hurt, I am practicing as I preach and calling myself out.
For those that I have caused hurt to, particularly the Jewish community, my constituents, friends and family, I sincerely hope my intentions and actions from here on in will win back your trust and faith in me.
For my part I promise to have open and honest conversations about such issues and invite others to do that with me.
Naz ShahLabour Party Member of Parliament for Bradford West
For most of my adult life antisemitism was predominantly the preserve of the far-right - it’s what the National Front was all about. Marine Le Pen’s father was a Holocaust denier and it was always on the far-right of British politics that had that lingering antisemitism that was still there and when it rose up it was slapped down. Why is this now coming from elements of the left?
On the democratic left - they fought antisemitism. that’s why so many Jews joined the Labour party in the 1930s. Why has it now become - in a small element of the left - such an issue?But why?
It has always been associated In recent times with the far-right, but there is a far left element in this. In fact I was speaking in the US recently and I was quoting Karl Marx - it was written in 1840 and he said ‘The essence of Judaism and the root of the Jewish soul was expediency and self-interest, the God of Israel is Mammon who expresses himself in a lust for money - Judaism is the embodiment of antisocial attitudes. There is an element in the left that has always taken these views. it needs to be stamped out whether it comes from right or left, it is fundamentally wrong and it degrades our society.
I think David Cameron ratcheted up the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to act further on Naz Shah. He said it was quite extraordinary that she still had the whip. Now I do think that we should be watching this space through the course of the day. There has been, and it’s certainly the first time since I’ve been reporting on politics, ....the first time that we’ve seen this bubble up as a problem.
Where the leader of a party has been accused of not acting swiftly enough when these things pop up - and I - like you - can’t unpick the reasons why it’s become an issue now. And the Labour leadership has tried - you quoted John McDonnell saying ‘out, out,out’ -that will be what we do,” but when these things bubble up and out,out, out is not the immediate response, it does leave the door open to people questioning why things aren’t happening quickly enough.
“Through the lens of her upbringing in Chelmsley Wood”
A different 80s, the one that made sense to the people in power. “The 80s were like Shangri-la to my family” he said. “They were checking their share prices on teletext on their new tellies. They all thought Scargill was a loooonatic, and Thatcher was a saviour and miners were eeevil because they punched policemen. It just didn’t make any sense because my family were made up of really kind generous people and so when they had these incredibly harsh opinions I just didn’t understand it. It seemed out of character.”
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| Black Lives Matter |
Nick Robinson: A last word on an organisation that you used to be in charge of...You were chairman of this organisation, of course, which you generously called "the greatest broadcaster in the world", the BBC. There are people on your side of the argument, who are in favour of remaining in the EU, who - to paraphrase them - say the BBC's bending over backwards to produce balance in this argument and doing so in a way that does not produce the facts.
Lord Patten: Well, I think the BBC has an extremely difficult job. It's having to cover this referendum with the shadow of a charter review and Mr. Whittingdale hanging over it. I think that may make people excessively deferential when trying to produce balance. You have the governor of the Bank of England on or the IMF chief, so you feel obliged to put up some Conservative backbencher who nobody's ever heard of on the other side of the argument, and it does occasionally raise eyebrows. But I think I would prefer the BBC to be being criticised for being so balanced, excessively balanced, than for them doing anything else. It's a very great broadcaster which is dedicated to telling the truth - and that's an unusual thing in the world of the media.
Nick Robinson: Lord Patten, Chris Patten, thank you very much indeed.
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| Mother and daughter. Fearful in Paris |
“.........Hussey has written so carelessly, and in so needlessly inflammatory a manner. He repeatedly makes large, highly questionable generalisations without anything resembling evidence. "For most French people," he asserts, "Tunisians … had the same supposed racial and cultural defects of all North Africans, ranging from stupidity, criminality and a taste for violence." Most French people? How does he know?
More serious a problem is his inflammatory style when discussing violence. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that when he describes violence committed by the French, he mostly gives quick, summary accounts, but when he turns to violence committed by Muslims, he cannot resist lurid detail.
So focused is Hussey on the legacy of colonialism that he pays little systematic attention to what is, in fact, one of the book's most striking and disturbing themes: Muslim antisemitism. As he notes, hatred of Jews now runs deep in Muslim populations, including in France and North Africa. In France, the worst examples of individual violence committed by alienated Muslim youth have been against Jews, notably the torture and killing of the mobile phone salesman Ilan Halimi outside Paris in 2006, and the shooting of four Jews, including three children, in front of a Hebrew school in Toulouse in 2012.
