The Labour MP for Hammersmith, Andrew Slaughter, is already noted for his extremist stance on the Middle East. Now he has sent a tweet congratulating Seph Brown on his election to the Young Labour London executive.
Brown reportedly made comments about "shooting down zionists" during a debate at the LSE. When the Labour MP Barry Gardiner discovered his views he sacked Brown from a campaigns role but Brown was accepted for work as a volunteer working for Ed Miliband during his leadership campaign last year - this proved a great source of embarrassment
The Jewish Chronicle reported:
A spokesman for Mr Miliband said: “Looking at these reported comments, they are clearly reprehensible, and we completely reject them. The campaign has benefited from hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers, who undertake a variety of tasks.
“The person in question is an unpaid volunteer and has clearly already paid a price for this silly behaviour in the past. We understand that he lost a previous job as a result of the comments he reportedly made while still a student.”
The Union of Jewish Students said: “We are disappointed to hear that Ed Miliband has failed to dissociate himself from an individual who, throughout his time as anti-racism officer at LSE, showed little regard for minority students. We urge the Miliband campaign to reconsider its position.”
The journalist Nick Cohen gives this account of meeting Brown:
"Unfortunately, the effect was spoilt when later that evening I bumped into one of his campaign workers, Joseph "Seph" Brown. I didn't realise it at the time but he was a guy who had already made a stir in the Labour Party by talking about "shooting Zionists" - or "Jews" as we said in more plain-speaking times. He said later he meant the he wanted to "shoot them down" in debate.
Anyway, I was unaware of the fuss and was chatting to him about the Middle East, and he would not offer a word of criticism of Hamas. I said that it was fair enough to support the PLO, which for all its faults and corruptions was an authentic national liberation movement. But backing Hamas meant backing the Muslim Brotherhood, which supported the subjugation of women, the murder of gays and "apostates" and the Jewish conspiracy theories of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Nazis. If you couldn't criticise Hamas, you couldn't criticise the Iranian mullahs, the Taliban, the Saudi monarchy and everyone else who upheld what we on the Left used to call "far right" ideologies. More to the point, you couldn't support Palestinian women, gays, secularists, liberals etc who would be the Muslim Brotherhood's first victims.
My accusation that he had a soft spot for Islamo-fascism, provoked the response...
"But my grandparents fought fascism."
I have heard this retort so often that I suspect it is on some central list of "lines to take". It sounds vaguely impressive, until you think for a second and realise that the logic behind it is haywire even by the standards of the pseudo-left.
If your grandparents always obeyed the law, is it permissible for you to break it?
If your grandparents never claimed a penny of social security, is it permissible for you to fiddle benefits?
If your grandparents always paid their taxes, is it permissible for you to dodge yours?
Most people would hold that the behaviour of grandparents does not give their grandchildren a free pass. They would say that you cannot bank your grandparents as if they were a legacy and draw on their good deeds to compensate for your own faults. That was then and this is now, and we must be accountable for our actions. And yet the aide to Ed Miliband thinks it acceptable to avoid condemning ultra-reactionary ideas and movements because his grandparents opposed ultra reactionary ideas and movements.
I'm still backing David.
At least Barry Gardiner and Ed Miliband had the excuse of ignorance when they accepted the services of this abhorrent individual. What is Slaughter's excuse?
"Andy" Slaughter also claims that as a member of the shadow cabinet he is bound by "collective responsibility" and unable to represent his constituents (when for example they ask him if he is in favour of yet more EU integration).
I conclude from that 1) his support for this insavoury individual is official Labout Party policy. 2) he sees his job as representing Labout rather than his constituents.
Altogether a prize ass.
Posted by: Marcus Aurelius | Sunday, October 30, 2011 at 03:16 PM