At the time of writing the Labour party is engulfed in a row about racism, or, more specifically, anti-semitism. The Bradford MP Naz Shah has been suspended, and so, in his contorted attempts to justify her behaviour, has Ken Livingstone. Jeremy Corbyn reacted to Livingstone's transgressions with characteristic sloth. He can't be too happy at the prospect of losing his right hand man.
It won't come as any surprise to readers of this blog (all nineteen of them) that I am a long way away politically from the likes of Livingstone. Yet I have some sympathy with him. Here's why.
Anti-Semitism is popularly regarded as a form of racism, as if the term applied only to Jews. But the Semitic peoples are not confined to Jews - it's a term applied to a number of Middle Eastern countries, including some Arab ones - and not all Jews are from the Middle East.
Nor, to confound the issue still further, are Jews a race. Jews are a religious-ethnic group including people of many races. There are white Jews from Europe and black Jews from Ethiopia. If Jews are a race, then so are Christians.
For what it's worth I once put this point to a family friend, who is an Orthodox Jew. He agreed with me.
But surely this is nit picking, I hear you cry. We all know anti-Jewish prejudice is bad, so what does it matter which words we use?
It matters a lot, not least because words are the things we use to try and ferry meaning between each other. In this as in so many areas of political conflict the party that controls the meaning of words has the upper hand.
Racism as a form of hatred towards people with different physical characteristics from ourselves is rightly reviled. Describing someone as racist in the West is a term of pejorative heft
only a few steps down from murderer, rapist or paedophile. As a consequence it provides an intellectual umbrella underneath which many have sought to shelter, most problematically in the context of religion.
Amidst the many unattractive features of Islam - its homophobia, its repression of women, its anti-democratic insistence on God-made law - is the insistence that criticism of the religion is racist. But Muslims, like Christians and Jews, are not a race either, and by allowing religions to shelter under the "racist" umbrella we stifle discussion and criticism.
If it's legitimate to criticise Islamic societies which permit (and sometimes institutionalise) FGM, for example, it must also be legitimate to criticise the use of sharia courts, and, by extension, the people who staff them. The problem is that if disliking people on the basis of their religion is racist, then the line between what it's legitimate to say and what society utterly condemns becomes impossibly narrow to draw. People retreat to a safe distance because they don't want invite the R-word. For a politician this is problematic because an allegation of racism can finish a career, but for civilised society it's a disaster, because freedom of speech is both one of that society's causes and one of its consequences.
Racism is incompatible with a good society, because it is wrong to revile people on the basis of characteristics they can't choose. On the other hand a good society can't function without the freedom to criticise people for the choices they make, including the religion they adhere to or the cultural practices they adopt.
Nowhere are the consequences of confusing racism with sectarianism (my preferred term) clearer or more ironic (or funnier) than in the current plight of the Labour party. In areas of West Yorkshire (as in parts of London) the Labour party is dominated by Muslims, many of whom take a dim view of Israel generally and it's treatment of the West Bank Palestinians in particular. Many of those, I would guess, don't make the distinction between Jews and Zionists very sharply.
People like the Bradford MP Naz Shah for example. Ms Shah has done a couple of things on social media in the last few days which I personally find very unsavoury and which seem to suggest anti-Jewish prejudice. She has apologised for her "the Jews are rising" comment, and the Labour party can decide whether or not it wants to keep her.
But Labour is reaping a whirlwind it has itself sown. The Left is so keen on the widest possible definition of what constitutes racism that it has made criticism of Islam very difficult (if you doubt me, look at the abuse heaped on Zac Goldsmith for pointing out that London mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan has shared a platform with extremists) and turned a blind eye to some really very unsavoury people within its Muslim ranks. This is something the Quilliam Foundation head Maajid Nawaz described as "the left-wing bigotry of low expectations that holds Muslims to lesser, illiberal standards". If Labour hadn't been so myopic about Islam, Naz Shah would never have become an MP.
Ken Livingstone leapt to Ms Shah's defence with some comments which have now got him into trouble. He said there was a "well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby" to get rid of Ms Shah, and that it was "over the top" to "think of anti-Semitism and racism as the same thing". On this last point at least I agree with him.
He also pointed out that the Nazis had meetings in the early 1930s with Jewish leaders to discuss the prospect of moving Jews to the Middle East. I don't know whether this is true, still less why Livingstone thought it would be a good idea to make the claim, but it has landed him in hot water, not least with the Labour MP John Mann, who confronted Livingstone angrily on the stairs of a BBC studio and called him "a Nazi apologist" on camera.
(Journalists love this kind of thing, and are much more interested in the spats and resignations than in the substance of the dispute.)
Is there a "well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby"? Danny Finkelstein, a pundit I admire, wrote in the Times this morning that "the idea that the Jews pull the strings, are the puppet masters and have an all-powerful lobby is the most traditional of anti-semitic ideas". Fair enough; except Livingstone didn't say "Jewish lobby" but "Israel lobby", which is not the same thing.
Elsewhere Finkelstein writes, "the oldest theories of Jews as rich manipulators and financiers of evil have been merged with the new ideas about imperialism. And they have given it a name: Zionism. No longer does that term mean a belief that there needs to be a small Jewish homeland. Now it is used to mean a global conquering force of money-lending, oil-stealing militarists".
Who said words didn't matter? It looks as if Finkelstein, never mind his misquote of Livingstone, is trying to give Zionism a new meaning, one which will immediately brand the user as a conspiracy-theorist fruitcake. Perhaps Finkelstein really does think Jewish and Israeli interests are coterminal, but if he does he can hardly cry foul when people criticise Jews for things Israel does. Like Naz Shah, it doesn't look as if Finkelstein is making the distinction between Jews and Zionists very sharply.
Elsewhere Labour MP Chris Bryant said, "Only one sane sentence has Hitler and Jews in it. We'll never forget Hitler was a genocidal murderer who slaughtered Jews in their millions". Is Bryant really arguing that, even if Livingstone got his facts right, it was wrong for him to utter them? Is an open society best served by prescribing what people can and can't say in this fashion? I doubt it. Meanwhile Bryant's colleague Luciana Berger said, "There is no hierarchy of racism". Depressingly, I take this to mean that for her anti-semitism nestles snugly beneath the umbrella of the R-word.
I don't think British politics would be signally worse off in the absence of Ken Livingstone, but there are lot of other people thrashing around on the muddy shores of the race debate, wrestling over the slipperiest of meanings, trying to set the boundaries of the permissible in a way which is thoughtless, ill-informed, tendentious and damaging to a free society. We could well do without them too.