The role of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the formation of contemporary Muslim identities, and the way that Jews have come to stand, in much of the Muslim world, for the worst tendencies of the "west", and even of modernity, deserve more analysis than Hussey provides.
“Hussey blames France’s tortured relations with “its” Arabs on its colonial history in the Maghreb, which started in earnest with the invasion of Algeria in 1830.”
“With this provocatively titled book, he joins the increasing number of respected authors from the liberal Left who are shocked at some of the effects of mass non-European immigration on Western European countries and cultures.”
“Antisemitism used to come from the far right, but now it’s coming from a different group, a small minority of French Muslims”
“Radical Islam offers you a way out”
“Muslim extremists recruiting in the suburbs often use derogatory passages from the Koran”
“out of context, most Muslims would say, to further their own anti-semetic (sic) ideology”
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| Professor Andrew Hussey |
“It’s conflation of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it’s also conflation of that old historical shibboleth - the conspiracy theory - that the Jews control everything.”
“They need someone to blame”.
“We hear from the families most affected and explore the reasons behind the rise in anti-Semitism. With insight from those who live in the notorious Paris suburbs, often accused of being a breeding ground for anti-Semitism, and from Lassana Bathily, a Muslim from the suburbs who saved Jewish lives during the kosher supermarket attack in 2015. “
I have spent my life opposing racism. Until my dying day I will be opposed to racism in any form."
“I’ve fought extremism all my life”
I’ve always been a strong campaigner against racism and fascism in all its forms.Malia Bouattia.
“In 2011 she claimed, for example, that Birmingham University had become something of a Zionist outpost”
“I know that many of you will have seen my name dragged through the mud by right-wing media. You’ll have read that I’m a terrorist, that my politics is driven by hate. How wrong that is. I know too well the price of terrorism; the consequences of violence and oppression. I saw a country ripped apart by terror and was pushed into exile by (indecipherable) I know too well the damage done by racism and persecution I faced it every day.......and I will continue to fight in all its forms whoever its target, whether it’s antisemitism Islamophobia, Xenophobia or any other bigoted idea and I’m so glad we passed a motion (indecipherable)
“It wasn’t the bombs and the bullets, it was the fear for our education that drove them to leave everything behind” “They taught me that education is key to liberation, that it would give me the power to change the world.”
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| Christy McMorrow |
“Why do you think Malia Bouattia called Birmingham University something of a Zionist outpost?”said Jo Coburn
“Well obviously a lot of this ties up with campaigners for the rights of Palestinian self-determination and Palestinian liberation. Malia probably thought that on campus there was a lot of support for the state of Israel and in her campaigning for the rights of Palestinians and for Palestinian self-existence she found a lot of opposition, and I think that is where that came form. Perhaps the language could have been better.”
If Christy McMorrow is representative of your average student, as I suspect he is, I think the message is that he means well, but doesn’t have much of a clue. He knows next to nothing of the situation in the Middle East, besides the deafening racket made by Malia’s friends from the PSC and their ilk.
“Zionism. That is used to explicitly mean right-wing Zionism or support for the current State of Israel. That’s not always accurate but I think Malia has already come forward and said she wants to talk to students”
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| Jonty Leibowitz |
“everyone knows that antisemitism isn’t anti Zionism and anti Zionism isn’t antisemitism....but sometimes they do conflate”
“if we mean by Zionist someone who wants to protect the State of Israel it should not be a negative [...] the implication there is that Zionism is a bad thing” “Malia would be wise to dissociate herself from these comments.”
“Antisemitism is always wrong. It was wrong when the Tory party was advocating it in the 30s, it’s wrong when people in the Labour party espouse antisemitic views - or near antisemitic views - today”
“And is this what this is?
“I’m not quite sure. It’s bordering on the edge, and that’s why i think she’d be wise to...”
“Apologise?”
“Look at different ways of expressing herself, because - look, I think we do bandy the word Zionist around so it almost sounds like a kind of pejorative term, and that’s the real danger here - I mean incidentally I think this applies to how we treat Muslims in politics as well. [... ]Sadiq Khan[.........]
“I count myself as a Labour friend of Israel and a Labour friend of Palestine in the Middle East and I want the two-state solution to succeed. It pains me that we are now in a situation where Israel, partly thanks to Netanyahu’s government, which I dislike
and I think people on the left should be perfectly free to criticise Netanyahu’s government, that doesn’t make you antisemitic. My anxiety is that there seems so little prospect of peace.”
