A Comment On Anti-Semitism

The good thing about having your own blog is that you can comment without restriction on the contents of other people's blogs and publications.  In fact, it was on that basis that this blog was started 12 years ago, after the AWL began censoring my comments to their website.  It not only means that you can post such comments, but if and when others do engage in such censorship, you can also point that out, and thereby raise the question of what is it exactly they are afraid, in allowing such discussion.

Over the last couple of days, I have been engaged in a discussion on Andrew Coates blog, about the suspension of Chris Williamson, and the related issue of anti-Semitism.  You can see the original post, and the discussion surrounding it - here.  For some reason, a comment that I posted on four separate occasions then failed to appear.  It could be a technical issue related to the spam filter, or whatever, but it contained no hyperlinks and so on.  A further different comment did appear.  Then when I posted a comment saying that the earlier comment had not appeared, despite being posted four times, that comment did not appear either.  Then when I posted another comment pointing out that not only had the earlier comment still not appeared, but that the comment relating to that failure to appear had itself not appeared, this last comment, plus the one submitted two minutes earlier, both appeared.

The more substantial comment still has not appeared, despite me raising its non-appearance.  So, no worries, having described that sequence of events, here is the comment that was submitted four times, and which did not appear.  It is a response to SueR.

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Sue,

How is herding Native Americans on to reservations, and their murder by industrial weapons - gatling guns etc - qualitatively different? Churchill also said he was in favour of using poison gas against "barbarians" etc.

In the end mass murder of a particular ethnic group by whatever methods are used is qualitatively the same thing - genocide, and your attempts to differentiate one type of genocide from another, by these strained qualifications about the method by which the genocide is undertaken, simply prove the point that in so doing, you diminish one genocide, by simply comparing it to some even worse genocide! I doubt the thousands of Native Americans murdered in that process would be impressed by your nuanced definition.

Its also illustrated by the fact that Jim Denham clearly cannot rationally answer the points put to him whereby in order to make that comparison, he also must have an extraordinarily thick skin in order to claim that the murder of these thousands of Native Americans and other aboriginals is somehow "not so bad" compared to the Holocaust, or that it requires those making that argument to imply that the lives of some human beings are more valuable than those of others, which is inherently racist.

The same applies to his statement about

"Encoded versions of that policy – via “right of return” for example – should not be tolerated in the labour movement."

What this means is that he supports racist immigration controls in the case of Israel, whereas he would oppose such racist immigration controls elsewhere. That means he is himself guilty of anti-Semitism, because in doing so, he wants the State of Israel, to be treated differently than any other state on the planet, the very thing that the Left anti-Semites do! He wants the state of Israel to have the right to exist as a confessional state, i.e. to be an explicitly Jewish state. But, no socialist would argue that they want, say Northern Ireland to be an explicitly Presbyterian State, and thereby to prevent Catholics having the right to move there, or that Presbyterians wherever they are in the world, should be considered citizens of that state, and with a right to move there, over and above that of persons of other faiths and none! No one would argue that Britain should have the right to declare itself a white Christian state, and to deny others from migrating there, so as to undermine its racial purity. But, that is precisely what Jim Denham proposes in insisting that the former inhabitants of Palestine, who have been turned into refugees should have no right to return to their homes and lands that were stolen from them.

Of course, the state of Israel, as with any other state, has the right to defend its borders, including with the right, as other states do, by the introduction of racist immigration controls. What is peculiar here, however, is that in nearly every other case socialists oppose such immigration controls, precisely because they are racist, and act to divide the working-class as an international class. I say, in nearly every other case, because, for example, during the Falklands War, as one of the members of the WSL opposing the idiot anti-imperialism of the Thornett Faction, I argued that in the case of the Falklands the tiny population of the Falklands could be overrun by just a few thousand Argentinian "immigrants", and so in such cases, its necessary, as Trotsky said to "Learn to Think?" and not just blindly apply mantras. But, that is not the case in relation to Israel. It would not be overrun by the return even of 75,000 Palestinians.

So, Jim Denham himself ends up being guilty of anti-Semitism, because his actual demands amount to demanding that the state of Israel be treated differently to other states, where we would oppose both the implementation of immigration controls, specifically those targeted at a specific ethnic or religious group, as even liberals did, in relation to Trump's attempts to deny Muslims the right to enter the US, and where we would oppose a state being a confessional state that attempts to impose some kind of "racial" or religious purity, as the foundation of the state. In so doing, that approach is not only anti-Semitic by treating Israel differently to every other state, but it is also implicitly racist, because it implies support for the idea that other ethnic groups that might want to migrate to Israel, on an equal basis, are somehow inferior and would undermine that racial/religious purity.