Labour MP Diane Abbott was stripped of the Labour whip on Sunday morning amid a backlash at her “shameful” suggestion that Jewish people don’t suffer racism in a letter to the Observer. MailOnline has more.
The former Shadow Home Secretary has been suspended as a Labour MP by the party’s chief whip, Alan Campbell, while an investigation is carried out.
Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer had faced called calls to take action against Ms. Abbott following her comments in a Sunday newspaper.
The 69-year-old, who has been an MP for more than 35 years, suggested that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people experience “prejudice” but “are not all their lives subject to racism”.
Amid the fury at her comments, Cabinet minister Grant Shapps accused Ms Abbott, a close ally of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, of “spouting hateful anti-Semitism”.
She later issued a statement to “wholly and unreservedly withdraw my remarks and disassociate myself from them” as she blamed drafting “errors”.
But Labour pushed ahead with action against the ex-shadow minister.
A spokesperson said: “The Labour Party completely condemns these comments which are deeply offensive and wrong. The chief whip has suspended the Labour whip from Diane Abbott pending an investigation.” …
The Jewish Labour Movement issued a statement in support of the party’s action to withdraw the whip from Ms. Abbott.
“Diane Abbott is one of the most respected people in the Labour Party as an activist who overcame racism and prejudice to become Britain’s first black woman MP,” they said.
“We should be unified in our struggle against racism, not divided against one another. A hierarchy of racism only divides communities and assists the racists. We must not allow this. We take seriously our responsibility to unite with friends and partners across the Labour movement to fight racism together.”
A senior Labour activist told MailOnline: “Shame that Diane decides that testing boundaries with Keir is more important than building solidarity between black people and other minorities. She should know better. People are furious – this tendentious hierarchy of racism narrative only helps the racists in the end.”
Worth reading in full.
Ms. Abbott has also been criticised for claiming that white people were not enslaved. In her letter she wrote: “At the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.”
This is untrue, of course: historians estimate that over a million Europeans were abducted and enslaved by North Africans between the 16th and 18th centuries, as explained in this old Guardian book review (which I suspect would not get published in the newspaper now):
North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than one million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids that depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research.
Thousands of white Christians were seized every year to work as galley slaves, labourers and concubines for Muslim overlords in what is today Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, it is claimed.
Scholars have long known of the slave raids on Europe. But U.S. historian Robert Davis has calculated that the total number captured – although small compared with the 12 million Africans shipped to the Americas in later years – was far higher than previously recognised.
His new book, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery In The Mediterranean, The Barbary Coast, And Italy, 1500-1800, concluded that one million to 1.3 million ended up in bondage.
Historians were split over whether Prof. Davis’s unorthodox methodology has produced plausible estimates, but they welcomed any attempt to fill a gap in the little-known story of Africans subjugating Europeans.
Ms. Abbott’s comments about Jews not suffering racism are reminiscent of comments by Whoopi Goldberg last year that the “Holocaust isn’t about race” because “these are two white groups of people”. There appears to be a strain of woke thought that sees racism as only applying to black people and not other racial or ethnic groups, or at least not to Jews and other “white-seeming people”.
While denying that non-Jewish caucasians can suffer race-based prejudice is par for the course among critical race theorists, saying the same about Jews is obviously more contentious. However, there is a strain of Leftist thinking that sees Jewish people as beneficiaries of ‘white privilege’ – perhaps even especially so – and hence ‘oppressors’ rather than ‘oppressed’. This may be what Abbott and Goldberg are drawing on, though not necessarily consciously.
Whatever the source of these ideas, though, they are clearly factually dubious and likely to exacerbate racial divisions rather than heal them.
Stop Press: Brendan O’Neill in Spiked says that “Abbott’s mad letter sums up everything that’s wrong with identity politics”.
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