I'm finally watching this now, and I see that this episode's theme is "It's Thatcher's Fault!" A whole lot of energy placing blame squarely on her shoulders, and painting her in a rather bad light. Nobody said it outright, but the subtext was that Thatcher handled it all badly and was a bit of a hypocrite. Nice touch showing Nigel Lawson describing one speech as xenophobic. It possibly even caused her downfall.
I find it curious that Robinson's approach is to convince Right-wingers that the EU is not only something conservatives can support (Churchill introduced the vision, what's your problem?), but the two main reasons it might not be as beneficial as possible for Britain are: It's the fault of Little Englanders that Britain wasn't in from the beginning, and Thatcher is to blame for eroding national sovereignty, so conservatives can't really complain about Socialist Europe. Never mind that Eurocrat after Eurocrat featured kept saying that the money paid into the EU isn't really Britain's money, it's theirs.
So, who was it who would sign up to the changes which transform the Common Market? None other than Margaret Thatcher. Now seen as the Euro-sceptic's pin-up, she was staunchly pro-European when she first came to power.
Dublin was Mrs Thatcher's first big summit. She arrived with a demand for what became known as Mrs Thatcher's Billion, the gap between what Britain paid in and what we got out. Broadly speaking, for every £2 we contribute, we get £1 back. That leaves us with a net contribution of £1,000 million next year to the community, and rising in the future. Some saw this as a sort of late entry fee for joining the European club after its rules had been drawn up. Mrs Thatcher complained that Britain, along with Germany, was footing the bill for everyone else. Her fellow leaders didn't much like being lectured by the new girl.
The response of the European smoothies was far from diplomatic. The summit went from bad to worse.
The leaders gathered for a glum photo call. Dublin had set the tone. From then on, year after year, summit after summit, the budget row rumbled on. Again and again, Mrs Thatcher would insist that Britain should get our money back. Eventually, five years later, in Fontainebleau, she swung that famous handbag and did get a rebate of some of her billion, but at what cost?
It was not, though, an idea from the French or the Germans that would turn Margaret Thatcher against Europe. It was, ironically, an idea that emerged from her very own handbag. She wanted to make it easier for companies to do business across Europe, to turn the Common Market into a single market. The problem was, that would involve watering down the power of governments to block, or veto, proposals they didn't like. The grand ambition of a Europe without frontiers had become logjammed. Countries were looking after their own, protecting their industries not respecting the rules. At national borders, cash was king.
Margaret Thatcher's ambition was not just to do away with coffee money, but to lift all other barriers to free trade.
The man in charge of securing the powers Brussels needed to enforce and police the single market was the European Commission's new president, Jacques Delors, a French socialist. For Delors, a single market was just as much about the rights of workers as business - the message he would take to Thatcher's enemies in the trade unions.
But it was another Delors plan that would outrage Mrs Thatcher's supporters. He wanted to revive the idea of a single European currency. (Sun headline: Up Yours Delors) Ironically, he'd been backed by her to be the top man in Brussels, but theirs was a relationship which quickly soured. After one summit in London, she wouldn't let him get a word in edgeways.
To keep Delors and his grand schemes under control, Thatcher sent one of her own Cabinet to Brussels. Arthur Cockfield was a former taxman. Thatcher thought he was a pen pusher, who would be prepared to do her bidding, but Cockfield went native, backing his new boss, Jacques Delors, instead. He explained to Thatcher that the single market meant harmonising VAT.
Delors's plans where the most significant changes to the European Community ever made. Back then, there were only ten members at the table. Now, there are almost three times that number. But what they, what she, agreed in Luxembourg, didn't just expand what Europe did, it limited any country's veto power to block it by expanding so-called majority voting.
She swallowed hard and signed up, but how would she persuade her MPs to do the same? Simple - brief reporters that nothing much had changed at all.
The law enacting the transfer of so many powers from Westminster to Brussels, the Single European Act, was rushed through the Commons at top speed. The debates lasted just a few days, many MPs scarcely knew what they were voting on.
For decades, opponents of Britain's membership of the European club have claimed that it involves sacrificing our sovereignty, giving away the power of Parliament to decide what's right for us. Over just six nights, it was the House of Commons itself which voted to surrender the British veto on proposals coming from Brussels on a wide swathe of policy. And whose lead were they following? Margaret Thatcher's.
The second treaty, already planned in the mid-Eighties, was that signed six years later at Maastricht, transforming the European Community into the “European Union”, with its own currency, foreign and defence policies and, again, much more. Not only did Robinson say nothing of all this, but he tellingly omitted a remarkable interview in The Poisoned Chalice with Jacques Delors, who recalled how, on becoming president of the European Commission in 1985, he proposed “three themes: a common defence policy, a single currency, a change to the institutions which would lead to political integration”.
