Comment on I won't accept exclusion within Green Party, says Polanski after criticism of Zionism motion

geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Polanski, who is Jewish, added that “antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state are, and must always be, completely distinct”.

  This is the correct and ethical stance.

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  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Polanski did not take part in the vote on Sunday and four of the party’s five MPs opposed it.

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• danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  How though? You can still accept that Zionism is racism (it is) and make the statements he has here. If the contention is that Zionist == Jew, then that would lead to the exclusion of some people based on religious belief, but as Zionism and Judaism are distinct ideas, nothing he said here is unreasonable. He wouldn’t have to say anything if this dumb motion hadn’t been brought to a vote in the first place.

  This motion was toxic af to the entire party and if I didn’t know better I’d think it was designed to be just that. It offers no tangible benefit to the party, nor to anyone on the planet, especially Palestinians who might have benefited from having a party with stated goals of their liberation with some power in the UK. Now we have to spend the next year or so digging into the academic weeds with the public explaining just what Zionism is, why we oppose it, and how the policy is effectively meaningless as it excludes no one, but for some reason a bunch of ideological puritans insisted that this be the thing we’re all talking about. Not climate change, not wealth disparity, and certainly not the plight of the Palestinians.

  It’s absolutely absurd how the Left is so hell-bent on destroying itself with purity tests and virtue signalling.

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  • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    On the contrary, this motion is extremely useful for Palestinians because it describes the root cause of their problems.

    Furthermore, I’m not sure how many Zionists you think there are in the Green Party, but it’s not that much. Most of the issues you see here are from Labour screaming anti-Semitism.

    Let me ask you this, do you actually disagree with the motion or do you think it’s just bad for optics?

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    • danielquinn@lemmy.ca ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Of course I agree with the motion. I’m a thinking person with a reasonable understanding of the history of the region. I’m assuming you are too, but I hate to break it to you, you aren’t most people.

      Most people don’t understand that Zionism ≠ Judaism and this motion will absolutely not help in their education. It will alienate them, and the media will have more ammo to paint us with the “extreme crazies” brush. Worse still, people within the party who have joined, perhaps even as their first foray into politics are going to feel alienated. The party will appear to have been co-opted by a bunch of masturbatory academics, bent on spending time and resources defining a word that has no effect other than to piss people off an alienate them. Indeed that’s all the party’s been talking about over the last few days: the fact that this motion is meaningless. So what have we accomplished exactly?

      This is a classic case of the Left’s favourite pastime: purity tests and virtue signalling. Now everyone who pushed for this meaningless exercise can pat themselves on the back for being enlightened and they can look down on everyone who opposed it, abstained, or dared to clarify its meaning as Polanski has done here. Then, when the taste of that passes, they can get back to sabotaging any real work (which requires cooperation, something these people cannot understand) by choosing a new group of people to alienate.

      Next up: the meat-eaters. It’s bad for the animals and the environment. Fuck those guys. Let’s pass a motion declaring meat-eating evil. Actually, that’s not good enough. Roll the pansy-assed vegetarians in there because they lack the conviction of proper vegans.

      This is what this sort of politics breeds, and it doesn’t stop until you have a party of just 8 people who think they’re better than everyone else while giving the other 7 the side-eye.

      Politics is about community and working with others — others who may not agree with you on everything, who may not have made the same journey you have (yet?) to come to the same conclusions, but you have enough in common to pull together to get things done. These people have done the opposite. They’ve driven a wedge into the party for zero benefit, to (as you say) “filter out” people they don’t like. Palestinians won’t benefit from a bunch of Britons defining a word. They would have benefitted from the blockage of arms sales to Israel, but they’ve set back any progress we could have possibly had on that now.

      It’s just so dumb, and selfish, and navel-gazing. And the reaction here to Polanski, rejecting him if he should dare do anything other than to embrace this idiot motion… it’s just so counterproductive.

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      • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        So what you’re saying is that this doesn’t affect you and your treats, so therefore you don’t care and nobody should care about it either.

        The comparison between this and calling the consumption of meat evil is quite a massive leap.

        You’ve seen what happened to Corbyn. If the Greens don’t cleanse themselves from Zionists that would await them if they ever got to power. So this is a great and very important motion.

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• Rat_in_a_hat@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  He’s an asshole that is purposefully conflating an ethnosupremacist ideology with Jewishness.

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  • ohulancutash@feddit.uk ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Seems to be doing the opposite.

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    • Rat_in_a_hat@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      An ethno-supremacist political ideology is very different than an ethnicity, because not everyone from that ethnicity prescribes to that supremacist ideology.

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    • geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      No he’s doing what the person above said. Trying to make this about antisemitism and prioritizing when it clearly isn’t.

      And then saying that Jews who attend Zionist synagogues or are Zionist themselves don’t need to worry for getting booted because apparently the Green party can correctly identify racism but doesn’t want to kick out racists. You’d think half their party base consists of said racists seeing how afraid they are to lose them. But in reality almost all Zionists are voting Labour or Tory already.

      It’s great the Green party is moving the overton window ever so slightly but Zack Polanski is trying to put the rabbit back in the hat which is really shameful.

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