This is an absolutely stunning admission about the IHRA definition in Owen Jones’ book, but lacking any moral explanation for years of Corbyn’s and Milne’s activism clearly violating an internationally agreed definition of antisemitism.
It actually doesn’t matter if that belief had no foundation in reality, Corbyn didn’t want to support a definition of antisemitism because he knew he had personally engaged in antisemitic behaviour by that definition. The fact that it wasn’t used to punish him doesn’t change that
As leader in charge of an organisation, Corbyn tried to change a definition of antisemitism, not to protect Jews, but to protect his position as leader of the Labour Party. That’s what direct responsibility for institutional racism looks like.
And while publicly the response was “it’s all a smear”, privately the response was “I’ve broken these rules so we shouldn’t pass them”, and as it turns out, the journalist reporting this as fact knew this at the time but was also dismissing it as smears.
If I ever get the chance to interview Owen, most of my questions will be “why didn’t you say this at the time?”, and judging from the reviews, that seems to be the overwhelming journalistic consensus.
Always felt like Owen’s pre-Corbyn career was summarised by a feeling that “if only more people knew the truth about socialism, they’d support it”. That sense of duty to informing and educating was seemingly replaced by an intention to keep certain truths hidden from public view.
It’s true that if Owen has admitted at the time said Corbyn was opposed to IHRA because he was afraid he had contravened it, Owen’s own side would have torn him apart. But it would have been the truth. What we were fed at the time was lies and spin.
I think of all the Jewish people who were smeared as hysterical malicious liars for complaining about situations that apparently everyone already explicitly understood at face value. They are owed a lifetime of apologies.
I haven’t even addressed the fact that fears of disciplinary action were dismissed by his allies reassuring him that they held too much executive power for that to ever happen. This is really damning stuff.
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I want all dictatorships to be replaced with democracies.
As a liberal democrat, by definition, I oppose all regimes.
I support revolutions to overthrow regimes.
Put “regime change fanatic” on my tombstone, that’s fine.
I am a regime change fanatic & you @aaronjmate are an accomplice to Assad’s war crimes, who advocated for him at the UN, at the invitation of the Russian government, and you and your colleagues, for pay, were the propaganda wing of a regime engaged in industrial human slaughter.
@aaronjmate Both of us are still relatively young, but I need you to understand this, I promise you, I will spend the rest of my life making sure none of you ever truly know of a moment of peace.
And when I am in Syria, I will be searching through Mukhabarat documents for your names.
What is happening in Syria today is happening in spite of those foreign policy decisions, and in spite of those who presented Assad’s victory as the only possible resolution to the Syrian civil war.
Now the conflict is no longer in the hands of the western powers.
The US & Russia effectively came to an agreement that Assad should stay in 2015, and 9 years later, the consequences of that monstrous, despicable decision are rippling out across Syria.
These people always fundamentally misunderstood why Syrians tried to topple the regime.
Imagine having a discussion about Lebanese sovereignty vis-a-vis Hezbollah without even acknowledging Hezbollah’s very existence violates my country’s sovereignty.
I’m insulting you because you are no longer even attempting to disguise your deference to Hezbollah.
You aren’t talking about Lebanon in this, you’re talking about Hezbollah, no matter how much you want to backpedal when called out on it.
Yes, you are right that Israel violates Lebanese sovereignty and we Lebanese want that to end permanently, but you aren’t even paying lip service to the fact that our entire state has been hijacked by an Iranian proxy terrorist organisation, that has murdered our people for generations, launched a war without the consent of the country, which it then lost, at huge cost to the Lebanese people, and your only comment on this so far is to complain that Hezbollah don’t get favourable enough terms in their defeat agreement.
I’m so beyond respectful disagreement on this, if you want to have your arse kissed, go back on Owen Jones’ show, where you will get the kind of ill-informed ignorance that will never challenge anything you say.
Denying being deferential to Hezbollah/Iran while wholesale accepting Iran’s “resistance” narrative for financing, training and arming groups who brutalise and oppress their native populations.
There is such a deep rot in academia on this issue, it’s beyond absurd.
For context on how seismic Hezbollah’s decapitation is politically, from the perspective of most of the Middle East the Iranian “Resistance Axis”, of which Hezbollah is a critical component, has never “lost” a war, and have come out with some kind of victory in every conflict.
That image of invulnerability was bought and paid for mostly with Arab blood, with very little domestic impact on Iran, despite the vast sums it was pumping into its proxies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen.
Hezbollah was the crown jewel of the IRGC network.
The battle-hardened, totally asymmetric domination Hezbollah had over not just Lebanon but the wider Levant region, has had its entire command and control structure from bottom to top systematically liquidated in the space of a week. The people enforcing the status quo are gone.