Very valid questions that require answers before saying that the LP is "an Israeli body".It would be nice to know how LFI is funded, especially so when "37% of Labour MPs are associated with LFI, with an additional 37 Lords"
Who funds Labour Friends of Israel – and why won’t it say?
LFI is one of the largest lobbying forces in British politics, but refuses to disclose its sources of income. What is it hiding?www.declassifieduk.org
fair enough but with clear overlap and close access to the Israeli inner state ... what i was alluding to with 'proxy'
i guess so...Zionist funders are an Israeli body, not sure how you can separate Zionists from Israel
So what? They've just done more bombing than Dresden is so what, and been defended by the labour party in so doing is so what
I guess not. So if they really had to, the left LP activist could have made the point about funding from overt Zionists, but the strength of their argument about how the LP had abandoned working class interests would still not have been helped, tbh.
Their current rule book is 147 pages long; surely that's enough, already?
The words used were clumsy and might even betray a mindset (in the audience member) that strays onto the wrong side of the line. However, just in common sense usage, in terms of conveying where prominent Labour politicians are getting their money, they certainly have pro-Israeli sponsors (as in, people who donate):
Yes, fair comment and I did deliberately try not say that the observations were antisemitic, but that they did tiptoe around tropes that are. I still think it very dumb to claim that the the LP is "an Israeli body".The words used were clumsy and might even betray a mindset (in the audience member) that strays onto the wrong side of the line. However, just in common sense usage, in terms of conveying where prominent Labour politicians are getting their money, they certainly have pro-Israeli sponsors (as in, people who donate):
Just moving this on to the 2nd bit highlighted, surely the switching between and deliberate confusion of anti-semitism and criticism of the state of Israel is the problem. We might quibble as to whether Labour is being 'sponsored by' Israel (certainly not directly, though the money Starmer got for his leadership campaign probably fits that definition of 'sponsored') or just from 'pro-Israeli groups'. But the reality is they are receiving funding, supporting mass murder by Israel and have used this in the most cynical fashion to remove the left from the party. It should be unproblematic to say that. You shouldn't have to be on the defensive, awaiting accusations of antisemitism when you say that, accusations that then blunt the criticisms of Israel you are making. Yes, of course, do that without generalisations about Jewish people, without any of the filthy conspiracy theories that slosh around with antisemitism. But equally, call out the way antisemitism is deployed. And Mason is doing exactly that here, flourishing antisemitism as a trump card. And the slaughter continues.
But, if there were any basis for the claims that the LP were talking funding from a foreign state, either directly or indirectly, that would be quite different to accepting money from a domestic union.
That seems an odd point to make in this context. Yes, of course a broader analysis of where Labour is at should focus on its relationship to capital. But this thread, albeit from initially talking about Mason, has got onto exactly the relationship between Starmer and his party and Israeli interests. None of that can be reduced down to funding but it's certainly part of it. So what? The relationship between Labour and Israel is the very thing we are talking about.
"They've just done more bombing than Dresden"
So do I. I suppose though what I'm getting at is the added frisson that gets layered in when someone like Mason calls that out. To say that Labour was, say, 'an American body' at the time of the Iraq invasion might have been equally correct/overstated/clumsy/polemical, all at the same time. But to call someone out for describing Labour as an Israeli body brings with it the accusation of antisemitism. Now yes, I get that, there are of course tropes there about world wide influence and the rest. But what's the net result of this process? Critics of Israel having to watch their language? That's all well and good, those criticisms should avoid slipping off into antisemitism. But in all of that there's also something else at work that blunts those critics of Israel.
Yes, when I read the transcript of the meeting the thing that stuck out was how the comment(s) presented such an open goal for Mason.
