I am sorry.
For someone who knows the scourge of oppression and racism all too well, it is important that I make an unequivocal apology for statements and ideas that I have foolishly endorsed in the past.
The manner and tone of what I wrote in haste is not excusable. With the understanding of the issues I have now I would never have posted them. I have to own up to the fact that ignorance is not a defence.
http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/jewish-news-exclusive-naz-shah-my-apology-to-the-jewish-community/
From the Awesome Conversation —
FB friend: Just a political move of a Jew hater!
Editor: I’m not so certain. People dead-end on bad habits, including bad habits of mind. In the past month, she has been the guest at a private seder without issues; she has made a public apology that reads as authentic statement . . . I think the world surrounding her has changed, and Naz Shah MP has set off in a new direction.
FB Friend: yes, the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder! It’s good to be optimistic! i am skeptical though!
Editor: I’ve just been to her page, and you can read the anti-Semitic spew that comes out in her crowd. Naz Shah with her apology and her soul has betrayed that mob, so she’s going to have to gather herself and face it. Good news if she has courage, she’ll have decent company and plenty of it.
Not only Naz Shah has been plunged into soul searching, the entire Labour Party has been lit up like summer noon by no less liberal a spotlight than The Guardian:
Lady Neuberger claimed the issue in Labour was “attached to Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader”, and “an issue within the hard left”.
John Woodcock, MP and former chair of the Labour Friends of Israel, said: “The handling of this has been a mess. But the most important thing is that the Labour leadership properly acknowledges now the scale of the antisemitism problem that is growing in the party.
Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013) has weighed in on George Galloway’s Hitlerian method — leveraging “Jew hate” (start with the stew — anger, fear, jealousy, ignorance, impoverishment, suspicion, shame — and stir it up) into political power and comfortable digs — and legacy in Bradford:
Perhaps that cycling-up of the anti-Semitic phantasmagoria that has duped and shortchanged Bradford will stop now with Naz Shah’s turnaround and the Labour Party’s (perhaps garment-rending) introspection as regards its tolerance for bigotry (anti-Semitic cant generally signals greater antipathy and contempt for additional others matched to the speaker’s own avarice and penchant for social control and related plunder).
Underestimated: the length of the shadows cast across the Left / Far Left (on this blog, the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left and Syndicate Red Brown Green) by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and their deliberate, intense, and medieval defamation of Jewry in service to whipping their mobs and using that energy to build the aristocracies that would then ride them into the ground.
Cited and Related Reference
Addendum – April 29, 2016, 8:17 a.m., EST
The conversation rolls on:
Facebook Friend: It is claimed that Shah’s apology was much more contrite before Seamas Milne took his blue pencil to it, speaking specifically about antisemetism.
BackChannels: Then she’s now wrestling with conscience and her political position. Gosh, I would like to speak to her for a few minutes! 🙂 When we “talk politics” we seldom talk “political psychology”, but behind all of this — behind Galloway, behind the disinforming and misshaping of Bradford’s political perception — there has been at work the malignant narcissism that manipulates mobs, that reaches for their sorrows and then gives the same a plate of readymade answers to what bothers them. Counter to that: the reparative vision — and once gotten, it’s impossible to give it back or give it up.
The latest on Seumas:
Posted to YouTube April 29, 2016
Related: http://order-order.com/2016/04/29/seumas-milne-praises-hamas/
Related (Posted Both At and After Publication and Addendum Dates):
Malik, Kenan. “The British Left’s ‘Jewish Problem'”. The New York Times, May 3, 2016.
Mosbacher, Michael. “The Stalinist Past of Corbyn’s Strategist.” Standpoint, December 2015.
Omer-Jackaman. “The Left, Anti-Zionism & Anti-Semitism.” London Progressive Journal, March 28, 2015.
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