secret squirrel wrote: ↑Fri Jun 26, 2020 10:26 am
Grumble wrote: ↑Fri Jun 26, 2020 9:52 am
Also, as discussed elsewhere on this forum, the US has about 3 million police forces, not 1.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find that pretty much every police force globally employ fairly brutal restraining methods - they will need to use them on violent offenders. (It’s when they get used on non-violent people that the problems start.) Involving Israel in this is such absolute b.llsh.t.
Except that Israel has, through its well document actions, become a benchmark for democratic countries brutally oppressing a segment of their own population. So while Peake is factually wrong to say the Israeli's taught the Minneapolis police to kneel on people's necks, it's certainly reasonable to bring them up in a conversation about brutality by security forces, which is essentially what happened. The idea that Peake means to imply that Israel is in some way causally responsible for George Floyd's death seems pretty far fetched to me, the fact that her off the cuff remarks could be interpreted in that way if you really wanted to notwithstanding.
As I said before, I can understand why Starmer has to act to avoid the wrath of disingenuous conservatives and idiots, but you don't have to
be one of the idiots.
Maxine Peake is free to say whatever she likes, including randomly imagining links between the world's only Jewish state and the globally notorious murder of a black man by police. Regardless of whether or not she meant it to be, that is somehow loading partial responsibility for something far, far away, onto a nation which just so happens to have a lot of Jews in it, without evidence, and is an anti-semitic canard.
That, to my mind, is idiocy, but it is idiocy which is at least somewhat debatable.
The relevant idiocy, though, isn't that, it's the fact that Long-Bailey touched this story with a bargepole. Her choices included just not tweeting it at all*, tweeting it with something along the lines of "I think she's wrong on the point about Israel but otherwise I think she's an absolute belter" or doing what she did. She
knows where the Labour party is on this, and yet she did it anyway. That's the idiocy.
*it raises the issue to me of why the f.ck politicians even bother with twitter - Christ, it's a f.cking binfire - but that's another argument for another time.