Labour would be unwise to appease Muslim activists
Labour suffered, in its otherwise successful local election performance, from the loss of the “Muslim vote”. I put inverted commas round the phrase because I dislike the idea that a religion enjoins support for a political party.
Nevertheless, it is true that Muslim activists in Britain seem obsessed with Israel-Gaza. It is the subject of the angry weekly marches in London which menace Jews and block the streets. It is what causes the protests on university campuses.
What should Labour do about this? Since it has long been far more popular with Muslim voters than any other major party (except the SNP under the hapless Humza Yousaf), it obviously needs to worry. Some will advise Sir Keir Starmer to edge away from the strong support for Israel which he expressed immediately after Hamas massacred 1,200 Israelis on 7 October.
This would be a mistake, both politically and morally. Labour insiders are more aware than most voters of the danger of the weird alliance between punitive Muslim extremists who believe women are inferior, homosexuals should be killed etc and the usually white hard-left Corbynites whose social agenda is completely different but share Islamist hatred of Israel and the West.
Some activists in the Corbynite organisation, Momentum, have now left Labour to campaign against candidates whom they regard as unsound on the Middle East. Others stay to undermine it within. These are the people whom Starmer came into the job determined to depose. He should not flinch now. Their presence taints any party which contains them, and loses moderate votes.
Some will say, “What is wrong with Labour becoming more anti-Israel? That would reflect a growing belief.” In theory, it is legitimate – although, I would argue, mistaken – to come down harder on Israel. There is much to criticise in the policies of Netanyahu’s uneasy coalition. But the nature of leftist/Islamist opposition to Israel is unappeasable.
After all, the current rage is provoked not by an atrocity of Israel’s but by the atrocity which triggered Israel’s response. The marchers express no anxiety about Hamas. In any sane political culture, the main moral and practical energy should be directed at catching and punishing Hamas. Yet exactly the opposite occurred. Israeli retaliation was condemned even before it had happened. The well-coordinated crowds in the streets shouted anathemas at the victims, not the perpetrators.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) claims to speak for Muslims in this country, though the Government does not recognise that status. I recently emailed the MCB to check its official position. It says, “The Muslim Council of Britain condemns the killing of innocent people on October 7th. There is no justification for the murder of innocent individuals. Similarly, we retain this position for the many thousands of Palestinians murdered prior to October 7th, for the approximately 1200 Israelis killed on October 7th and the well over 34,000 Palestinians killed including thousands of Palestinian children in what the ICJ plausibly considers genocide.”
At a casual reading, that sounds reasonable; but note the nuances. No mention is made of who killed the Israelis. The killing of “innocent people” is condemned, with the implication that some killed were not innocent. By mentioning the “many thousands” of Palestinians killed in unspecified events before 7 October, it implies that the 7 October attacks were retaliatory. By lumping together the massacred with the victims of the Israeli military response, it assumes a false moral equivalence (and the truth of the Hamas casualty figures). It is also untrue that the International Court of Justice “plausibly considers” the killings in Gaza to be “genocide”. The just-retired ICJ president confirmed this last month.
Sensing these equivocations, I emailed the MCB again, asking whether it agreed that the murders of 7 October “were carried out chiefly by Hamas”. I had no reply. I re-sent the question. Again, I have had no reply. Apparently, the biggest British Muslim umbrella organisation cannot bring itself to say a bad word against Hamas. A party likely to form the next Government of this country must beware with which Muslim leaders it engages.
Footnotes to Plato
Thrilling to find out, thanks to AI work on a charred manuscript surviving from Pompeii, how Plato may have spent his final hours. According to the story deciphered (which describes events over 400 years before it was written), the man whom many consider the greatest of all philosophers got grumpy at a dinner party at which a Thracian slave-girl was playing a flute. He complained of her “scant sense of rhythm”. Then he died.
I noticed that no one reporting this story complained about the fact the girl-flautist was a slave. It was simply part of the narrative.
Imagine this had been a new discovery about the death of, say, Sir Francis Drake. If the old buccaneer were today revealed to have been rude about a slave girl on his last night in earth, this would lead to calls to remove any remaining Devonian “colonialist” monuments to him. Everyone understands that slavery existed in the otherwise democratic city-state of ancient Athens. Many probably feel much the same about the traditional story that the Prophet Muhammad had a slave-wife, called Maria the Copt? In both cases, the wrong of slavery is acknowledged, but so is the cultural context. Why is it only when the British had slaves that their guilt must be everlasting?
