Labour’s antisemitic strategy?

Maybe it’s both, Chris.

The Mel piece in FPM is amazingly mad drivel even by her standards (my personal highlight is “There has never been a shred of doubt that MEMRI’s translations are accurate” – no, nobody’s *ever* suggested such a thing…).

I’m starting to believe that “Melanie Phillips” is a deep-cover satirist.

Alison, I’m in Haringey. My father was an electrician, my father-in-law was a postman. My antecedents are entirely London semi-skilled working-class. I have grown up and lived for nearly 60 years in London in an environment of mild anti-semitism.

Just an interesting question that comes to my mind; Melanie Philips uses the phrase “trivialises the Holocaust”, and so do a number of commentators I’ve seen recently. This phrase sticks in my mind somewhat, because in France and Germany it’s a phrase with a precise legal meaning; there is a criminal offence of trivialising the Holocaust. Is the phrasing intentional, or just fortuitous?

In general, the appalling Liddle does actually have a point; Labour politicians with dodgy majorities have a pretty shameful record in saying silly things about Islam (even such a decent bloke as Roy Hattersley stunk the place out during the Salman Rushdie affair). But I don’t like the massive air of ad nos bovem punctur hanging over the whole thing; how in hell’s name does it make sense to be simultaneously defending the right to incite religious hatred, but bring in the simile police to enforce Godwin’s Law? If British Jews had a riot tomorrow, would this suddenly become a free speech issue?

Dan Hardie:

Mike O’Brien certainly said some things he shouldn’t have to Muslim News

I agree with you, and some of the things he shouldn’t have said amounted to disgraceful pandering. But I don’t agree that the things he shouldn’t have said were anti-semitic things. Most of the faux outraged commentary focused on the following passage in his article:

bq. Ask yourself what will Michael Howard do for British Muslims? Will his foreign policy aim to help Palestine?

The suggestion made by Phillips, Pollard etc was that this was anti-semitic because, according to them, the _only possible explanation_ for O’Brien asking that rhetorical question was that he wanted to remind Muslims that Howard is Jewish.

I don’t think that charges of anti-semitism or racism should be chucked about unless the person making the charge can meet a pretty high burden of proof and “I can’t think of another explanation” just doesn’t cut the mustard.

Anyway, people should “read O’Brien’s article”:http://www.themuslimweekly.com/newspaper/viewfullstory.aspx?NewsID=NW00002041 and make their own minds up.

‘how in hell’s name does it make sense to be simultaneously defending the right to incite religious hatred, but bring in the simile police to enforce Godwin’s Law?’

It makes perfect sense for those of us who find stupid remarks re the Holocaust offensive, but don’t want to see such remarks criminalised. If Ken Livingstone or the self-pitying moron who is President of Ireland want to say silly things about Nazis, concentration camps, etc, I’ll say that I find them disgusting and ignorant but I don’t want them to be locked up. I don’t want to see Holocaust denial become a criminal offence in the UK, I don’t like the ‘incitement to religious hatred’ law, and I despise people who do incite religious hatred or deny the Holocaust. What is so complicated about this?

Btw, France has a criminal offence of denying the Holocaust, but none for trivialising it. Otherwise Roberto Benigni and Martin Amis would be in the slammer next time they visited Paris, not to mention the French synchronised swimming team who, ten years ago, gave a performance representing Jews being gassed in Auschwitz…

You think Time’s Arrow *trivialised* the Holocaust? People really are strange.

Nope, trivialising is the offence in French. Like “incitement to hatred”, it has a reasonably well-established legal meaning based on case law, and this meaning is not the same one which the man in the street might decide it had in order to rubbish it. Dealing in Nazi memorabilia is the main way that people get caught under it by numbers but it’s also the Holocaust denial law.

dsquared,

Are you sure it was “trivializing”? The gayssot law in france fights “negationnisme” (denial of the reality of holocaust), considering it racial hatred.

So the word trivialisation does sometimes come up in circumstances similar to the liddle thing, but without (afaik) the legal subtext.

At least you guys do have a labor party; even though it’s all messed up by the ‘third way’ crap… Even though they are anti-semites and Holocaust denialists (is this the word?) and trivializers … Even though they are Islamofascist appeasers and terrorist sympathizers…

Still, you’re lucky bastards to have a labor party.

Dsquared, I fear that you have been addressing us from your fundament again. The text of the Loi Gayssot reads, in relevant part “Art. 24 bis. – Seront punis des peines prévues par le sixième alinéa de l’article 24 *ceux qui auront contesté, par un des moyens énoncés à l’article 23, l’existence d’un ou plusieurs crimes contre l’humanité* tels qu’ils sont définis par l’article 6 du statut du tribunal militaire international annexé à l’accord de Londres du 8 août 1945 et qui ont été commis soit par les membres d’une organisation déclarée criminelle en application de l’article 9 dudit statut, soit par une personne reconnue coupable de tels crimes par une juridiction française ou internationale. ‘ Emphasis added by me: this criminalises the denial of the Holocaust and the acts comprising it, but says nothing about ‘trivialisation’. Full text of the amended law is here:
http://www.jura.uni-sb.de/france/Law-France/l90-615.htm

Haven’t been able to find any evidence of prosecutions in France for the ‘banalisation’ of the Shoah (presumably the closest translation of ‘trivialisation’), although ‘banalisation du mal/de la Shoah’ etc is a very widespread phrase among French intellectuals.

although ‘banalisation du mal/de la Shoah’ etc is a very widespread phrase among French intellectuals.

