[lbo-talk] Gaza and anti Semitism

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Jan 16 04:36:02 PST 2009


Peter Ward writes of "the flagrant anti-Arab racism, long existent, that has flared up"

Quite right. When the 2003 war was I was living next door to a Somali family whose windows were broken on a regular basis. They were schoolboys and we chased them a few times, before my neighbour persuaded our MP (venerable left-winger Jeremy Corbyn) to get them re-housed. There's no desire here to minimise that, which is a real issue. (And "long existent" is right, too, when my mother taught in a majority Pakistani attended school in West Yorkshire in the seventies, teachers there would regularly give the children English names, claiming that they could not possibly be expected to pronounce Mohammed or Mustafa.)

At the risk of being pedantic, though, it is not quite true to say that 'this subject receives squat attention'. On the contrary, alongside the popular antagonism to muslims, and the extensive police raids, arrests and monitoring, there is also another realm of liberal angst-festing over 'Islamophobia' with endless conferences of the great and the good, inter-faith meetings, local authority guidelines, employment monitoring and so on. None of the latter of course has much effect, since the military and policing policy is all pulling in the opposite direction.



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