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”
Daz K
Quite frankly, your unwillingness to label it a global Islamist movement and instead label it ‘organised crime’ shows the intellectual bankruptcy on these issues. You say these movements tend to crop up in power vacuums, yet ignore the fact that groups such has Hizb ut-Tahrir, Al-Muhajiroun, the Muslim Brotherhood and many other organisations have planned for years to undermine democracy and human rights not only in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia, but also here in European and other Western nations for decades now. The liberal-left (of whom I class myself a member) was totally and utterly blindsided by this issue in the late 90’s early 2000’s as shedding the light of criticism on the Muslim community made many feel uncomfortable and made people uneasy of being labelled a bigot. The aims of Islamists are widely stated, they wish to create a state, or caliphate which submits to the doctrines of Islam as taken from canon in both the Quran and Hadith. In fact, you only need to read the definition of Islamism below to see how silly your point about ‘organised crime’ was:
Islamism
noun Is·lam·ism is-ˈlä-ˌmi-zəm, iz-, -ˈla-; ˈiz-lə-
Definition:
1: the faith, doctrine, or cause of Islam
2: a popular reform movement advocating the reordering of government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam
I also highly recommend reading Maajid Nawaz’s excellent autobiography ‘radical’ for a further, in depth look at the Islamist ideals and movement.
And here we get to where you claim the far-left isn’t siding up with Islamists, Islamofascists and religious bigots, just yesterday David Cameron gave a very, very lucid and well briefed speech on non-violent extremism (I am no fan of DC I must add), however within hours, Owen Jones was on the defensive regarding this issue responding to a basic, Daily Mail-esque version of Cameron’s speech. In this he tries to explain away Jihadism and Islamism as results of alienation or Western foreign policy, nowhere in this article does he address that the doctrines of Islam and the consequences of belief have adverse effects on a person, he also lied that ISIS didn’t exist before the invasion of Iraq, they did:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/19/david-cameron-islamic-extremists-british-muslims
I initially noticed these issues with Owen Jones after Lee Rigby’s murder, instead of addressing the issue of why two men from London ran over and then hacked the head of an unarmed serviceman on our capitals streets, he focused on the secondary symptom, he focused his ire at the EDL and leapt to the defence of what he sees as a persecuted minority, I would advise you check out these tweets, not in one does he address the role of Islam in intolerance, bigotry, homophobia, hatred of apostates and violence in the world:
https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40owenjones84%20Islam&src=typd
Jones also speaks at UAF rallies, as did Michael Adebolajo https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3A%40owenjones84%20Islam&src=typd
There are vast other incidents of the left supporting/siding/enabling Islamism in society, Len McCluskey’s support for Lutfur Rahman in recent weeks, the unwillingness to accept the plot to take over schools by extremists, the search for excuses about our society when young men join a murderous death cult like ISIS and the smearing of Charlie Hebdo journalists as racists, all shocking, and giving people excuses they don’t ask for.
I myself have followed these issues for years, I have travelled throughout the Middle-east, I have friends who are hunted by their families for leaving the Muslim faith, I have read the doctrines of the faith. I do not need to be patronised that I have ‘swallowed simplistic narratives’. If anyone has swallowed simple narratives it is the fellow travellers of Islamists from the liberal-left who swallow the Islamist victim narrative, the identity politics, the politics of grievance and the half truths which have allowed this pernicious ideology to fester to a point where it is now killing hundreds every week.
Daz K
What on earth does this overly long diatribe (of things I was already aware of) have to do with my point?
tamimisledus
Hamas? Is that the organisation whose aim is to destroy Israel and promotes the killing of every Jew? The organisation of muslims who, in their world of delusions, project their own plans for ethnic cleansing of non-muslims onto non-muslims, so that they can use that delusion as a pretext for ethnic cleansing of non-muslims throughout the entire world? muslims like those who, since the creation of islam, have been using the fiction of the koran to provide justification for their war to impose the totalitarian, supremacist, anti-democratic, anti-humanist, anti-women, anti-progressive, anti-life, superstitious, ignorant, primitive doctrine of islam on the entire world?
Or maybe it is just some hamas of your creation, a delusion existing only in your mind?
The contentious centrist
“And no i have never said right wing voters shouldn’t vote. Don’t pretend i have.”
No you wouldn’t say that openly but it was implied from your interpretation of Netanyahu’s words as threatening to Arabs and calling on ” Israeli Jews should stop the Arabs from winning the election for “the left” .You convey the impression that he was calling for VIOLENTLY stopping the Arab voters from voting, as if he was inciting them against another constituency instead of just asking them to come out and vote.
Forgive me if I read to much into your words. I’m only emulating your inclination to insert the worst, most damning meanings into any Israel action or Israeli leader’s words.
***
“If Israeli Arabs were really equal in practice and treated as equal in Israel, why would he mention that Arabs were coming to vote in large numbers at all?”
So your complaint boils down to the argument that because a distinct demographic constituency is explicitly named as an incentive for other, rival, constituencies to beat them in the elections, that means that constituency is not “equal in practice and treated as equal”?
stephenb
Its the neocon sensible left o:))