Is it antisemitic to hate Israel?

Corbyn risks his party being torn apart if he can’t sort out this anti-semitism business (pic from the Independent)

What does anti-semitic mean?  The top three online dictionaries (of a Google search) say:

anti-Semitism discrimination against or prejudice or hostility toward Jews (www.dictionary.com)

anti-Semitism Hostility to or prejudice against Jews (oxforddictionaries.com)

anti-Semitism the strong dislike or cruel and unfair treatment of Jewish people (dictionary.cambridge.org)

Well, that seems simple enough, right?  Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.  Some people want the term antisemitic to cover a lot more than anti-Jewishism.  And it’s tearing the Labour party into strips when Britain badly needs a working Opposition to the Conservative government.

So what is the problem?  Some people want the Labour party to adopt an “official” international definition of anti-semitism.  The definition they have chosen to push is that of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA).  Their definition is:

Anti-Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.

Even this definition isn’t too bad.  But the main problem is the examples that go with the definition.  These include “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour,” and “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”  Basically, criticism of the state of Israel should be viewed as anti-Semitism, as should any equivalence of their racist policies and those of Nazi Germany.

Why should criticising Israel be labelled anti-Semitic?  Generally it is accepted that anti-Semitism is wrong.  So now criticising Israel is wrong too?  That country can do no wrong?  And why is it wrong to point out that Israel’s foreign and domestic policies are racist?  I mean, those policies are racist, inasmuch as they are hostile to Palestinians.  And how exactly does pointing out this racism deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination?  Israel is denying Palestinians their right to self-determination… but to point that out is anti-Semitic?  My head’s starting to hurt.

The organisation that first drafted this definition, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, recognized it was contentious – it drafted but never adopted the definition.  And the UK government, which has adopted the “working definition” and the examples, was warned by the Commons home affairs select committee in October 2016 that in the interests of free speech it ought to adopt an explicit rider that it is not antisemitic to criticise the government of Israel, or to hold the Israeli government to the same standards as other liberal democracies, without additional evidence to suggest antisemitic intent (the government sadly ignored this advice).

Unfortunately for the Labour Party and its leader, some party members and supporters of the leader have come out with some awful stuff on this subject.  Peter Willsman, for instance, has said some stuff that is just plain wrong and he needs to resign.  But the party should not adopt the IHRA definition.  And if supporters of Israel don’t like that country’s policies being criticised, maybe they should call for those policies to be changed.  To be made less racist.  Less likely to be compared to those of that old Nazi Adolf Hitler.

So WTF is genocide then?

I find this ridiculous. A brief summary of the story: East European EU states that had suffered appalling crimes against humanity when ruled by Communist regimes – Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic – want a law created that will make denial of Communist atrocities illegal, in the same way that some states have made denial of the Nazi Holocaust a crime.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of Holocaust denial laws; they are a direct contravention of freedom of expression. If I don’t believe that the Nazis killed millions of Jews, why shouldn’t I be allowed to say so? It’s like how the Inquisition treated Galileo for saying the Earth orbited the Sun.

No, what annoys me is the reason given by the European Commission and various experts for rejecting this law. Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff said “For all the terrible crimes of the USSR, you can’t compare the people who built Auschwitz with the people who liberated it. Nazi Germany would probably not have been defeated if it weren’t for Russia.” He gave the USSR a free pass for its murder of millions of people because its was the army that liberated a site of other mass murders. Where is the logic in that?

One reason given for the European Commission’s refusal was that the mass murders carried out by Communist regimes were not “genocide”. Matthew Newman, the EU justice spokesman, said: “The bottom line is, obviously, what they [the communist regimes] did was horrendous, but communist regimes did not target ethnic minorities.” It seems that the industrialized slaughter of millions of human beings is genocide only if its victims belong to a particular ethnic minority.

This means, of course, that a massive part of the Nazi Holocaust was not genocide. It was genocidal for the Nazis to kill the Jews and the Gypsies – but their slaughter of homosexuals, political dissidents, the handicapped, were just regular murders. WTF?

From the Guardian article:

According to Lithuania, whose foreign minister leads the campaign to create a new law, the EU’s understanding of genocide should be extended to include crimes against groups defined by “social status or political convictions”.

Andrius Grikienis, a spokesman for Lithuania’s mission to the EU, said: “During the first years of Soviet occupation, Lithuania lost more than 780,000 of its residents. 444,000 fled Lithuania or were repatriated, 275,697 were deported to the gulag or exile, 21,556 resistance fighters and their supporters were killed and 25,000 died on the front.”

By comparison, he said: “More than 200,000 citizens of Jewish origin were killed by Nazis and their collaborators.”

Do the math, then tell me: why is it okay to deny the murder of 780,000 people, but wrong to deny the murder of 200,0000? Where’s the logic in that?

Lithuania wants the definition of genocide to be extended to include crimes against groups defined by “social status or political convictions”. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. But West European politicians are suggesting that this movement is an attempt to trivialize or justify anti-semitism. So it’s “anti-semetic” to say the murder of 780,000 Lithuanian dissidents and “enemies of the state” was genocide? I suppose there is a kind of twisted logic to this. It’s okay to say the murder of thousands of people in the WTC Twin Towers was an act of “terrorism”, but the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Iraq or Afghanistan is not “terrorism”. I think it was Noam Chomsky who said the control of language is thought control. So be careful what you think about!

BNP membership list leaked again. Nazis worried.

Wikileaks.org released a membership list for the British National Party 2007-8. And they’ve done it again: a list of BNP members in 2009.

Unfortunately, Wikileaks.org is currently offline while its owners seek funds (please support generously) and the Wayback machine doesn’t have anything that recent from the site. But I can provide a Mediafire.com link to a .xls spreadsheet of the list (I checked the link today, 25 Jan 2010, and it appears to be okay. Though I cannot verify the accuracy of the info).

I also found a pretty map, courtesy of the Guardian, showing BNP membership in the UK. You can download the map here.

Oh yeah, and check out this:it’s a BNP member proximity search. You type in your postcode, and it gives you the names and postcodes of BNP members close to you. The site was originally created with the 2007-8 list, but it’s been updated to include data from the 2009 leak.  EDIT: the proximity search is no longer online. Just as well really, the info was 5 to 7 years out of date, many of the dweebs will have gone over to Ukip or something now. (24 May 2014).

Some people might say that some of the stuff I’ve linked to invades the privacy of innocent people. To which I reply: Bollocks! No members of the BNP deserve to be called innocent. Though of course I would try to discourage anyone from using the info to do anything illegal. Crime doesn’t pay!!

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