A Month to Remember: Corbynism's Shameless Shame

On 1 December the London Jewish Chronicle reminded us of the results of a poll taken before this month's British General Election was called:

'Antisemitism on the far-left has "overtaken" antisemitism on the far-right according to new research. According to YouGov polling commissioned by Campaign Against Antisemitism and analysed by King's College London Jeremy Corbyn is the most popular leader for anti-Jewish racists. 

Sixty seven per cent of British adults who expressed strong support for Mr Corbyn hold at least one antisemitic view, while 33 per cent hold four or more antisemitic views ... [Emphasis added]

Researchers asked 2,040 people about antisemitism using a range of examples incorporated in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance Working Definition of Antisemitism.Questions not only included stereotypes regarding Jewish influence, money, loyalty, trustworthiness and power, but also about ideas regarding the supposedly outsized and malign influence of Israel and its supporters, and drawing comparisons of Israeli policy to that of the Nazis. 

Results showed that  20 per cent of British people hold the view that "Jews chase after money," and when the same question was asked of a sample that identified as ‘very right- wing’ this rose to 29 per cent.

Researchers found that out of those surveyed who described themselves as ‘very left-wing,’ 42 per cent believe that Israel’s supporters are damaging British democracy, and 60 per cent believe that Israel treats the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews....'

Read more here

And what a month for antisemitism last month alone has been.  Gathered by estimable University of Aberystwyth international relations academic Dr James Vaughan, and reproduced here from his tweets, here's a sample of villainous old Jezza's headlines from last month:

From the same source, and the same month, these examples of the British Left's shamelessly shameful sentiments:

From another tweeter with an eagle eye for leftist malevolence:

Moreover:

And this excrescence.

Little wonder that the admirable Anglo-Jewish actress and writer Maureen Lipman, a staunch and outspoken defender of Israel, has spoofingly reprised the role that years ago made her famous (Beattie, in a series of commercials for British Telecom), picking up the phone to tell friend Nora why after a lifetime on the Left she won't be voting Labour this time around!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fttknbIFiR4

"The World Has Hallucinated A Sabre-Toothed Tiger": Maureen Lipman on Israel-hatred

Here's the warm, witty and wonderful British actress Maureen Lipman speaking succinctly about the need for Jews to speak up on behalf of the traduced and heroic little nation that the BDSers love to hate:

And here's the eloquent Israeli Arab diplomat George Deek, speaking for half an hour before a pro-Israel London audience last week:

(StandWithUs videos)

"We Don't Proselytise, We Don't Fly Planes Into Buildings ...": British national treasure Maureen Lipman on rising antisemitism

Yorkshire-born Anglo-Jewish actress, writer, and humorist Maureen Lipman, an outspoken champion of Israel, was born the year following the end of the Second World War (although for reasons better known to itself the Daily Mail gives her age as 71).

On a north London pavement

 Like her contemporaries, the woman often described as a "British National Treasure"  grew up during a time when antisemitism appeared to have virtually expired, as people contemplated the unparallelled genocidal wickedness to which antisemitism led.

Today, of course, antisemitism has proved, both in Britain and other parts of Europe, that it was not at death's door but only slumbering after all, and none too deeply at that.

Maureen Lipman, in an interview with LBC Radio on Holocaust Memorial Day, has revealed that the rise in antisemitic incidents in Britain in recent months has not only left her "very depressed" but has alarmed her enough to consider moving to New York or Israel:

 “When the going gets tough, the Jews get packing.  It’s crossed my mind that it’s time to have a look around for another place to live....

My kids are very bored with me.  But it is only in the last few months that they have to begun to say: ‘Mum, you may have something’....

When the economy dries up, then they turn on the usual scapegoat: the usual suspect – the Jew.

There is one school of thought that says it’s because of Israeli policies in the West Bank – it isn’t. There’s been antisemitism for the past 4,000 years....

There are 245,000 Jews in the country. What’s to fear? We don’t proselytise, we don't fly planes into buildings, we generally keep on the right side of the law.... We give and give and give ...’

Stephen Spielberg, too, spoke out on Holocaust Memorial Day on burgeoning antisemitism.

Read more here (with videos)

Maureen's Message To Miliband

www.telegraph.co.uk

What a great lady British actress Maureen Lipman is.  Known for her gifts as an actress and writer, the widow of much-acclaimed playwright Jack Rosenthal well deserves her epithet "a British national treasure".

While a bevy of other star thespians, including Miriam Margolyes, Juliet Stephenson, Emma Thompson, and Harriet Walter, to note only examples from the pro-cultural boycott distaff side of Britain's theatreland, are among Israel's trenchant critics, Ms Lipman outdazzles them all with her steadfast support of the beleaguered, traduced, and heroic little country.

Now, writing in the conservative intellectual monthly Standpoint, she tells Labour leader "Red Ed" Milibank, who placed a three-line whip on his members during the recent Commons debate and vote on whether Britain should recognise a Palestinian state, why she's abandoning, at least for the foreseeable future, her decades-long attachment to the Labour Party.

www.telegraph.co.uk

She writes in part:

'Just when ... anti-Semitism ... is mounting savagely...  Just when the virulence against a country defending itself, against 4,000 rockets and 32 tunnels inside its borders, as it has every right to do under the Geneva Convention, had been swept aside by the real pestilence of IS, in steps Mr Miliband to demand that the government recognise the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel.  