It is heard, but you may in fact think of “banalité du mal” : Hannah Arendt and all that.

In other, half related news, the swimming team didn’t perform their routine after all.

You don’t hear so much from Norman Tebbit on the national stage nowadays, you lucky people, but he has a regular column in my local free-delivery paper, and he was making this exact allegation, that Labour has a policy of anti-semitism to attract Muslims, several weeks ago. Norman Tebbit, famous non-racist.

Okay, so he’s lying, but his lie, combined with the identical lies of Rod Liddle and Melanie Phillips, demonstrates that the Karl Rove strategy has come to Britain: falsely accuse your opponents of doing what you actually do.

In this case, the word has clearly come down from Howard to push the racism line to blur the distinction betweeen the two parties.

Didn’t Le Pen call the Holocaust a ‘footnote of history’ or something like that? If that’s not trivialisation, what is? Was he prosecuted?

Abb1, Le Pen said that ‘les chambres de gaz ne sont qu’un détail de l’histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale ‘, which does seem to me to be trivialisation rather than denial. The thing is, Le Pen was convicted by a German court, not a French one, since he made the remarks on German soil, in the company of the former Waffen SS man Franz Schönhuber. I can’t see that the action would have succeeded under French law. I don’t know whether the Germans prosecuted him for trivialisation or whether they judged it to be a remark likely to incite hatred of Jews or offend Holocaust survivors. German speakers could help me out here.
He was convicted of assault in a French court (the victim was female).

Evidence in favour of O’Brien’s being anti-semitic comes from a very good piece by David Goldberg, in the godslot of Saturday’s Independent. Goldberg. a former rabbi at the LIberal synagogue in St John’s Wood, is one of the most level-headed people I ever knew in the god business, and one of the nicest. He certainly isn’t someone to rush around crying “anti-Semitism!” every time someone upsets him. If he thinks O’Brien’s remarks were dodgy, as he does, this opinion should be given proper weight.

I have a column about this somewher eon the Gdn’s web site this week, though more about how Ken Livingstone is not being anti-Semitic.

i guess one of the reasons i am bangin on abt the distinction eg between “trivialisation” and “banalisation” is that the increased deployment of anti-semitism as an accusation flung abt by hack columnists and politicians seems to me a clear example of the latter, but not the former – whereas eg the synchro swimming case is (seemingly) an example of the former but not the latter

(tho as i said before, the synchro swimming project was intended absolutely seriously, the french synchro team being at that time by some margin the worlds best, and very theatrically literate: synchro being one of the very very few sports which can deal in narrative expressivity as a judgeable component of its “art”)

(ie it can so deal, but on the whole the sports bodies which reluctantly tolerate it hugely discourage such dealing)

Yabonn, I’m right to say that Le Pen was convicted by a German court in ’99 for an offence committed in Germany in ’97. The RTL remarks were made in 1987; in 1997, Le Pen said almost exactly the same thing in Munich, which is what he was tried for.
Eg, in Liberation:
‘En 1987, sur RTL, Le Pen déclarait : «(…) je crois que c’est un point de détail de l’histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale.» Dix ans plus tard, à Munich, le président du FN récidivait. «Sur un livre de 1 000 pages, les camps de concentration occupent 10 à 15 lignes. Cela s’appelle un détail», affirmait-il … Il avait alors été condamné et déchu de son immunité de parlementaire européen .'(http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=245441&AG) L’Humanité (6th July 1999) gives more details of Le Pen’s conviction in a German court:
” Inique et secondaire “, c’est ainsi que Le Pen avait accueilli la peine prononcée, début juin, par la justice allemande. Logique : le leader d’extrême droite français n’a pas fait appel. L’amende infligée est donc exécutoire. Le 5 décembre 1997, dix ans après avoir utilisé l’expression en France et subi une première condamnation, c’est à Munich que Le Pen récidive en qualifiant les chambres à gaz construites par les nazis de ” détail de l’histoire de la Seconde Guerre mondiale “. Il est vrai que, ce jour là, il est en compagnie d’un connaisseur : l’ancien Waffen SS Franz Schönhuber, ex-président d’un parti d’extrême droite allemand. Le Pen n’aurait sans doute manqué pour rien au monde la sortie d’un livre à la gloire de ce nazi non repenti. L’immunité du député européen avait été levée le 6 octobre 1998 par le Parlement européen à la demande de la justice allemande, rendant ainsi possible l’ouverture d’une information judiciaire dans ce pays. Pour le tribunal de Munich, Le Pen ” est coupable d’incitation à la haine raciale “…'(http://www.humanite.fr/journal/1999-07-6/1999-07-6-292596)

mark s: I said that ‘banalisation’ is the closest French translation I can think of for the English word ‘trivialisation’- on which point, I will accept correction from a native speaker of French, but not from you.

