Cops and lobbyists dominate EU working group on anti-Semitism
JVL Introduction
The EU has a relatively new working group on antisemitism.
But Brussels-based journalist for Lobby Watch, David Cronin, has found it hard to get information about it – even to discover its membership required a Freedom of Information request.
His concern is two-fold: the working group’s use of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and the fact that all Jewish groups belonging to it are all pro-Zionist.
There is a real fear that the activities of this group will both chill discussion and lead to further attempts to criminalise criticism of about Israeli apartheid, for membership of the working group includes representatives from Europol, as well as police forces from Ireland and Austria, and justice or interior ministries from many countries…
This article was originally published by Electronic Intifada on Wed 26 Feb 2020. Read the original here.
Cops and lobbyists dominate EU working group on anti-Semitism
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This is like Animal Farm, Kafke, The Crucible… And worst of all, these machinations all resemble the vector of influence that started in the 1930s…
Have we learned NOTHING from our collective histories?!
I’d like to thank David Cronin for an excellent piece of journalism. Nonetheless, I’d like to take issue with a rather important claim he makes. He says: “No state is entitled to base its very existence on the dispossession of an entire people. Israel, therefore, does not have the right to exist as an apartheid state.”
The fact is that many states, the US and Australia for example, “base (their) very existence on the dispossession of an entire people.” Regrettably, the very success of the genocidal enterprise that led to the establishment of these states has created a situation where they are universally considered legitimate. Indeed, with the success of that enterprise and successive racist policies (Jim Crow, White Australia), these states find themselves today in a position of boasting that they are multicultural.
In other words moral and political legitimacy do not go hand in hand.
But Israel’s attempted ethnocide is not yet a done deal. It is therefore our duty to stand in solidarity with its victims, to champion their fight for nationhood. And because Israel is the creation of a movement claiming in large part to be socialist and not racist, to be democratic and not colonialist, shalom-schmoozing and not agressive, it is our duty to expose this loathsome hypocrisy.
The logic of Example 7 of the IHRA “Working definition on Antisemitism” is rather like David Cronin’s: it implies – read backwards, from example to substantive statement – that the claim that Israel is a racist “endeavour” would undermine the right of Jews to self-determination. It wouldn’t. Jews, that is, World Jewry, had no right to self-determination because Jews did not constitute the majority of inhabitants on the territory in which they wished to establish their state. That’s the fundamental issue – independently of the question of oppression. Since, in the real world, the establishment of that state could only be achieved by oppression, what might otherwise be seen simply as a nonsensical idea – the right to self-determination of a people with only a tiny representation in the territory claimed – has become a shameful human tragedy.
“prejudice, hostility or discrimination towards Jewish people on religious, cultural or ethnic grounds.”
Seems like a perfectly good definition to me.
This remains a superb website.