by Benjamin Jefferies
I was brought up in a secular, democratic
socialist family and the values of freedom, equality and solidarity were
engrained into me from an early age.
My parents, British Labour Party stalwarts,
looked to Israel in the 1960s as exemplar of the democratic and
socialist ideals they maintained. Both were on the centre left of the
Labour Party, and as a result, they and their many friends were
deeply committed supporters of Israel and the Zionist cause. The
commitment of those British socialists of half a century ago to the
cause of the national self-determination of the Jewish people was
exemplary and widely shared on the British left, Jewish and Gentile
alike.
Things are very different now. The left of
centre is, at least in Britain, the domain of the new antisemites of the
anti-Zionist movement. BDS stalks the land, not the Spectre of
Communism. The left is delivered to a lethal compromise that gets into
bed with clerical fascists who demand women and gays and Jews be thrown
off mountains.
This modern red-brown Strasserite left spits
on the socialists of yore that actually believed in such values as
freedom, equality and solidarity — and does it in the name of a
fictional “anti-imperialism” that is nothing but the cheer-leading of
the evil and murderous. The great British writer and journalist Julie
Burchill has recently written of her own similar upbringing and the sad, sad demise of that left of the past, that left of another country:
It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power.
And blatant, overt hypocrisy.
On March 17th, the Times of Israel carried an article
about the recently published report of the UN Commission of Inquiry on
human rights in DPRK (North Korea). The report is some 400 pages long
and makes for harrowing reading. In its press release, the Commission asserts that
The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world [...] These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation. Crimes against humanity are ongoing in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea because the policies, institutions and patterns of impunity that lie at their heart remain in place.
What has been the reaction of the British left
to news of this thumping great big report that overtly compares the
North Korean neo-monarchy with Hitler’s Germany? In short, the reaction
has ranged from utter indifference to insane support for the North
Korean regime. The report certainly makes uncomfortable reading for the
comrades who head up Britain’s fractious and minute communist movement,
for example — especially as many of them spend an awful lot of time
inviting members of the North Korean embassy in London to shindigs.
Hardly a surprise then that the comrades have either ignored the report,
or denied its findings (for a deranged and mendacious example of the
latter, see here).
Much the same weary cynicism greets news that
the situation in Darfur is continuing on its genocidal way. The
indefatigable Eric Reeves, who has spent decades exposing the murderous
ways of the Khartoum regime is certainly correct to condemn the inaction
of the international community. In one of his most recent articles,
Reeves highlights the escalation in mayhem in that benighted place and
the utterly abysmal lack of concrete response from the world community.
Writing of the thoroughly useless and widely ignored 2011 Doha
“agreement” between the Darfuri rebels and the Khartoum regime, Reeves
writes:
The international community—especially the UN and African Union—have been flogging this dead horse of a “peace agreement” since it was signed by factitious, unrepresentative “rebel groups” in July 2011, failing to acknowledge how very little support it has among Darfuri civil society and the major rebel groups (who must answer for their own severe abuses of the civilian population). This “support for the Doha process” has persisted long after all observers not part of the AU or the UN clearly have come to see that it is a failure. It was left for expedient international actors to pretend that “progress” was being made in negotiating an end to the Darfur catastrophe, thus giving the Doha process a credibility that could hardly be provided by its Qatari auspices. The U.S. has been front and center in this pretense, shamelessly asserting the potential success of the DDPD. Both previous U.S. special envoys for Sudan—Scott Gration and Princeton Lyman—were complicit in this diplomatic travesty.
Reading Reeves’ cataloguing of the crimes of the Khartoum regime’s janjawid
mercenaries in Darfur, the trail of murder, rape, looting, arson,
sickens one’s heart. It is truly appalling what is happening in Darfur.
It is equally as unacceptable that, despite it being widely known that
the Khartoum regime is committing genocide there (and elsewhere),
absolutely nothing is being done to stop that vile and barbarous
dictatorship of military men and religious fanatics in their tracks.
Nothing. This absolute condemnation of the moral hypocrisy of the global
movers and shakers is embellished by the discovery that the very “great
and good” sent in to Darfur by organisations as allegedly august as the
African Union to oversee resolutions to such intractable conflicts have
spent much of their time fighting turf wars with each other whilst
women and children die in the villages and desert fastnesses of Darfur.
Thambo Mbeki, former President of South Africa, take a bow.
