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Stephen Bush won a certain reputation among Labour supporters after 2015 for displaying basic professional competence in his reporting on Corbynism—something that eluded most reporters. But he always set that professionalism aside for the "Labour antisemitism" controversy. 1/
Bush apparently believes that racism in the Tory Party has not been "sufficiently acute" to warrant an EHRC investigation. Of course, he knows full well the EHRC's criteria for launching investigations have nothing to do with objective merit: it's about political expediency. 2/
Bush plays with words to insinuate that there was something sinister about Maxine Peake's comment, in which she drew a connection between two forms of state racism that have a well-documented ideological and material affinity, including the sharing of repressive techniques. 3/
The Israeli military is a brutal occupation force: fact. US police forces have received training from it: fact. The particular technique used by the officers who killed George Floyd is also routinely used by Israeli soldiers: fact. All glossed over blandly by Stephen Bush. 4/
Peake's suggestion that there was a direct causal link is a plausible inference, not an established fact (but certainly not a "conspiracy theory"). What's beyond question is this: US police forces learn methods of racist repression from the IDF. It's all on the public record. 5/
"Why didn't she talk about Britain or France?" Bush demands to know. Those states have many crimes to answer for, but unlike Israel, they don't rule directly over an oppressed, stateless people, whose occupied land they claim as part of their own national territory. 6/
The IDF's main function, for many years now, has been to keep its boot on the necks of the Palestinians, both literally and metaphorically. The fact that US police forces are learning lessons from the South Africa of our time is extremely pertinent to the anti-racist cause. 7/
If US police forces had been receiving training from the apartheid regime in the 1980s, nobody would have dared accuse critics of "placing South Africa at the heart of a global nexus of various ills". Nor would they have split hairs over the precise content of that training. 8/
There's a palpable fear on the part of Peake's critics that anti-racist protests in the US will spill over into sympathy for the Palestinians as they face perhaps the bleakest moment in their history: isolated, downtrodden, facing a powerful state with a superpower behind it. 9/
Palestinians have seen the few politicians willing to champion their democratic rights—Jeremy Corbyn, Ilhan Omar—viciously slandered by charlatans. They need (and are entitled to) our support. Maxine Peake understands that, and she deserves nothing but praise. 10/
We've been told repeatedly that antisemitism can be inferred from a "pattern of behaviour": people don't have to say "I hate Jews". This inferential method can be—and has been—shamelessly misused, but there's nothing wrong with it in principle. Let's apply it here to Bush. 11/
From his "pattern of behaviour" (one that long precedes this article), from what he has said & neglected to say, it's reasonable to conclude that Bush thinks Palestinian lives have less value. His wilful blindness to anti-Palestinian racism is a form of that racism in itself. 12/
Is this a trope I see? Is Bush suggesting that British Indians have "dual loyalty"—that they base their voting choice on what happens in Kashmir rather than what happens in Britain? (No, it's sensible stuff, but the double standard is evident.) 13/
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/11/whats-behind-labour-partys-rift-hindu-voters
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/11/whats-behind-labour-partys-rift-hindu-voters
Bush's subjective feelings on the subject are of no real interest. Objectively, he is linking arms with anti-Palestinian racists as they try to snuff out any expression of solidarity with Palestinian democratic rights, giving their bogus talking-points a veneer of legitimacy. 15/
Pay no heed to the comfortable people who are anxious to erect firewalls between different struggles against oppression. Listen to the people with the boot on their neck instead: 16/ https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/06/palestinian-protests-hallaq-floyd-israel-racism.html
Listen to the people who know what a real anti-racist struggle looks like (and who know all too well how worthless the platitudes of establishment liberals are when it comes to the crunch): 17/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/03/israel-treatment-palestinians-apartheid-south-africa
