Wait, just to be clear, he was taking Corbyn's side? I don't know anything about Graeber whatsoever (I honestly thought he was some CS pioneer I had forgotten before clicking the link), but that's a pretty bad look
There were plenty of examples [0] of unpleasant statements coming from people on a Labour party platform or at their events, which were not dealt with sufficiently quickly or seriously by the Labour Party. They could’ve made this problem go away by just having a proper policy and dealing with these cases swiftly and appropriately. They didn’t.
[0] https://news.sky.com/story/12-shocking-claims-of-abuse-in-le...
"The 860-page document claims that “an abnormal intensity of factional opposition to the party leader” had “inhibited the proper functioning of the Labour Party bureaucracy” and contributed to “a litany of mistakes” in dealing with antisemitism, which it admits was a serious problem in the party."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-r...
Meanwhile, the Tory party gets a free pass on their rampant Antisemitism and stoking hatred of immigrants.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/labour-hq-used-facebook-a...
The centrist and right-wing of the Labour party have a lot to answer for and have clearly displayed that they will stick at nothing to ensure that:
* There is no Green New Deal and the climate crisis is going to happen * Power remains in the hands of few incompetent fail sons and their sociopathic remoras.
You’re the leader of Labour; your party is being criticised in very damaging ways and (for the sake of argument) it’s because your internal processes are being sabotaged. What do you do? Maybe... look into it? Fix it? Change the people responsible if that’s what it takes? At best, it was weak leadership. At worst, it was a reluctance to discipline political allies.
I think it's pretty clear that Rachel Reeves, Ian Austin et al are not allies when they are funnelling money and faking ad spend, and leaking lies to the press specifically to stop labour from winning.
(I'm not referring to all claims of antisemitism here as lies by the way, but many of the stories that broke in the Guardian were later redacted as bunk)
It's like, what are the priorities here?
We’re not talking about a ranked value system here, we’re talking about an organisation that can do multiple things at the same time.
I don't care if it was exasperated by "saboteurs". If Corbyn can't adopt this basic moral position that all humans ought to adopt, I don't care to hear any excuses at all.
Edit: you seemed to have silently edited your comment to change your argument, so I’ll do the same:
> No. The "real solution" is to oppose anti-semitism with all due expediency.
And the labour leaks show that a faction of the party was purposefully undermining labours ability to do this against the wishes of the leadership. Do you accept this?
> I don't care if it was exasperated by "saboteurs". If Corbyn can't adopt this basic moral position that all humans ought to adopt, I don't care to hear any excuses at all.
That makes no sense: are you really arguing that Corbyn’s political enemies’ actions lead you to hate Corbyn’s moral position, even when it ostensibly matches your own?
Maybe you should have another think before you reply
Conspiracy theories, whataboutism, insults -- these are less than nothing, yet the spineless Corbyn and his supporters dare claim leadership over better people, and fabricate whiny paranoid stories of their persecution. Given that there are liberals and leftists who are not comfortable with pointless evil, everything else is insignificant.
Corbynite Labour is the party you vote for to fight fascism and antisemitism. But instead media parrots like yourself prefer to ignore any nuance because - I suspect - it suits your conservative political ideology.
It’s destructive thought patterns like the ones you are displaying which have allowed Boris Johnson into power. I think you’ll find that if Jewish people in the UK (and I sincerely And truly hope this never, ever happens - to Jews, or any other vulnerable group) is ever treated like they have been in the past, it won’t be from people like Corbyn, it’ll be by people like Patel.
But, you know, you do you.
We would have seen this fiction in USA too, if voters would have just forgotten that Bernie is actually Jewish.
It’s not unreasonable to hold a leader somewhat responsible - it’s not like Trump isn’t criticised (rightly) for things done by other people on his watch.
It is interesting to imagine holding the national leader of a political party responsible for her or his own actions, let alone the antics of other party members. Whatever UK has done to make this possible, we should do. Only, I suspect it will turn into yet another double standard.
Meanwhile, over in actual Israel they're busy setting up an apartheid state and enacting race based policies.
It's simply not possible to be consistently anti racist without being accused of anti-semitism. Rebecca Long Bailey getting fired is simply the latest illustration of that.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2019/12/05/jeremy-corbyn...
Clearly you could decide that you will hold a leader to be (somewhat) responsible simply by virtue of them being the leader, as a matter of principle. However, it seems quite possible to at least _imagine_ situations where a leader is "fatally" undermined by people within their own organisation. Given that, it is worth considering whether that may have been the situation for Corbyn, and if so where culpability lies.
To complete your point, I would contend that this isn't the key issue with Trump - it isn't obvious to me that generalising over these situations is really that useful.
The UK is several decades into successive governments with centre-right leanings to some level or another. New Labour were mayyyyybe centre-left, but Blair had to drag them as far right as he could to get anointed by the media.
