Once again the far-right and Zionists allied against Muslims. This time it was the annual al-Quds march in support of the oppressed Palestinians. The EDL thugs united with Zionists in support of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the oppression of Palestinians. MPACUK welcomes the revelation of the alliance between the two fascist groupings. Together they chanted “We hate Muslims” while waving Israeli flags when the Muslim marchers walked by with banners stating; ‘Justice for the murdered children of Gaza’, ‘We are all Palestinians’, ‘Boycott Israel’ and ‘Judaism rejects the Zionist state’.

“Together eh?”. “Zionists” probably write all the MPAC UK articles to make MPAC UK appear stupid(er)

That specific ethnic community, or as we should say, many but not all of the Jews of the East End felt under threat from Nazi Germany in particular, but also the rise of fascism in Italy and what was starting to happen in Spain. Just prior to ‘Cable Street’ the CP had actually called a demo on that day at that time for Trafalgar Square about the Spanish Civil War – so mcu for it all being about suckering in an ethnic community. It was only the activity of a small group of people on the ground, most of whom were Jews themselves, that pulled out the organisational stops of the CP to call for a demo at Gardiner’s Corner to stop Mosley.

My parents were quite clear over and over again explaining to me and my brother and to the various anarchist, trotskyist, apolitical, liberal, rightwing friends who trooped through our house that in 1936, when they were 17, they felt desperate. They were both being attacked on the streets and the news felt that the rise of fascism abroad was getting nearer and nearer. You can’t defy that or defend yourself against that on your own. The choice they made was to go with the Communist Party for the specific reason that they were the only group which seemed to them at the time to be taking that seriously. What’s more, they wanted to find solutions to the poverty and deprivation (that’s a more modern word) to what was happening all over the world but also right there to everyone in the east end, and in the major industrial centres of Britain. Again, they asked, who had some kind of global analysis for all people (not just Jews) that seemed at that time, in that context to make sense.

Now, as it happens, as they would say over and over again, (they left the CP in 1957) it turned out to be wrong in some respects ie their loyalty and belief in Stalin and the Soviet Union was entirely misplaced. This was a matter of anger and regret equally mixed for them. (They visited the GDR in 1957). But the idea that there was something ‘outside’ about the hard left (ie the CP) and they were ‘inside’ as the ‘ethnic community’ completly misreads and misrepresents the situation. From the earliest formulation of ideas of liberal, socialist, anarchist and communist thought, Jews of very many differnt kinds have been involved – posh assimilated Jews, religious Jews, nationalistic Jews, poverty stricken Jews, Western, eastern, southern jews and so on. These Jews were intrinsic to the ideas of the left, part of the blend of peasant ideas of communalism, industrial workers’ ideas of co-operation, religious ideas of brotherhood and the community of poverty etc etc, not some mass waiting to be converted like gullible sheep. Jews offered those strands of left ideas that I’ve mentioned another set of ideas, some philosophical/theoretical and empirical (eg Marx) but also some to do with oppression, racism, persecution and therefore liberation.

I think David T has sorted you out on your ‘freedom to go anywhere’ business. We’re not all free to go anywhere anytime and shout anything at anyone any time. If I go and stand outside the Hassidim’s houses in Stamford Hill and scream at them, fuck off to Israel (let’s say) the police will take me away and say that I am trying to cause a disorder or that I’m provoking people etc. The legislation about creating situations that are likely to cause disorder has been around in various forms for hundreds of years. What’s important is that neither the Home Office nor the police in September/October 1936 decided that a quasi-military march of people whose mission was to say that the Jews of the east end had no right to be there, could or should be stopped.

You misundertand the difference between marches in the south and and the north of Ireland. The reason why they’re different is that in the north, the Protestants created a Protestant state which excluded Catholics, while the ascendancy Protestants have always done very well in the Republic. In the north, the marches were marches that celebrated the defeat and ongoing discrimination against Catholics. They said, ‘you lost, and we’re going to make sure you stay defeated.’ That doesn’t apply in the south.

http://current.com/items/90919637_far-right-group-return-to-birmingham.htm

I have nothing in common with anyone on this blog but some limited sense of shared nationality. I follow it because I think most people here are generally intelligent and well-intentioned and have interesting things to say. The frightening thing is the blind spot about snobbery. Everybody is up in arms about racism, homophobia, sexism but call someone chavscum or a dirty northern monkey and you get a free pass. I despise it, not because I’m a liberal but because I got it all the time when I lived there and still tend to sympathise with people on the receiving end – even the less worthy ones. Is this so hard to understand? I’m sure you’d understand if I said I was a black professor, who never got racist comments, but got infuriated when he heard poorer blacks copping that kind of crap.

Monaco? The only European country I lived in was Ireland – never heard the Irish maul each other the way the British do – and I like them much more than the British as a result. Off to bed now, night, night. Try to be less defensive, not every comment is personal ;-)

I’ve never met a ‘hard left’ person, Jewish or otherwise, who doesn’t , if asked, describe Trotsky, Chomsky and Hobsbawm as Jews. There are people here and elsewhere (not of the ‘hard left’) who would describe them in all sorts of different ways. I, for one, ‘can’t be Jewish’ according to some posters here and indeed according to one, I must be ‘an animal’. In actual fact, for the last hundred years there have been thousands of Jews like Trotsky, Chomsky and Hobsbawm. Maybe in the next hundred years there will be many fewer and it was a transitional stage between one kind of Jew and a disappearance of some sort, but in that transitional stage, lasting as I say a hundred years, there have been thousands of people of very similar background (ie people of Germany, Austria, France, Poland, Russia and all the countries of eastern Europe with Jewish parents) roughly behaving and believing the things that Trotsky or Chomsky or Hobsbawm have believed in. The argument about this keeps getting hung up on whether such people were ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. That’s interesting but has very little to do with whether they are/were Jews or not.

“Maybe you have to be an immigrant or British and domiciled abroad just to see how ugly and impoverished these stereotyped attitudes are.”

Being an immigrant certainly makes me more sensitive to the default anti-white position of naive white liberals and some non-white members of our ‘victim group communities’ who proudly harbour a massive chip on their shoulders.

And my background certainly helps me appreciate the stupidity of white liberals who assume that white people have a monopoly on bigotry and racism.

The irony is that their attitudes are so unbelievably racist on so many levels.

Who here hasn’t heard white lefties coo about how wonderful hard-working immigrants are so much better than the lazy, drunken ‘chavs’ of our council estates?

Or how ‘young’ and ‘vibrant’ immigrant communities are culturally ‘enriching’ Britain’s bland, indefinable and worthless indigenous culture.

Bloody racists!

So I take it you dissent from Fred Kite’s view that you can tell your average EDF member hasn’t been to university?

You find scum in all the social strata. Assuming the EDF are the well-intentioned, representative lot some commenters are claiming them to be, then chances are that some members will be middle-class and some will have had a university education. I make no claim to the contrary. But I find it illuminating that having referred to the EDF as “scum”, I’m accused of making an observation about the social status and educational achievements of EDF members when of course the only people doing this are those who seek to defend EDF by invoking assumed working class roots.

Being working-class is no protection against being scum, by the way. Just ask any genuinely working-class person. You’ll find your average working-class man and woman is considerably more trenchant in their condemnation of “scum” than chattering-class liberals who live a safe distance from such scum and never have to interact with such scum….at least, they only have to interact with a decidedly better class of scum.

Perhaps you’ve lost your grasp on all this since you’ve been living in Monaco?