As the most left-wing candidate you should get my vote. But you won't. And here's why.
Congratulations!
By securing a place on the ballot to become the next Labour leader you have put a spring in the step of many party members and trade unionists who feel that you embody their values better than any other candidate. (You embody only some of mine, trampling on some others, but I will get to that.)
You represent a clear alternative to the suffocating consensus that says there is no alternative to neoliberalism: marketisation, deregulation, privatisation, financialisation, an assault on the bargaining power of labor, regressive tax regimes, and cuts to welfare.
You will not tell us to be ‘intensely relaxed’ about people getting ‘filthy rich’ and you will not sneer at the trade union movement.
You are acutely aware that the transformation of European social democracy into a political force pursuing only a slightly kinder and a slightly gentler neoliberalism has caused the erosion of the emotional connection between the party and the working-class.
And you know that neoliberalism has eroded local democracy and the public realm, pushing aside actors other than those at the center, and then micro-managing Britain through a grim and relentless bureaucratising cult of quasi-government bodies.
On that basis you will secure the votes of many party members and trade unionists.
But you won’t get my vote.
You won’t get it because Labour’s best traditions also include anti-fascism and internationalism while your support – to me, inexplicable and shameful – for the fascistic and antisemitic forces of Hezbollah and Hamas flies in the face of those traditions. In particular, your full-throated cheer-leading for the vicious antisemitic Islamist Raed Salah is a deal-breaker.
Why did you lend your support to Raed Salah? No, he is not a ‘critic of Israel’, but a straight-up Jew hater.
You said in 2012, ‘Salah is far from a dangerous man’, even though the left-wing, anti-Netanyahu Israeli newspaper of record, Ha’aretz, reported that Salah was first charged with inciting anti-Jewish racism and violence in January 2008.
You said ‘Salah is a very honoured citizen’, even though Salah was found guilty of spreading the blood libel – the classic antisemitic slander that Jews use the blood of gentile children to make their bread. He did so during a speech on 16 February 2007 in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Wadi Joz.
I mean, just listen to Salah: ‘We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children’s blood’, he said. ‘Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the holy bread.’ (The UK Appeal Court decided that ‘We do not find this comment could be taken to be anything other than a reference to the blood libel against Jews.’ It also decided that this would ‘offend and distress Israeli Jews and the wider Jewish community.’)
You said: ‘Salah represents his people extremely well’, even though after the 9/11 terrorist attacks Salah wrote this in the October 5, 2001 issue of the weekly Sawt al-Haq w’al-Huriyya (Voice of Justice and Freedom): ‘A suitable way was found to warn the 4,000 Jews who work every day at the Twin Towers to be absent from their work on September 11, 2001, and this is really what happened! Were 4,000 Jewish clerks absent [from their jobs] by chance, or was there another reason? At the same time, no such warning reached the 2,000 Muslims who worked every day in the Twin Towers, and therefore there were hundreds of Muslim victims.’
You said ‘Salah’s is a voice that must be heard’ even though he has called homosexuality a ‘great crime’ and recently [preached that ‘Jerusalem will soon become the capital of the global caliphate’ which will ‘spread justice throughout the land after it was filled with injustice by America, the Zionist enterprise, the Batiniyya, reactionism, Paganism and the Crusaders.’ i.e. everyone who does not follow his brand of Sunni Islam.
You said ‘I look forward to giving you tea on the terrace because you deserve it!’, even though the Islamic Movement [the northern branch of which Salah heads] has eulogised Osama bin Laden and Salah has incited Muslims against Jews by writing incendiary lies such as this: ‘The unique mover wanted to carry out the bombings in Washington and New York in order to provide the Israeli establishment with a way out of its entanglements.’ Who do you think he meant by ‘the unique mover’?
Why is that kind of conspiratorial antisemitism, dripping with threat and menace, worthy of tea on the terrace?