I'd be interested to hear how your mind was made up though. The UK benefits from having some pretty strong social systems built into its core but the media seems to be practically one-note in a way I haven't experienced in the other countries I've lived (all European/North American) and the sheer fixation on finding ways to push negative write-ups on him was exhausting. You're getting the same counterarguments because it was pretty much the same things coming up again and again.
Brown, Miliband, Kinnock and the voting reform referendum all got similar carpet bombing treatment; albeit to nowhere near the same levels of venom (although the attacks on Brown and his eye were pretty cruel iirc).
yes, it's a bad look, but one of his few (another one was the infantile Occupy movement).
but, to be factual, anti-semitism in the UK Labour Party has been a thing since the 20th century, and culminated with the recent leader Corbyn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_UK_Labour_...
Anti semitism is a thing in society at large. It's bigger than it is in society in the Conservative Party. It's smaller than it is in society at large in the Labour party, but not entirely non-existent.
The reason it became such an "issue" with Corbyn was about Israel attempting to shield itself from Corbyn's criticism (e.g. land expansion, abuse of palestinians, highly racist policies) and because others found it useful to jump on Israel's bandwagon. It's not because it was common. It wasn't.
Tom Watson (deputy leader, never a corbyn fan) was one of those people.
He even went as far as visiting Isaac Herzog in Israel with a contingent of MPs (all of whom loathed Corbyn) to "apologize" for the "anti semitism problem" in the Labour party: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/nov/15/tom-watson-...
Isaac Herzog, then leader of the Israeli Labour party, is famous for declaring that "race mixing is a tragedy" and refusing to apologize for it. This is who the concerned "anti racists" allied themselves with - an Israeli obsessed with racial purity: https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/isaac-herzogs-remarks-...
The hypocrisy and pearl clutching on this issue was absolutely staggering - especially by the guardian. The fact that something like this can be used to take down an honest politician in this way gives us a terrifying glimpse into the future.
this was an entirely avoidable mess. but Mr Corbyn and his team were so bad at politics that they managed to not only make this non-issue (to the UK voters) an important one, but also be defined by it.
i honestly could not believe such bad politics would ever survive. and of course it didn't. Corbyn is now again a backbencher and his group has been replaced.
* A politician that will speak out against all injustices.
* A politician that will speak out against injustice only when it is politically expedient.
The reason people liked Corbyn was because he was the former. Why do they want the former? Well, because any day you might be the one thrown under a bus because it is politically expedient to do so. In a world where every politician is apparently a lying snake, he was somebody you could trust to be true to his word and true to his principles.
It's not like he spent all of his time on Palestinian issues and none on anything else. This isn't about how he allocated his time at all. The reason this blew up is because Israel decided to engage in the nuclear propaganda option because he had already spoken out against injustice in Palestine and wasn't going to apologize for it. Consequently, they threw everything they had at him and as it turns out they had a multitude of weapons they could deploy.
Note that if he had just shut up about Palestinian issues after becoming leader they would not have left him alone. They had a destroy at all costs mentality. As did many others who were similarly evil with powerful weapons at their disposal (Lord Rothermere, etc.).
This is probably the primary reason we can't have honest, principled politicians (what you described as "bad"). The system will filter them out - usually before they even get to that level and as we can see it will attempt to destroy them if they do.
To have avoided this scenario he would have had to grovel and apologize profusely for speaking out against Palestinian rights in the past. That's the only way this would have gone away. US politicians will do this kind of thing to appease powerful lobbies (e.g. NRA) and as we all know they are a lovely bunch of highly principled human beings who are loved by their people.
The US is actually a good example of what happens over the long term when people instinctively just try to pick the lesser evil and all integrity eventually gets washed out of politics by powerful, entrenched, wealthy groups. It's a long, dark, winding road to some kind of populist fascist leader - an incompetent one if you're lucky, a competent one if you are not.
Here's Jeremy Corbyn condemning two antisemitic attacks:
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1022172377269133312
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/1100553357075382276
Sad to read of David Graeber's death. I attended two of his talks in support of Universal Basic Income.
this is why i've written this naivety was one of Mr Graeber's flaws.
as for Mr Corbyn, he was an honest but very weak leader. exemplified by his failure in containing this issue. an issue which to be completely honest is actually a non-issue for the UK considering it's many, more pressing and more important problems.
> In April 2020, an 860-page report into the handling of antisemitism by the party concluded that there was "no evidence" that antisemitism complaints were treated any differently than other forms of complaint, or of current or former staff being "motivated by antisemitic intent.”
So how exactly did it “culminate” with Corbyn?
Irrespective of the merits of the claims made in the report - itself the subject of further independent investigation and lawsuits filed by people criticised in it - it's not something which would have been written if things were going well.