One last, delightful bouquet from Jean Marie Le Pen, after which I really must go. He was convicted by a French court in ’87 for having called the gas chambers a ‘detail’, and the court did reproach him for having ‘banalisé’ the Holocaust. But the most detailed account I’ve been able to find seems to make it clear that the judges convicted him because they felt his remarks constituted a denial of the reality of the gas chambers, and used the phrase ‘banalisation’ in the judgement- in the same way that a British judge’s sentencing speech might call a rapist ‘wicked’, but the man is convicted for ‘rape’, not for ‘wickedness’.

Anyway, the link is at-http://www.crif.org/index.php?menu=5&dossier=2&id_doss=29

LES CHAMBRES A GAZ : UN DETAIL« CONSENTEMENT A L’HORRIBLE, BANALISATION D’ACTES JUGES CONSTITUTIFS DE CRIMES CONTRE L’HUMANITE »
Arrêt (de référé confirmatif) de la cour d’appel de Versailles du 28 janvier 1988 ; arrêt de la cour de cassation du 11 octobre 1989 (pourvoi de Le Pen rejeté) : sanction des propos tenus par Le Pen à l’émission « Le grand jury RTL- Le Monde » du 13 septembre 1987 par lesquels Le Pen avait mis en doute l’existence des chambres à gaz, les considérant comme un « point de détail ».Deux jugements, sur le fond, du tribunal de grande instance de Nanterre des 11 janvier et 23 mai 1990 et un arrêt de la Cour de Versailles du 18 mars 1991 : pour assertion « coupablement choquante et elle-même intolérable ». La justice a considéré qu’il y avait « atteinte très grave au souvenir, au respect et à la compassion dues aux survivants du génocide et de leurs familles ».

i wasn’t correcting yr french, dan (hence my phrasing it as a question) (my french is i’m sure distinctly worse than yrs), but i am questioning the equivalence in english of “banality” (in arendt’s phrase “banality of evil”) with “trivialisation” as you seem to be using it (ie any discussion of the holocaust by someone you don’t take seriously = a triivialisation) (i realise that yr citation of craig brown is possibly not 100% serious, but that only amplifies the sliding around of usage, surely?)

anyway i’m not intending to seme like i’m getting at you here, dan: i am seriously interested in the ramifications of “trivialisation”, “banalisation” and whatever near-equiv as modes of discussion to be denounced, bcz i think denunciation of either is a worrying development, but for difft reasons

Yabonn, I’m right to say that Le Pen was convicted by a German court in ‘99 for an offence committed in Germany in ‘97.

Certainly. I meant to answer to “The thing is, Le Pen was convicted by a German court, not a French one“, because, precisely, the thing is not, as he was convicted by a french one too. But i see we finally agree on that, as you mention the ’87 vintage above.

“Trivialisation” is, at least to my taste, a fairly good one for “banalisation”.

The core of the condemnations seems to revolve more (but then again, i’m fairly ignorant of legal things) around the art.645, gayssot law, or incitement to hatred rules, than on the “banalisation” of the holocaust.

What’s wrong with pandering to ethnic groups? Moslem, Jew, Irish, French, German, whatever. Pandering did a lot of good in the nineteenth century in the U.S. — the great urban machines that were captured by the Irish in New York and Boston, for instance, certainly had a lot to do with lifting the Irish out of an almost caste-like position as manual laborers. The same thing was true for Jews in NYC, when, after the pograms in Russia, Jewish immigrants became numerous in the boroughs. And a good thing — out of that immigration came not only the core of the American intellectual community, but a political machine that “pandered” to the Jews. That pandering led to the breakdown of quotas, among other things, and to the early civil rights movement.

Now, Labour, which is burdened by a foreign policy disaster — the war in Iraq — that is seen as distinctly anti-Moslem, could well pander to Moslems without being anti-semitic, just as Boston politicians could pander to the Irish and still loyally support WWI. It is funny that the right, which spent the eighties and nineties bemoaning political correctness, now advocates such a tender sensibility that the very suggestion of a Palestinian nation on the West Bank is to be considered on par with swearing by Eichmann.

Oh well, in some ways this is progress — the Right is, perhaps, assimilating the lefty advances against bigotry over the past fifty years by enfolding it into its own peculiar narrative.

I said above that ‘I don’t know of any UK data on the ethnic identity of non-convicted criminals’.

I have now rooted around and found a little bit of data: according to the 2000 British Crime Survey, as described in a Home Office report on ‘Crime, Policing and Justice: the Experience of Ethnic Minorities’, victims of crime among survey respondents reported that, in those cases where the ethnic identity of the criminal was visible, 15% were from ethnic minorities. Of course this applies mainly to offences against the person, and not, e.g., to most commercial crimes.