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    Open Letter to the Guardian’s Gary Younge – Why the Double Standards Over Israeli Apartheid? Tony G Archived Message

    Posted by MikeD on June 1, 2019, 10:42 am

    Open Letter to the Guardian’s Gary Younge – Why the Double Standards Over Israeli Apartheid?

    https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/06/open-letter-to-guardians-gary-younge.html

    Only today Pete Willsman has been suspended for stating the obvious, namely that the Israeli Embassy is behind this pernicious campaign. Chris Williamson MP has also been suspended for doubting the fake anti-Semitism allegations.

    You cannot be unaware of the expulsion of Marc Wadsworth, a long-standing anti-racist activist, who was accused of ‘anti-Semitism’ by Ruth Smeeth MP, who is a ‘protected’ asset of the United States. About all of this you have nothing to say.
    What surprised me was you that you drew a link between the false anti-Semitism campaign and the very real racism of New Labour and its predecessors. A racism going back to the 1968 Kenya Asian Immigration Act.

    You spoke of how a ‘mass-sensitisation to and mobilisation against prejudice both within the party and without is to be welcomed.’and then wondered ‘where that sensitivity was when senior figures in the party were burqa-baiting, accusing the children of asylum seekers of “swamping” schools...’ in the course of which you mentioned the role of Tom Watson in a race baiting campaign.

    In fact you were too kind. You will no doubt remember the unlamented former Immigration Minister Phil Woolas who based his whole election campaign in 2010 on ‘making the white folks angry’. Far from Tom Watson condemning him for his campaign when the High Court removed Woolas Watson wrote that he had ‘lost sleep’ over ‘poor Phil’

    You seem to see a contradiction between the concern over the concern over ‘anti-Semitism’ and New Labour’s racist record. There is only a contradiction if the concern about anti-Semitism is genuine. I suggest it is anything but.

    I find it difficult to believe that you are so naive. It is completely consistent that those who are using ‘anti-Semitism’ as a weapon against Corbyn and the Left are the same people who demonised, pauperised and removed legal aid from asylum seekers.

    Tom Watson, Ian Austin and the Labour Right aren’t in the slightest concerned about genuine racism or anti-Semitism. What concerns them is opposition to Israel. That is why they campaigned so vociferously for the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism which conflates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism...

    ...Younge referenced a 2002 article Terms of abuse whose subheading was ‘If the left wants to win over the pro-Israeli lobby, it will have to start taking anti-semitism seriously’. Would Younge have written a similar article that if the left wanted to win over the pro-Apartheid lobby it must start taking anti-White racism seriously? What has anti-Semitism got to do with opposition to Zionism and Israel?

    ... It surely cannot have passed his notice that the people who are responsible for past racism in the Labour Party, and he mentions Tom Watson, are precisely the same people who are driving the fake anti-Semitism campaign?
    Or put it another way. Why is it that the racist Tory press, from the Daily Mail to the Sun are so unanimous in condemning Labour ‘anti-Semitism’? The very same press that employed Katie Hopkins.

    ...When one of the few Black anti-racist journalists in Britain feels that anti-Semitism, a minor prejudice at worst, is more important than state racism in Britain and when he ignores where this campaign has com from then there is a problem of political cowardice at best.
    Gary Younge is not a Chuka Ummuna figure. Chuka is someone who just happens to be Black. Like his Zionist heroes he is an active participant in racism. He supported the 2014 Immigration Act and Theresa May’s hostile environment policy. No one could accuse Gary Younge of that and yet, in upholding the fake claims of ‘anti-Semitism’ he has given comfort to the racists of the Israel lobby.

    ...Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews not hatred of Jewish racism.

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