they’ve been very careful to not appear anti-semitic to the point at which they are refusing to even acknowledge Israel’s war crimes.
And that’s how you completely conflate the meaning of a word.
I don’t think it was ever anything concrete. Some members of the Labour Party made some comments that could potentially have been interpreted as being anti-semitic. Everyone went absolutely crazy, without anything in the way of evidence, and it caused a major political scandal. Labour themselves made the whole situation infinitely worse by not properly investigating the allegations, which made it look like they were trying to protect people. In reality I think it was just incompetence.
It was the very definition of a storm in a teacup, essentially nothing had happened but the opposition parties reacted as if it was some major scandal for the sole purpose of political point scoring.
Labour subsequently lost the 2019 elections and the suggestion was it was because of this scandal.
So when Starmer became leader one of the things he said he was going to do was root out anti-Semitism within the party (no matter how much he had to dig for it), this was around 2020 but he had been campaigning about it since around 2018. Anyway when he became leader there was a big bust up where he got rid of anyone he thought was being anti-semitic (again there was a lot of doubt about whether or not they were being). Then in 2024 they won the election. So ever since then they’ve been very careful to not appear anti-semitic to the point at which they are refusing to even acknowledge Israel’s war crimes.
This is all especially annoying since they would have won the 2024 general election no matter what because the Conservatives were polling so badly. So this big arguement about anti-Semitism was completely unnecessary. Had it not happened Labour would still be in power, but would be less inclined to shy away from criticism of Israel.
TLDR
Accusing Labour of been anti-semitic has been the default position of the opposition for a while because it works. Who cares about the truth anymore?
0x0@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
courval@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Thanks for clarifying, I’ve heard about the accusations before but never really understood what they were accused of… But I think the last couple of years of “anti-Semitism” left and right accusations aimed at individuals who are simply against the murder of innocent people help explain it. My guess is that some members of labour saw the Israeli regime for the terrorists they are ages ago and didn’t shut up about it… The Zionist lobby in the UK is obscene… Shame on these crooks!
skisnow@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
The big you’ve skimmed over is that it happened under Corbyn, who was hugely popular with Labour members for being actually Left Wing, and hugely unpopular amongst the entire rest of the political and media establishments (including Labour MPs) for exactly the same reason. Pretty much everyone on all sides who’d never given a toss about antisemitism before were suddenly pearl-clutching over the tiniest statement made by a backbencher’s assistant’s brother’s gibbon because it was a handy way to bring Corbyn down without having to give any airtime to debating his (very popular) policies.