I read an article in last week's Big Issue magazine print edition,
https://www.bigissue.com/latest/susan-neiman-the-brexit-lessons-we-can-learn-from-postwar-germany/
that I initially warmed to but ended up feeling potentially misled by.
Susan Neiman: the Brexit lessons we can learn from postwar Germany
There
will be life after Brexit, probably. But like Germany in 1945 we face a
day of reckoning before fixing our fractured country. Author and
adopted Berliner Susan Neiman looks to the future,
the article led, but ended up with an apparent slagging off of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party leader on account of what I regard as hearsay evidence from someone who does not seem to have as intimate a grasp of what life is like in his constituency as I have. (My former residence bordered onto Jeremy Corbyn's Islington North constituency, and I had print copy and online access to the local freebie newspaper of that constituency; and that
Islington Tribune was/is the sibling of my local freebie, the
Camden New Journal.)
A German nation's "dark history" and the current sins of the State of Israel
The Big Issue interview article includes:
An American Jew who grew up in the South during the Civil Rights
movement, Neiman has spent most of her adult life in Berlin, where she
gained a close-up view of a society grappling with its own dark history.
“By accepting that they were the perpetrators of the war and not the
victims, they were able to reach a consensus and restore some national
pride,” she says.
The process is called ‘working off the past’, or, as the Germans put
it, ‘vergangenheitsbewältigung’. Yes, it’s a silly and excessively long
word. But might we Brits be able to learn something from it?
The Big Issue: You say we should have debated the sins of colonialism in the Brexit debate. What good would that have done anyone?
Susan Neiman: Conservatives will always say there is nothing to be
gained in opening up old wounds – that you just destroy national pride
and cause divisions. What I think Germany shows is that a country can go
through that process and come out the better for it....
In 1985 president Richard von Weizsäcke made a speech in which he
described May 8 1945 as a day of liberation. That might seem an obvious
statement to the rest of us but, until then, Germans had described it as
a day of capitulation.....
and pull-quote:
"There is a real aversion to discussing the sins of the British Empire,
but ends up with an attack on Jeremy Corbyn, framing him as leader of an antisemitic political party:
You describe yourself as a social democrat. You are also Jewish. What do you make of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party?
I was delighted when he was first elected because I heard him
described as Britain’s Bernie Sanders. I began by dismissing the
accounts of anti-Semitism as the right trying to smear their enemies.
But I read more and more about it and became more concerned because I
have met many British anti-Semites that you don’t tend to find too much
in Germany any more. And they dress it up as anti-Zionism.
Well I am as opposed to Netanyahu’s policies as much as anyone but to
use that struggle as a vehicle for covert anti-Semitism images – or not
even very covert – and not being able to distinguish between Jews and
the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is very pernicious. An
awful lot of Jews left the Labour Party with tears. Labour is naturally a
home for Jewish people – Jews proportionally skew left more than any
other religion. Corbyn seems to have been pig-headed about the whole
issue.
Do you regard him as an anti-Semite?
I don’t think he is an anti-Semite. I think he might be a Little
Englander who has a problem with cosmopolitanism. The problem is when
you’re a politician what counts is not the contents of your soul but
what you do in public. [End of article — i.e., 'the last word'.]
I would argue that Neiman's statement that she opposes "Netanyahu's policies as much as anyone" lacks substance; it avoids actual spelling out of what Israeli Government is doing under Netanyahu's leadership. It also avoids the fact that anti-Zionist Jews such as
Tony Greenstein are pilloried by those Jews who would find it too painful to attack or even have mentioned the immediately current sins of the State of Israel. They call Tony Greenstein and other anti-Zionist Jews, "self-hating Jews."
Tony Greenstein has been fearlessly flagging up the sins of the Israeli state for quite a few years now, as a
search link of his website reveals.
Like
most diaspora Jews, Emily Henochowicz, was brought up to believe that
Arabs are intent on injuring or killing any Jew they come across and
likewise that Israel was a place of refuge for all Jews against
oppression. They didn’t tell her that Jews who mix with Arabs are termed
‘Arab lover’ (just as civil rights protesters in the USA were called
n***** lovers). ...
And
you get the measure of the Zionist sickness, because it is a sickness,
that one of these anonymous contributors to a discussion list wished she
had lost her other eye too. I also have some sick Zios who write
wishing that I'd died or my family had in Auschwitz, all the while
professing a belief in 'the Jewish people.'
Emily
lost an eye at the Qualandiya check point when an Israeli border guard
fired a tear gas cannister straight at her. As is normal with the
Israeli army an ‘inquiry’ has cleared the army of any wrong doing. No
doubt if the pressure becomes too great then Israel will hold a new
inquiry, depending on whether the United States is concerned enough over
the maiming of its citizen to protest. Certainly the ‘Jewish’ state is
unconcerned.
Source: https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2010/07/day-american-jewish-art-student-emily.html
The major confusion and connection between matters of how 'antisemitism' and anti-Zionism have been conflated by the Israeli State and its supporters has been in what has been labelled the 'International Holocaust Remembrance Association' (IHRA) definition of antisemitism that lobbyists have had adopted by local authorities and political parties.
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/search?q=ihra
Closing this blog post on a positive note about Jeremy Corbyn
I close with an extract from a Camden New Journal-published letter from March 2019:
Attacks on Jeremy Corbyn from his fellow party members amaze me
21 March, 2019
• THE attacks on Jeremy Corbyn, made by some
members of his own party, continue to amaze me. The latest comes from
Cllr Richard Olszewski, (Leading Labour councillor tells Jeremy Corbyn to resign, March 14).
I am no longer a member of the Labour Party but I have
known Jeremy for many years as an MP. Our church, of which he is not a
member, is in his constituency.
On numerous occasions he could not have been more
personally helpful in dealing with asylum seekers, the homeless and
those with other pressing problems. I have never known him to go in for
unkind comment about any section of our national community.
No doubt he is not perfect – who is – but the Labour
Party ought to be glad that it has now, at its head, someone of obvious
integrity and single-minded concern for the whole of our community.
Young people can see these qualities, which is why so many of them are
attracted to his sort of Labour Party.
BRUCE KENT
N4
Blog post by Alan Wheatley, a member of Green Party of England & Wales.
I take the view that an attack on anti-Zionists of other political parties shrouded in terms of 'antisemitism' is really an attack on all anti-Zionists and freedom of speech. Having quoted Tony Greenstein, I should also add though, that he has been
hugely disappointed at Labour Party Corbyn/McDonnell leadership response to 'fake antitsemitism' smears.
My focus in this blog post has been to flag up an instance of how unexamined 'facts' lead to such portrayals as 'Corbyn is antisemitic'. Of course, how Corbyn and McDonnell handle such attacks is a further development that may have a lot to do with the
panic that may ensue from the dominance and pro-Zionism of the right wing news media and even the kind of organisation that is nominally a 'charity'.
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2017/03/campaign-against-antisemitism-is.html
See also
https://www.facebook.com/ShahrarAliGreenParty/posts/1327179840786844
