Wednesday 10 July 2019

One rule for all!



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Any Labour Party member bold or stupid enough to make or be associated with negative statements about Israel, the Zionist politics that support Israel or who questions any piece of the present Holocaust narrative has been disciplined by the Party. Ex, See or See.
England has Jewish citizens and Israel is a British ally, these two facts somehow get conflated. Israel is a separate sovereign state, has been so for seventy years, and is likely to remain a country, and a rich and powerful one at that, for the foreseeable future. Britain’s Jewish citizens, like all Brits, have rights to protection from discrimination, hate speech and the like that derive from their British citizenship and are wholly unrelated to Israel.
England and the US are also allies. When President Trump visited England he was met by huge protests and  signs calling Trump a racist, a warmonger (in that I see little difference between Trump and other recent US presidents) dangerous and unAmerican and by large balloons portraying Trump on a toilet, in a diaper and as a penis. I’m an American, not a fan of Trump’s and it is fine with me if the British choose to protest his presence, although as far as I can tell such protests have no effect. Trump blithely misinterpreted the demonstrations as crowds greeting him, brilliantly diverting the media into a discussion about how that was not so.
Now imagine if the British held up similar signs insulting Netanyahu or Israel. Could they call Netanyahu a racist or ‘unIsraeli?’ Would anyone dare hold blimps of Netanyahu as a penis? Who would be kicked out of the Labour Party? Who would be prosecuted for hate speech or defamation?  And what would this have to do with Britain’s Jewish citizens?
Why does Britain insist that there are certain ‘rules’ for criticizing Israel, as contained in the international holocaust definition of anti Semitism (the only racism that has its own special set of rules, apparently Blacks can go it on their own)  but not for critics of Americans? Sadly, the US is close on England’s heels in implementing similar free speech penalties. Is there to be one rule for Jews and another rule for the rest of humanity?

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   
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