This should make the British left choke with
frustrated anger. Yet fear that it might interfere with the comrades’
digestion might well also mean that they defer reading on until they
have finished debating the intricacies of transgender intersectionality.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, many times even if the left
collectively shakes its head in despair at the evil that walks on every
side and the vilest men that are exulted… they will move to propose
some daft resolution demanding immediate socialist revolution in the
Sahel based on the sterling work of local jihadi and condemning Zionism
for the ills of the world.
So if genocidal regimes are either to be
supported, or simply ignored by those who call themselves left-wing in
the UK, if the mass murder of women and children in Darfur, or the
terrifying, Orwellian dystopia of North Korea does not move the brothers
and sisters, what exactly does get the comrades all frothy at the chops
and out on the front line where they are meant to be? — Israel and
Jews. That’s what.
Sometimes I think the entire British left has
dropped acid. There can be surely no other explanation for its addiction
to insane, inverted political visions of a surreal quality that might
suggest the left was readier for the madhouse than any sort of political
power. Really though, it is not funny ha-ha. There is nothing amusing
about the treachery of the modern British left, its abandonment of the
values of freedom, equality and solidarity. Julie Burchill rightly rages
against the modern British left’s obsessions with the hang-ups of the
chattering classes; but if ever there was a collective criminal act by
which the British left has betrayed its own foundational values, it is
its iniquitous and venomous loathing of Israel and its denial of the
Jewish people’s inalienable right to national self-determination in that
land.
It is more than a delusion to condemn the only
democratic and liberal state in the entire Middle and Near East as an
“apartheid state”, to vilify its supporters as “Zionazis” — it is an
outright slander, a defamation of the rights of an entire people. It is
despicable to knowingly and falsely assert that Israel is a land without
freedom and equality, when it is the only state in the entire
meta-region where religious, sexual and personal liberties are not only
maintained but upheld. It is an utter disgrace that the British left,
almost invariably, takes the side of mass murderers of Jews, terrorists
and violent antisemitic clerical fascist thugs rather than show
solidarity with the Jewish State and its people. It is a betrayal of
those that die in the villages of Darfur, of those that languish in the
prison-state of North Korea, about whom these so-called British
socialists could clearly not give a fig.
Nick Cohen, one of Britain’s most wonderful
political journalists and writers, summed it up nicely: What’s left? The
answer is sad, so sad: not much – a red flag stained not with the blood
of our martyrs, so much as dripping with the blood of the victims of
the British left’s indifference or even naked, open support for the real
sources of evil and wrong in this world. The poet W. H. Auden wrote
bitterly in his poem Epitaph on a Tyrant of a dictator that
“When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter”. When
Comrade Kim laughs, the comrades in Britain stand up and deliver him a
round of applause, it would seem — lackeys all of a red-handed murderer.
When al-Qaradawi demands the extermination of Jews, Red Ken Livingstone
invites him to a nice slap-up meal in London and calls him a
“moderate”. When Hamas and Islamic Jihad slam indiscriminately missiles
into Jewish towns, the British left rambles on about a fictional “siege”
of Gaza. When clerical fascist murderers saw off the heads of their
victims, the British left rave about the ultimate responsibility of
Zionism. And woe betide the uppity Jews of Israel should they respond to
suicide bombers and Khaibar missiles and snipers – because, you see,
the victims of terror had it coming – just in case they are Jewish.
I have spent plenty of time trying to get to
the bottom of this evil malaise that grips the British left. I can
rationalise it away as an addiction to a basically failed ideological
obsession with a faulty notion of anti-imperialism, one in which the
tactic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” holds sway. Yet even accepting
this, it does not explain away the sheer poisonousness and simultaneous
stupidity of the British left’s hatred of Israel that seems to cut
across every single value to which it claims it holds dear.
Auden’s poem ends with a line that confronts
the sheer hypocrisy of his dictator, “And when he cried the little
children died in the streets”. The British left is today that dictator
crying its crocodile and lethal tears. What it does shout about is the
absolute inverse of what it should be screaming about. What the left
does rail about is completely the opposite of what should be motivating
it. It defends the evil and defies the righteous. As the Psalmist had
it: evil walks on every side when the wicked are exalted. The British
left have become part of the problem and not its solution.
I despair.
Benjamin Jefferies
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/benjamin-jefferies/and-when-he-cried-the-little-children-died-in-the-streets/
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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