John Mann's "charity" is funded by the William Pears Group, which is one of London's most notorious slum landlords.
Mann assaulted an elderly person. That assault was shown on television. Why has he not been arrested?
At the very least, if Labour expels Ken Livingstone, then it ought also to expel John Mann.
If Ken Livingstone did not exist, Nick Cohen would have to invent him.
ReplyDeleteWhereas no one would invent Nick Cohen. Or John Mann.
DeleteMr Livingstone rather proves Nick Cohen's thesis about the Far Left.
ReplyDeleteHe wouldn't know what the Left was.
DeleteHe's actually very left-wing. His whole argument is that the anti-American Left has embraced movements-such as anti-Semitic Islamic currents-that are not left-wing.
ReplyDeleteEndorsing Boris Johnson - twice - is not "very left-wing".
DeleteTime was when his column was much of the reason why I read The Observer. But he lost it a long time ago.
Utter rubbish.
DeleteCohen used to be on the left. He used to hold identical views to Jeremy Corbyn - anti-war, pro-Palestinian etc.
Around 2002 he started moving right. Compare and contrast his opposition to the war in Afghanistan to his support for the war in Iraq and you'll see it's he who has the problem, not us.
"But then I suppose that if you are a representative of a state that has been illegally occupying other people's land since 1967, which has murdered, tortured, impoverished and expropriated those others, which has invaded the Lebanon and stood by while Palestinians are massacred in camps, which has passed racial laws and which was, at the time of my meeting, in the process of watching a theocratic faction emerge that would view with approval the assassination of a secular Prime Minister, then money is all you have to offer." - Nick Cohen, Jewish Quarterly, Autumn 1997
ReplyDeleteChris.
ReplyDeletePeter Hitchens makes the same point as Cohen in that quote-that the Left hates Israel because it's a fundamentally conservative idea.
It's a European colony based on a recreation of an ancient nation, it is fiercely protective of its sovereignty, it is firmly monocultural and indeed restricts immigration on that basis.
There is nothing remotely monocultural about Israel! It is now absolutely riven between the religious and the secular, and between the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. Precisely because of its immigration policies.
DeleteThe Left used to support Israel. It was Israel that changed.
Of which European country is Israel a colony? Or is Europe now a country? Either way the Israelis wouldn't thank for calling them that.
DeleteThere is nothing remotely monocultural about Israel!
ReplyDeleteIt's a Jewish state that only allows Jews to move there.
That's about as monocultural as it's possible to get.
Where to begin?
DeletePerhaps with the fact that fewer than half of the Jews in Israel now have any European background, with that number continuing to decline very rapidly indeed.
Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, for its is they, speak Arabic at home and are at least as culturally Arab as secular Ashkenazim, a collapsing section of Israeli society, are culturally European or American.
More and more of the rest come from backgrounds that either actively hated Europe through many centuries there (not without cause, it must be said), or barely noticed that they were there.
There is now an Arab majority (not an Arabic-speaking Jewish one, a Palestinian one) in half the territory of Israel. Not the West Bank, pre-1967 Israel. Its north and south are predominantly Palestinian Arab, in many places overwhelmingly or entirely that. Berlin, London and New York liberals don't have very many children and don't want to live anywhere too hard.
DeleteWell, exactly. If Israel was ever some European outpost, then it is not remotely like that now, and it is becoming even less so all the time.
DeleteThe Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox are multiplying rapidly, and even the mainstream Sephardim, whatever else may be said of them, are not remotely products of nineteenth-century Berlin or twentieth-century New York. The people like that are simply dying out.
Those who set up Israel came from Europe, Lindsay. That's the point. That's why it's the last European colony on Earth.
ReplyDeleteIf Jews were culturally assimilated in all the places they live, there'd have been no need for Zionism.
Anon-the Arab minority in Israel has been a big fear for Israel for a long time, and they have been begging more Jews around the world to move there to counterbalance it.
Precisely to preserve Israel as a Jewish state and prevent it becoming multicultural.
And they are not coming. In fact, a lot of people like that are leaving Israel to its Sephardim, its Haredim (a lot of whom are virulently anti-Zionist) and its Arabs, which last include the ancient indigenous Christians, who are the founders and the mainstays of modern Palestinian identity.
DeleteWhy would the kind of Jews that you like wish to live in a country that no party can ever govern without the support of parties of the Religious Far Right? That has been the electoral reality for quite some time. One of those parties will provide a Prime Minister soon enough.
Paleocons have no time for Israel, traditionalist Tories couldn't abide it and probably still can't. It is neocons and Thatcherites who made it an article of faith and carried that over into New Labour and the Clintons. Say what you like about Donald Trump but he has promised neutrality towards Israel. Like Bernie Sanders, who needs no lectures on the history.
ReplyDeleteThe Left's hatred for Israel is understandable since it stands in contradiction to everything they believe.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, if multiculturalism worked, there'd be no need for Zionism or for Israel.
Like Orwell said in 1941, left-wing intellectuals hated Britain for a similar reason. Britain's existence as a successful nation stood in contradiction to everything socialists believed.
Britain had an established religion, yet was more religiously tolerant than any secular state, it had an unelected Head of State yet was more free and law-governed country than any Continental republic, it had a potent class system yet all could rise to the top of it, it was capitalist yet remarkably un-corrupt and had an Empire but is not hated by most of its former subjects.
Utter drivel. An Old Etonian dilettante who wrote novels for 14-year-olds, which is why he is well-liked. Read either of the two famous ones now, in maturity. They are not very good.
Delete"Not corrupt"? I ask you. "All could rise to the top"? "Not hated by most of its former subjects"? He was a faux-Left house ni*ger, the Nick Cohen of his day.
The pro-war "Left" proclaimed themselves Orwell's heirs over Iraq. That says it all about him. Anyone could rise to the top? Free and law-governed? Un-corrupt? For you maybe, posh boy!
DeletePlay our cards right, and we can have corpses dug up and put on trial, like that of Cromwell (the butcher of the Levellers and the Diggers), over Orgreave, which is the next one after Hillsborough. They will stand trial for every wrong ever committed since 1066.
DeleteAll right, we might not quite manage that. But we can come pretty damn close to it.
Thatcher was cremated. To stop a Cromwell-style trial when everything about the miners' strike and then Hillsborough came out?
DeleteIt's a thought, isn't it?
DeleteOrwell is a children's writer and not a good one. The rule for whether anything is left-wing is whether you could get away with saying it from the platform of the Durham Miners' Gala. That Britain was "un-corrupt", "free and law-governed", and enabled anyone to rise to the top? Enough said.
ReplyDeleteThere is of course a long and ongoing history of poshness on the Left, and of seeing the ancestral tradition as the source of inspiration for the righting of wrongs. But nothing could be further from any of that than the denial that the problems exist. Just look at who liked him then, and just look at who likes him now. As you put it, enough said.
DeleteHillsborough had nothing to do with Thatcher, you loon.
ReplyDeleteThe event itself didn't, at least not directly. Although of course it was an expression of the tone that her personality and Government had set. But the subsequent conspiracy involved her intimately. Of course it did.
DeleteYou are being cruel to that Anonymous boy in some public school dormitory and still quoting Orwell with a straight face. Nothing bad has ever happened in his life so he thinks that nothing bad ever happens to anyone never mind whole population groups over centuries. He very recently discovered that there was no bogeyman under his bed so he thinks there are no bad people anywhere. He'll learn.
ReplyDeleteOne would hope.
DeleteIt is open question whether Orwell himself was in earnest, or whether he was mocking the people who thought that he was.