And it isn’t just a problem with Salah, is it? You said it was ‘my pleasure and my honour’ to host ‘our friends from Hezbollah and our friends from Hamas’ in the Commons.
Really?
Why do you not care that the Hamas Charter states that ‘Islam will obliterate Israel’ and enjoins all good Muslims to kill Jews, whom it blames for all the wars and revolutions in classic antisemitic fashion?
Why don’t you challenge your ‘friends in Hamas’ about the inclusion in their Charter of this canonical Hadith: ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’
And why are Hezbollah your friends? They are an antisemitic Islamist goose-stepping ‘Party of God’ who persecute (and assassinate) liberals and democrats in Lebanon whenever they can. The Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said ‘If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.’ (NY Times, May 23, 2004, p. 15, section 2, column 1.) Your ‘friends’ were enthusiastically slaughtering Syrian civilians on behalf of the Assad regime long before ISIS or Jabhat Al-Nusra joined the fray.
Yes, you will say I am part of the Israel lobby and people should pay no heed. Yes, I work at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre. But here’s the thing. I have the same views now about the Israel-Palestine conflict as I did when I was a member of the Socialist Organiser Editorial Board and you were with Labour Briefing back in the 1980s. (I think our two organisations may have even ‘fused’ at some point, though those days are a bit hazy now.)
My views have not changed since I was a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism. They are the same views I had when we debated each other at Birmingham University some years ago: I believe in two states for two people, a secure Israel and a viable Palestine, a democratic solution to an unresolved national question based on mutual recognition and support for the right to national self-determination of both peoples.
I edit a journal, Fathom, which publishes many voices critical of the current Israeli government, from the Israeli left, from Israel’s Arab citizens, and from Palestinians.
I just do not understand how you can support so unthinkingly those political forces which oppose to their dying breath everything – literally, everything – the labour movement has ever stood for: trade union rights, freedom of speech and organisation, women’s equality, gay and lesbian rights, anti-racism, the enlightenment, and reason.
But as long as you do support those forces you will not get my vote. As long as you do, I will just have to remain politically homeless. Which is a pity, because there you are on the TV screen, talking with élan like a proper social democrat about full employment.
I want to cheer you on. Can you respond in such a way that I can?
Alan Johnson is the editor of Fathom – For a deeper understanding of Israel and the region, and works for the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM)
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497 Responses to “An open letter to Jeremy Corbyn”
Duncan_McFarlane
Their current tax raising powers are trivial and only apply to the basic rate of income tax. No UK government, Labour or Conservative, has raised the basic rate of income tax in decades as it’d by political suicide. Ditto for the Labour/Lib Dem coalition Scottish Executive before the SNP won a Holyrood election.
They could unfreeze the council tax. I think they should ,even though it’d be unpopular, because local government services are going to get slashed otherwise.
The contentious centrist
“Arab voters are advancing in large numbers towards voting places”
This is a mistranslation. Here’s what Netanyahu said in Hebrew:
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152778935532076&set=vb.268108602075&type=2&theater
“..The Arab voters are coming to the voting stations in huge numbers. The Left NGO’s are busing them there… Get up and go to the voting stations, bring your friends and family members… vote for “Mahal” [Likud]..”
If you have a problem with what he’s saying at the very least you should rely on what he actually said and not quote a translation meant to “aggressify” the content of the comment so as better to fit the pity narrative.
JAMES MCGIBBON
Hardly matters how trivial they should do what they can if they are serious. They are only interested in independence. They will do all they can to blame the English and that will become exaustive until the Scottish people say hey what the fuçk are you doing you have the powers and use them.
Duncan_McFarlane
Thanks for the correct translation – appreciated – but doesn’t seem much different in meaning. Still basically Netanyahu saying Israeli Jews should stop the Arabs from winning the election for “the left” – still talking of Arab voters as a threat.
