mangochutney
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Newsnight speaks to the Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.
Gaza-Israel Conflict | October 2023
- Thread starter Trisolaran
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Newsnight speaks to the Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh.
Foinikas
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For ****'s sake WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU SEE THAT MAKES ME PRO-ZIONIST?
Tell me exactly what I've said that sounds pro-Zionist.
I said Hamas is a terrorist organisation. I said killing innocent Israelis was evil and Hamas took the entire Gaza Strip hostage by doing that. I said Hamas attack had no strategic value. I said Israelis have the right to their own country and that country should be in the pre-1967 borders and without any settlements inside Palestinian territory.
That's all I said. Does that sound illogical to you?
I should go like "All of Palestine for Arabs only" to sound pro-Pal or neutral?
there is video footage
alphapak
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Israel will attack all its neighbours sooner or later. It is better for the Arab Countries to unite
and fight back together. But it looks like they want too be slaughtered 1 by 1.
This is a map of greater Israel which is their goal.
and fight back together. But it looks like they want too be slaughtered 1 by 1.
This is a map of greater Israel which is their goal.
PakistaniandProud
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You've never said the same about Israel.
Baba Google
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mangochutney
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Is Palestine the end of the road for the Labour Party?
The awful events in the Middle East have shown Starmer and his acolytes in their true colours – and it is not a pretty sight, says BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer on stage speaking during the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, October 11, 2023
WHILE it may be too early to ascertain how much damage has been done to the Labour Party, Keir Starmer’s obsequiousness to Israel’s apartheid state has undoubtedly cost it a great deal of goodwill, particularly among those Muslim communities that would normally be inclined to offer it unqualified support.
Already we are witnessing a steady stream of councillors resigning the Labour whip in protest against Starmer’s refusal to condemn atrocities committed by the occupiers of Palestine and because of the appalling comments made by the likes of Emily Thornberry and David Lammy as they toured the TV studios in order to give unqualified backing to the genocidal Netanyahu regime and Israel’s “right to defend itself.”
There is, of course, nothing new in the Parliamentary Labour Party’s connivance with the global forces of reaction, be they in or out of government.
Their benches are populated with numerous relics of the Blair years who voted to kill and maim defenceless people by the thousand in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia, not that is stops them continuing to pontificate about the importance of international law.
Most of them have no difficulty with Britain’s role as junior partner to US imperialism and enthusiastically endorse Nato’s proxy war in Ukraine, regardless of how many lives are lost and what harm is being caused to the European economy.
As Keith Flett recently pointed out in these pages, since the second world war, Labour has repeatedly sided with the Conservative Party in attempting to preserve what was left of the British empire and crushing all dissent to its brutal colonial rule as well as actively sympathising with various nefarious US activities in China, Korea, Vietnam, Chile and so on.
Today, Starmer, David Evans and the right-wing clique who run the Labour Party have decided that their best chance of winning a general election is to purge the party of left-wing influences and policies and by doing so present themselves as a credible alternative to the divided and chaotic Conservative administration.
They have done everything possible to ensure that the prospect of an incoming Labour government would do nothing to disturb Establishment interests or spook the City.
Consequently, next year’s Labour manifesto will not contain anything to challenge the neoliberal status quo and will therefore be of little or no benefit for an embattled and impoverished working class.
So where does all this leave the rest of the labour movement? Over the years, trade unions have wasted millions of pounds of members’ money on getting Labour candidates into the palace of Westminster who, once elected, more often than not put party loyalty and personal ambition well above any commitment to their union benefactors.
The introduction of “one member, one vote” for internal Labour Party elections paved the way for Jeremy Corbyn to become leader.
The subsequent media onslaught to discredit him and his followers by the weaponisation of anti-semitism torpedoed any chance of even a reformist social democratic party being given the keys to No 10 and effectively buried the notion of a parliamentary road to socialism.
In that context, and on the basis that it helped him get rid of Corbyn, Starmer has calculated that it is worth upsetting the many progressive Jews who are not zionists, by parroting Israeli lies that support for Palestine is tantamount to being anti-semitic.
Though we may have been startled by the ferocity of the attacks from some of those inside the Labour Party, for many of us, the Corbyn debacle came as no great surprise.
So called parliamentary “democracies” are nothing of the sort and are designed to exclude the vast majority of the population from the decision-making process by the creation of a self-serving political class.
Such was the success of the Westminster model in dissipating popular opposition, the British reproduced it all over the world.
A trail of lost deposits tells us that such are the ingrained habits of the British electorate in a first past the post general election, backed up by blanket media coverage, that running socialist candidates in opposition to the established parties is a futile exercise.
That does not, however, mean abandoning the bourgeois electoral process altogether. In many predominantly rural areas of Britain, independent councillors are in charge at the expense of the Labour and Conservative parties.
We might not agree with their political standpoints but what it demonstrates is that an emphasis on local issues that matter to local people can win votes.
Starved of funds and influence, local authorities have been emasculated by successive governments to the detriment of their communities.
The introduction of elected mayors, cabinet government and paid councillors by the Blair government did much to dilute local accountability and encourage careerists who merely use the town hall as a stepping stone in their political careers.
Nevertheless, the Labour Party has singularly failed to mobilise its thousands of councillors in defence of local services and that passivity has enabled the electorate to blame their councils for cuts emanating from central government.
Back in the 1980s, Ken Livingstone wrote a book entitled If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It. With the prospect of a Starmer government that will be as reactionary as what we have now, it’s difficult to argue with that sentiment.
The awful events in Palestine have at least shown him and his acolytes in their true colours and it is not a pretty sight. More than ever, we need a strong, unified left to challenge not just the capitalist consensus but the parliamentary pseudo-democratic order that sustains it.
Whether the Labour Party is part of a solution, or an intransigent part of the problem, remains to be seen, though the portents are not good.
Foinikas
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I've said it in other threads and other posts here. And I've also said that this is the "standard". The thing that has been happening for decades. What we know and all condemn.
I'm starting to think that you guys are only demanding others to only condemn yahood crimes against Palestinians,because you yourselves don't want to condemn Hamas' attack against Israeli civilians.
Because I don't remember seeing a strong condemnation from many of you,just a denial of Israelis being civilians regardless of age and rejoicing for a death count.
Do you condemn what Hamas has done? I'm not talking about raiding bases or fighting soldiers. I'm talking about the rest of it.
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