Friday 17 August 2018

The None Exclusivity of Death

by Les May

IT would appear that my reaction to Margaret Hodge’s preposterous comments about possibly facing a Labour party inquiry about her conduct bearing comparison with being a Jew in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, is shared by others.


Labour MP Ben Sellers caught the right note of ridicule when he tweeted;


The other day I had to queue for five minutes for a poor-quality mince pie and a Bovril at a local non-league ground.  It was a bit like being rounded up by Pinochet’s forces and getting a bullet through the temple in Chile’s national stadium in 1973.’

In response Anna Turley MP tweeted:

The Holocaust didn’t happen in a vacuum.  It happened because ordinary people turned a blind eye to racism and anti-Semitism.’

Sounds good doesn’t it? But wait a minute it’s we ‘ordinary people’ who cannot see this supposed antisemitism in the Labour party.  We are constantly being told it’s there, but we struggle to see any examples of it in the Labour supporters we know.

Anti-semitism is expressed as hatred of JewsThat hatred manifests itself through discrimination, verbal and physical attacks on Jews, and attacks on their individual or collective property.  These are the province of the adherents to extreme right wing parties, not members of the Labour party.   They are not the sort of thing that come to light years later by someone trawling the web looking for something to make a fuss about in an attempt to discredit Corbyn.  They are what we and the Jewish Chronicle should be worried about.  For Anna Turley to even hint that we are ‘turning a blind eye’ is arrogant in the extreme.

As for the ‘ordinary people’ in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 is Anna Turley sure, and I mean REALLY sure, that if she had been one of them she would have opposed the Nazis?  This is not a question for Anna Turley alone, it is one that we should all ask ourselves.  It’s one thing to live in the UK in 2018 where the cost of expressing opposition to Nazi ideology is small to non-existent and doing it in Germany in 1933 to 1945 where it would get you a visit from the Gestapo and much worse.

Nor am I willing to privilege the killing of Margaret Hodge’s antecedents over the murder of millions of Russians and Poles, or the death of even one Allied serviceman who fought to liberate Europe from the Nazis.  All these deaths have their origin in Nazi ideology.  Let us not forget this.

Recently Jeremy Corbyn tweeted:

The nation state law sponsored by @Netanyahu's government discriminates against Israel's Palestinian minority. I stand with the tens of thousands of Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel demonstrating for equal rights at the weekend in Tel Aviv.”

Long may he continue to be able to do so and still remain a member of the Labour party.

Anna Turley’s Wiki CV makes interesting reading. Do you think she qualifies as an ‘ordinary person’?


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