traditions of the world ' s great religions). The mistake is to treat any faith or other community as a monolith and thus to stereotype its members( whether through ignorance, insensitivity or for a more dubious motive), alienating them from politics in the process. To fall into this trap is to fail to understand twenty-first century racism and the way that race, faith and various hatreds overlap.
- I recommend that racial or religious tropes and stereotypes about any group of people should have no place in our modern Labour Party.
Insensitive and incendiary language, metaphors, distortions and comparisons
As a free-speech campaigner, I have always believed in the right to offend. But as a lawyer I know the difference between a right and a duty. Self-censorship is a terrible thing when those living under oppressive regimes bite their tongues for fear of persecution or prosecution. It is equally terrible when people restrict their political speech for fear of the lynch mob. But there is another type of restraint that you might call kindness, politeness or good advocacy that is genuinely designed to persuade people and inform debates rather than inflame them.
In day-to-day political debate, it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Indeed such remarks can only be intended to be incendiary rather than persuasive. Why? Because the Shoah is still in people ' s living family experience and because, if every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust, Hitler ' s attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history as is the history of a global minority that has had cause to feel, at worst, persecuted and, at best, vulnerable for thousands of years. Other hideous human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia, the Armenian and Rwandan genocides are all of course to be remembered and described, but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of victimhood and evil does no service to anyone.
I am in no way suggesting that bad taste metaphors and comparisons should ever be a matter for the criminal law any more than say ill-judged and incendiary cartoons. I am told that they are frequently used in Israel. However, they are all too capable, not only of bringing the Labour Party into disrepute, but of actively undermining the cause of peace, justice and statehood for the Palestinian people which forms part of Labour ' s current " two-state " foreign policy and which so many Jewish people( including in the Labour Party) actively support.
I make no comment on past, present or future foreign policy in this report. Such discussion is well beyond my remit. Suffice to say that insensitive and incendiary language, metaphor and comparison is of no help to constructive debate, in general, and discourse around the future of Israel-Palestine, in particular.
- I recommend that Labour members resist the use of Hitler, Nazi and Holocaust metaphors, distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine in particular.
- I further recommend that excuse for, denial, approval or minimisation of the Holocaust and attempts to blur responsibility for it, have no place in the Labour Party.
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