What does Indonesia have to do with Israel? It's as if someone said the war in the Congo needed stopping and he replied that Yemen also existed and the Saudi consulate made it difficult to talk about. It's a deflection tactic.
I think the point there was, why are you talking about Israel when you could be talking about any of these other places where there is oppression? The implication being that Israel gets a disproportionate amount of criticism compared to other countries, which then leads into
why it gets more criticism, etc, etc. A well trodden road.
Because he's intentionally undermining anti-racism with whataboutery which isn't factually correct - which is something I expect from EDL members, not Labour ministers.
Is what he did in any way defensible?
When you said RLB supporters wanted him sacked I wasn't sure if there was some anti-Semitic connotation I didn't understand, since West Papua is a topic I know nothing about. I think I get the MP's point now though.
The original tweet from BLM UK was not very helpful, its fair to say. I didn't see the problem at first, I just saw a lot of people arguing on Twitter about it yesterday, but I did eventually click why people are upset. Its not about the annexation bit, its the line "...
and mainstream politics is gagged of the right to critique Zionism...". As someone on Twitter pointed out, when you ask "
Gagged by whom?" it becomes easier to see the problem, because it falls into that trope of Israel controlling the media or politics. Hence a lot of people were offended by it, and a twitter row broke out.
Now my view is that BLM's tweet could have been better phrased but probably didn't mean to imply what people took it to mean, but equally I see why people took it that way and I get where the pushback comes from. Id also say that, in principle, challenging an anti-racist group can be fine and doesn't (automatically) count as racism (if done correctly).
Whether his response is a sacking offence is hard to gauge. I don't immediately see it as being racist or anti-semitic, so I dont think the RLB situation is comparable. Is the standard now that MPs shouldn't get involved in twitter arguments at all? That would overwhelmingly be a good thing, but I'm not clear whether that's what's expected. Sacking him would send a nice signal about expected behaviours on twitter, but that's setting a really high bar and would probably be impossible to maintain.
