Joel Singer, a veteran Israeli peace negotiator, critically reviews Seth Anziska’s book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, forcefully rejecting Anziska’s central claim that the peace process has ‘prevented Palestine’. Anziska replies to Singer in this issue of Fathom here. Seth Anziska’s revisionist book, Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo, tells an alternative story to the conventional wisdom regarding the political road that led from the Camp David Accords to the Oslo Agreement (with a detour to the intervening 1982 Lebanon War, which appears to not completely fit organically within his story). As someone who was deeply involved in both ends of this…
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When shoegazing sees only jackboots
There’s an old saying: “You can’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.” But no amount of walking in these – by the looks of it, fairly uncomfortable – shoes will get one any closer to understanding the lunacy of two of this week’s controversies running rough-show over reason itself. Yes, it has been a week of racist shoes. We have arrived in a world where one can combine expressions of white supremacy with a decent insole. Exhibit A: Sports shoe company Adidas has withdrawn a design and apologised for the offence caused by releasing an all-white sneaker during Black History Month. In fact the shoe –…
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This Week in Labour News (2/9/2019)
As always, feel free to post OT links in the comments section.
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Turning Point turnoff
To the extent that the far Left and Corbyn need to be challenged on American and British campuses– and they do need to be– these are not the people to do it. What a crew. Asked by a member of the audience about nationalism in Western politics, [Candace] Owens brought up Adolf Hitler. “I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word ‘nationalism’,” Owens said. “I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want. … Whenever we say nationalism, the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler.” “He was a national socialist,” she continued.…
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Venezuela: The Left manages to blame the Jews
The stinking cesspit that passes for contemporary left wing politics has an outlet valve through which the rancid slurry of its antisemitic propaganda leaks into the mainstream. This dripping fetid faucet is called The Canary. This week’s diarrhetic squirt of toxic bilge is a false narrative so bold in its distortion that it could fairly be called a lie and a blood libel. They ‘reported’: Guaidó is far from the fresh-faced, heroic character presented to you by outlets like BBC News or the Guardian.. On 27 January, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu officially recognised Guaidó as Venezuelan interim president. Israel became one of many colonial powers, including the US and the UK, to support the West’s…
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The Man Going After “Disruptive Zionist” Luciana Berger
The Red Roar Tweets: BREAKING: In the same week Luciana Berger has spoken out on antisemitism, members in her CLP have proposed a motion of no confidence in her, saying “our MP is continually using the media to criticise the man we all want to be prime minister”. pic.twitter.com/VeDr7NIwRJ — The Red Roar (@TheRedRoar) February 7, 2019 Note there’s a man with the same name as the proposer of one of the motions who posts on Facebook about Corbyn, the Labour Party and Liverpool Wavertree. He’s a real charmer: Note what he shares about Margaret Hodge: It seems like he wants to do something horrible to what he calls “traitorous…
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2018 Worst Year for Antisemitic Incidents in UK
The Community Security Trust has published their annual statistics on antisemitic incidents. This from The Times: A record number of antisemitic incidents was reported last year, prompting warnings of a “general atmosphere of intolerance and prejudice” in Britain. Previous rises in antisemitic hate crime, particularly in 2009 and 2014, have come after Israel was involved in a major conflict, but the level is now consistently high, according to the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Jewish incidents. It is the third year in a row in which antisemitic hate crime has reached a record level. The trust recorded 1,652 incidents last year, a 16 per cent increase on the 1,420 incidents…
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Richard Burgon wins libel case against the Sun
If pushed to say something positive about Richard Burgon, the best I could come up with is – he’s not as bad as Chris Williamson. However I was not surprised that he won his libel case against the Sun, and thought Justice Dingemans’ summing up seemed judicious. Here, via the Guardian, is a reminder of the background: The high court in London ruled that claims in the story, which ran under the headline “Reich and Roll: Labour’s justice boss ridiculed after he joins a heavy metal band that delights in Nazi symbols”, had caused the shadow justice secretary significant harm. The article, published in April 2017, reported on Burgon’s decision…
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The Policing of Thought & Expression in Britain Today
Following from my piece last week in which I complained about the growing trend of people being contacted by law-enforcement officers (or to put it another way “The Police”) after they’d expressed opinions of one sort or another – as they are legally entitled to do in a free and democratic country – online via their blogs or social media, I feel it is necessary to write about this topic again because there’s been another incident. For the full background read the twitter thread belonging to Margaret Nelson, the woman whose morning was interrupted by the Thought Police. Actually, calling them “the thought police” diminishes the severity and urgency…
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Trump and North Korea: then and now
As President Trump prepares to deliver his 2019 State of the Union address to Congress tonight, I want to recall a moving moment from his 2018 speech. Now Ji Seong-ho is among those who have noticed a sharp change of tone by Trump when it comes to the North Korean regime. Since Ji’s starring role in last year’s State of the Union, Trump has said almost nothing about the plight of the North Korean people, more than 100,000 of whom are estimated to be held in hard-labor prison camps. Instead, the president has abruptly shifted from a “fire and fury” condemnation of the North to an unprecedented strategy of engagement…