If Israeli Arabs were really considered equal citizens, the fact that they were Arabs would not have been worth mentioning for Netanyau. The fact it was shows Israeli Arabs are not considered legitimate or equal Israeli citizens.
Duncan_McFarlane
Abstract words and claims about ethics are one thing. Actions are another. In practice US and Israeli forces have often targeted civilians in their wars.
US veterans of the Korean war have recounted gunning down massive groups of refugees crossing the parallell, just on the off-chance that one of them might have been a North Korean spy. And the orders from the highest level to do this have been found.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/korea_usa_01.shtml
In Vietnam there were the “Free Fire Zones” where anyone present was assumed to be a combatant and fired on, even when they clearly weren’t. Again , on the orders of superiors. And there was the CIA’s Phoenix Program of kidnapping, torture and murder of combatants and civilians alike, including school teachers. (see e.g ‘The Vietnam Wars’ by Professor Marilyn B. Young)
In Latin America from the 19th century to present the US has backed military coups, military dictatorships, trained, armed and funded the worst human rights abusers, including those who committed genocide against the native Indians in Guatemala ; those who massacred whole villages in El Salvador, cutting the stomachs of children open with knives. And even tortured, raped and murdered American nuns – and even that didn’t stop the arms, money and political support from Washington continuing (see e.g Professor Greg Grandin’s book ‘Empire’s Workshop’)
In Iraq in the 1991 war the US air force targeted civilian targets as much as military ones – the water system, the sewage treatment system, power stations, killing thousands of civilians directly and tens to hundreds of thousands indirectly etc (see ‘Beyond The Storm’ edited by Moushabeck et al)
In Iraq in the 2003 war the Coalition used cluster munitions in the middle of towns and cities (something they have since correctly condemned as a war crime when Syrian forces do it in Syria), along with napalm (initially denied on the disingenuous grounds that it was a new chemical formula, despite the effects being very similar) and White Phosphorus (revealed by the US military’s own magazines to being used to “flush out” insurgents – as a chemical weapon, not just an illuminant, as US military press officers had tried to claim).
The ‘El Salvador option’ of native torture and death squads targeting people on mere suspicion, and civilians and combatants alike, was publicly rejected in the occupation of Iraq, but actually put into practice, e.g with the Iraqi Police Commandos, trained by Colonel (by this time retired) James Steele, who had trained the death squads in Salvador in the 80s.
https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/168/37037.html
In both Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo torture by US forces was widespread by methods including electrocution, beatings, asphyxiation, breaking arms and legs, and battering prisoners heads of metal doors and concrete floors. We know this from US veterans of the wars and of service in Guantanamo like Captain Ian fishback, Sergeant Samuel Provance, Sean Baker and Heather Cerveny, among others
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41035-2004May19.html
http://www.scotsman.com/news/world/soldier-left-brain-damaged-after-playing-unruly-prisoner-at-guant-225-namo-1-532722
http://www.informationliberation.com/test.php?id=16992 (reproduced from the Independent newspaper 14th October 2006)
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k6/introduction/2.htm#_Toc121910421
http://www.hrw.org/news/2005/05/20/afghanistan-killing-and-torture-us-predate-abu-ghraib
And then there were all the Coalition assaults on cities. In one alone – Fallujah in april 2004 – 600 of the 900 Iraqis killed were found by Iraqi Body Count’s analysis of media reports to have been civilians, 300 of them women and children.
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/press-releases/9/
Western aid workers and Iraqi doctors who were present during the assault reported US snipers firing so many times at clearly marked ambulances and unarmed civilians that they said there was no way it could be anything but deliberate.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3653223.stm
The dozens of other assaults – in other cities – e.g Samarra were similar
http://www.globalexchange.org/news/civilians-bear-brunt-samarra-pacified
So i’m afraid the claim that western forces don’t target civilians or torture, and that when they do it’s a “few soldiers out of control” are false. The rhetoric of western governments may be more progressive and humane – their actions frequently are not