.... Many people on the Left and the Right would like to see a two-state solution if it means peace and mutual respect. I am one of them. Any future Palestinian state will be entirely free of Jews, of course. Yet the Jewish state is labelled "apartheid" with 1.7 million Arabs in residence and represented in parliament.

(1) It is a historical fact that the Arab states refused such an offer in 1937, 1948, 2000 and 2008. They have yet to accept Israel's right to exist and their constitutions and broadcasts to this day extol its destruction. 

(2) How can you recognise a state until its borders are decided?

(3) If you recognise a state you can officially arm that state. Already billions of pounds have been allotted to rebuild Gaza. Ha! Rebuild the tunnels and reequip the arsenal. Oh, how the propaganda has worked on these clever, concerned people again and again and again. If Hamas and Fatah cared one iota for the Palestinians, might they not have built schools and hospitals and streets for their people the first time the billions poured in and were converted into weaponry and hotel suites in Paris and citizens were used as human shields?...

....May I remind you that no one is tunnelling into Dover or sending rockets into Coventry, yet we seem to have every right to bomb the living daylights out of Iraq. Again. Conclusion: one law for the Israelis, another law for the rest of the world. ....'

Read the entire piece here

A Woman of Integrity: British Actress Maureen Lipman stands by Israel

To her abiding credit, that national treasure of a British actress, Maureen Lipman, widow of the prominent playwright Jack Rosenthal, has never been afraid to voice her strong support for Israel.

As the Jerusalem Post  reported a couple of years ago, when she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Tel Aviv University, Ms Lipman noted:

“There are too many bigots and extremists using anti-Zionism as a cloak for anti-Semitism. And they are whipping up a frenzy.”

And as she told David Aaronovitch in the course of an interview in the Jewish Quarterly:

"I foolishly agreed to appear on a late night programme hosted by Andrew Neil [This Week, BBC2, 13 July 2006]. I say foolishly because it’s a soundbite programme and everything is reduced to soundbites. Diane Abbott MP had obviously been primed and announced that the Israeli reaction had been ‘disproportionate’. What I wanted to say was that it came about because rockets had been going into Israel for a long time and an unprovoked attack had been made on two soldiers. Her point was (and she knew it would wind me up): ‘All they did was capture two soldiers.’

I wanted to reply that, if you live in a country the size of Israel, two soldiers are incredibly important. Instead of saying just that, I said that it’s not the Israelis who are strapping bombs on young children and sending them out to blow themselves and everybody else up. That somehow became: life is much more important to the Israelis than it is to the Palestinians, and I was savaged by people like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and John Pilger in the Independent and New Statesman.

You don’t see most of the people who wrote to the newspapers to express outrage at the Israeli response at the meetings for other humanitarian causes like human rights in Burma – all I want is a level playing field, where the Middle East is given the same attention as Burma and Rwanda and Zimbabwe and everywhere else. But that doesn’t seem to be an argument which carries much weight.

Out of a year’s column in the Guardian I wrote about Israel maybe three times, and always from a defensive point of view. Even though most of the time I wrote about getting my hair cut, I became a ‘Jewish columnist’ – just as I’m a ‘Jewish actress’. Do you ever see the words ‘that well-known Quaker actress Judy Dench’?

We don’t even have to point out that the reporting is one-sided, because it always is – you see the same Palestinian woman wailing and keening over a dead child and then when you go to the Israeli side you see a bullet hole in a small shop. It’s constantly like that. I only defended Israel in the sense that when you have war and terrorism, as they have, for over 50 years, you do sometimes behave badly. The Americans bombed the Chinese Embassy after two days in Kosovo . . . We are judged by different standards, I don’t think anyone could dispute that – the Jews are always judged by different standards."

Here she is, last year, on the Andrew Marr Show, pointing out the hypocrisy of the BDS movement and of Professor Stephen Hawking regarding Israel.

Now, 67-year-old Ms Lipman, who is also celebrated in Britain as a writer and humourist, has proved her credentials once again by severing her long-standing ties with a monthly magazine, The Oldie, owing to what she describes as its “drip-drip of antisemitic, anti-Jewish, anti-Israel material”.

The catalyst for her action was, as the Jewish Chronicle reports: 'an article published in its March issue, in which travel writer Dervla Murphy described Hebron as a ghost town left ravaged by the shooting of Palestinians by American-Israeli Baruch Goldstein in 1994' and which prompted Ms Lipman to accuse The Oldie's editor,Richard Ingrams, of "anti-Zionist bias".

'She said: “There’s an insidious nature to what is being written. Why would I be involved with that?

“All I ask for is a level playing-field. They’re grinding babies into powder in Syria — get that in your middle page. I can’t just stand there at my age and contribute to something which is feeding the myth.”'

Private Eye-founder Mr Ingrams, characterised by Jewish Chronicle editor Stephen Pollard as "a vile man", has long been known for his hostility to Israel.  In 2003, for example, when editor of The Independent, he declared:

"I have developed a habit when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it."

(See also here and here)

Now, as quoted by the Jewish Chronicle, he says of Ms Lipman:

"She does have a very straightforward view — that critical comments about Israel should be balanced by critical comments about Arab countries."

And, alluding to the BBC's obligation via its Charter to be objective in its reportage (which of course it manifestly is not), he adds:

"Well, the BBC may feel itself obliged to give what they call a balanced view, but we’re not under any obligation of that kind."

How grand to see an Anglo-Jewish personality of Ms Lipman's stature take so principled and unequivocal  a stand in support of Israel.

Good on ya, Maureen!