Thursday 5 April 2018

Mick Hartley: Anti-Semitism is the precise form that unreason takes in modern politics

The ultimate obscenity; which many anti-semites now accept 
In the wake of the hullabaloo over anti-semitism in Corbyn's Labour Party. Justified, I might add. 

While Hitler comparisons are rarely advisable, MBS's analogy underscores the fact that he sees the nature of the Iranian region very differently than another world leader Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed, several times in fact—former President Barack Obama. Shortly after the Obama White House struck the nuclear agreement with Iran in July 2015, Goldberg pressed Obama on the Iranian regime's anti-Semitism. Obama saw it as functional.
"The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn't preclude you from being interested in survival," said Obama. "It doesn't preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn't preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn't mean that this overrides all of his other considerations."
It didn't take impoverished Iranians protesting against the economy their leaders had pillaged to show that Obama was fundamentally wrong about the nature of the regime — and about one of the chief ideological weapons that it cultivates. Anti-Semitism and reason cannot exist side by side because anti-Semitism is the precise form that unreason takes in modern politics.