Apology Excepted?

Diane Abbott has apologised, which has been considered enough when right-wing Labour MPs have been racist if that has even been treated as a problem, but it is not enough when she does it. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Travellers were the oppressed group that Abbott wronged, yet the views of the anti-Traveller fanatic John Mann are sought, aired, and acted upon. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there. Along with the views of Margaret Hodge, who called for an all-white housing policy in the Barking and Dagenham Borough that contained her constituency. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there. And along with the views of Jake Wallis Simons, who simply made up a Palestinian Muslim threat to bomb a church near Bethlehem; it is in fact the people running Israel who attack churches, not that you will have heard. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission is still taken seriously, yet it sacked its black and disabled staff first, it flatly refused to investigate discrimination and worse against Muslims in the Conservative Party, and it managed to find nothing wrong in the Government's conduct of the Windrush scandal. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Unlike Abbott, no one on the Labour front bench was among the mere six Labour MPs who voted against the 2014 Immigration Act that caused the Windrush scandal. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there. No action has been taken against anyone named in the Forde Report, including those who racially abused Abbott. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

And then there is David Baddiel, an unfunny comedian from the olden days when he tagged along with Rob Newman and Frank Skinner, yet who has managed to appoint himself as this country's preeminent public intellectual, always interviewed either on his own or alongside people who were in awe of him, never questioned on his assertion that anti-Semitism was like cancer while all other forms of racism were no more than shingles, and with his abuse of Jason Lee and of the Irish forgotten along with his abuse of the disabled. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.

Hierarchies of racism are not peculiar to Britain. At least half of Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern or North African origin. They look like Arabs, they spoke Arabic at home until very recently, some of them still do, and their great texts were written in Arabic but using Hebrew script. In general, Israeli public life does not reflect this.

But then, the Israeli elite knows why it has the support that it does in the West. Israel's whiteness is seen as its attraction. Its flag has been prominent at Far Right rallies for at least 20 years. It attracts everyone from Neil Masterson to those Afrikaner nationalists who have converted to Judaism and moved to the West Bank. The problem is that at least half of Jews in Israel are brown and not remotely culturally European. So the brown has to be kept down.

That said, and on the assumption that they will know their place, Israel takes everyone from East Africans who have invented a religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, to Peruvian Indians converted to Judaism and put on the plane as a single act. Even the Pashtun are now classified as a Lost Tribe with a view to airlifting them to Israel in future, since at least they are not Arabs, and Arabs are the majority in half of the land area within the 1948 borders.

As for white Jews in Israel, they now include Russians who refuse to eat kosher food and who insist on taking their Israeli Defence Force oaths on the New Testament alone, which latter is a very long way from an Orthodox Christianity that is anything but Marcionite. They now include Russian Nazis.

Yes, Nazis, such as display the Israeli flag wherever they congregate. The ones in Ukraine are genuinely affronted that Israel has stopped arming them, which it did used to do. Israel has commendably refused to sanction itself by sanctioning Russia, either. Some Western outpost. And so much for Volodymyr Zelensky's Jewishness. Theodor Herzl held that once the Jewish State had been created, then no one who chose to remain in the Diaspora would still be entitled to call themselves Jewish. Think on.

Although if they move to Israel, then while brown Jews have it a lot harder there than brown people tend to do in Britain, black Jews have it so bad that they may as well be black here. The Ethiopian Jews, almost all of whom now live in Israel, run the standard North Atlantic anti-black gamut, perhaps attributable to the American backgrounds of many white Israelis. Discrimination in education, discrimination in housing, sterilisation, Police brutality, all the greatest hits of the capitalist system founded on the transatlantic slave trade.

In Britain, black women are four times likelier to die in childbirth, black men are seven times likelier to be stopped and searched, black people are seven times likelier to die in Police custody, black people are far less likely to be homeowners, only six black men have ever been Labour MPs, there are only three at the moment, only two black men currently sit as Labour Peers, there are fewer than 100 black men as Labour Councillors, no black man this century has sat either as a Labour Member of the London Assembly or as a member of the party's National Executive Committee, and Abbott receives an average of 51 out of every 100 abusive tweets sent to MPs on any given day. This time last year, we had a First Lord of the Treasury who did not know how percentages or probabilities worked, and whose alcoholism and cocaine use were legendary, yet Abbott is mocked incessantly for once having been caught on the spot and for once having had a mojito on the Tube. The capitalist system founded on the transatlantic slave trade.

Until the early 1960s, 20 years after the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was the principal form of racism in Britain rather than in the Empire, and it was very, very prevalent. But Jews in Britain today do not face any form of structural racism. If they do, then what is it? Are they more likely to be poor, or unemployed, or poorly housed, or undereducated, or ill, or incarcerated, or to die early, or to be excluded from political participation, or what?

That is black people, and Muslims, and, yes, the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people to whom Abbott did indeed owe the apology that she has extended. Yet no one is even talking about, much less from or for, the GRT communities. All the attention is to the largely self-appointed voices of those who have a very peculiar definition of not counting. That is the hierarchy of racism, right there.