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 Jews.
That
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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