You get the difficulty then I see. I am opposed to all forms of discrimination, but there is a but. That is there because it is not clear and the report says as much. It does identify antisemitism and only a fool would deny that it existed, and again, but it also indicates other things too. It does indicate that antisemitism was over stated, and again but, they only investigated a smallish number of cases. So there are buts both ways. The report couldnt feasibly identify every case of antisemitism, and again but, where some of the cases that originated from the CAA even worthy of consideration such was the flimsiness and paucity of concrete evidence, and again but, that does not mean they were not cases of antisemitism, it means they weren't investigated. And again, but where these cases hidden or interfered with by LOTO because Livingstons was but not hidden, it was put to the front of the queue to be investigated, and again but, the report says there should not be political interference, and again but the political interference was correct and Livingstone got quite rightly censured for his actions.
Its a whole can of worms and a thousand buts, because as you have just proven yourself with your but regarding Starmer. Yet again but, Starmer made an immediate mockery of the report by politically interfering and suspending Corbyn, but Corbyn due to his political interference is quite rightly censored and removed from the party, But Starmer remains in the party having done exactly what Corbyn did. But again Starmer to my knowledge has not been involved with antisemitism.
And no, I will not shut up, I wont shut up until antisemitism has been eradicated and those who promulgated it are quite rightly held accountable, and I will not shut up until those who have been accused of antisemitism and have not been antisemitic are exonerated. Because if we don't then every body stands accused and the real perpetrators get away with it and the whole exercise is pointless because antisemitism will still exist.
Dissimulation again, although I understand where you're coming from with your "yes but..." position.
The report does not, as you claim, "indicate that antisemitism was over-stated". They examined 70 files but the terms of reference state that they could only take into account those cases where the person was acting as an "agent" (e.g. an elected official or someone involved in party management) of the Labour Party. Hence why it only named Bromley & Livingston, who were a councillor and NEC member respectively. The report clearly states that there were many other cases of antisemitism in the files relating to ordinary members.
This is copied from page 31:
In many more files there was evidence of antisemitic conduct by an ‘ordinary’ member of the Labour Party, who did not hold any office or role, whose conduct the Party could not be directly responsible for under equality law.
The unwanted conduct complained of in this group related to social media comments that:
• diminished the scale or significance of the Holocaust
• expressed support for Hitler or the Nazis
• compared Israelis to Hitler or the Nazis
• described a ‘witch hunt’ in the Labour Party, or said that complaints had
been manufactured by the ‘Israel lobby’
• referenced conspiracies about the Rothschilds and Jewish power and
control over financial or other institutions
• blamed Jewish people for the ‘antisemitism crisis’ in the Labour Party
• blamed Jewish people generally for actions of the state of Israel
• used ‘Zio’ as an antisemitic term, and
• accused British Jews of greater loyalty to Israel than Britain.
The 2 sections in bold are, to a large degree, what you're doing. You will no doubt counter that you've not blamed Jews for the situation, which I agree you haven't done explicitly, but you have accused those complaining about antisemitism of "weaponising" and overstating the situation. Given that the majority of complainants were Jews, as members or non-members of the party, then you are effectively accusing them of creating the crisis.
And as BobKowalski pointed out, you are, in turn, "weaponising" this issue to attack Starmer. In doing that, although you may not be antisemitic yourself, you're making common cause with many of those on the wrong side of the antisemitism issue.
So there's two areas where you're trying to ride two horses with one arse, namely weaponising the antisemitism issue for your own purposes while (wrongly) decrying those you see as having done it for theirs. And you are (I believe genuinely) deploring antisemitism while simultaneously failing to understand that you're dangerously close to engaging in behaviour that someone who didn't know you would possibly see as antisemitic. Harriet Harman said, quite succinctly, "
If you say that AS [antisemitism] exaggerated for factional reasons you minimise it and are, as Keir Starmer says, part of the problem”
You are offering arguments that have no intellectual substance or consistency. Which is where your "but..." comes in of course.
And for someone who was a member of the party, you show staggering ignorance of the rules about suspension & withdrawal of the whip. Starmer can, as leader of the party, withdraw the whip in the House of Commons. He requires no party approval to do that. But he can't unilaterally issue an administrative suspension, which is different to a permanent suspension issued after an investigation. The former can only be enacted by the Governance & Legal Unit and requires two signatures.
Funnily enough, that procedure was among the ones introduced by Jennie Formby, which you say improved the situation in 2018. So that's yet another example of you simultaneously using both sides of an argument, while failing to recognise the intellectual dishonesty in doing so or even to recognise you're doing it at all.
