What exactly did Diane Abbott say that is antisemitic?

The Americans can tune out to this or read how they have no monopoly on bizarre outcomes of political street-fighting

The following is from a BBC website that reports comments made by the first black woman ever to be elected to the UK parliament, who now rejoices in the unofficial title of mother of the House. As a result of the comments, she has now been chucked out of the ruling Labour Party, for the second time: Diane Abbott. Here she is, beaming:

Image: By Chris McAndrew, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61320746

Here is an extract from the article, containing the relevant passages of her interview:

In an interview with the BBC’s James Naughtie, she was asked about the controversy that was sparked by a letter she wrote to the Observer in April 2023.

In the letter, she wrote that Irish, Jewish and Traveller people “undoubtedly experience prejudice” that is “similar to racism”.

She added: “It is true that many types of white people with points of difference, such as redheads, can experience this prejudice. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”

Abbott was quick to withdraw the remarks, which were heavily criticised by Jewish and Traveller groups, and apologised “for any anguish caused”.

But she was suspended from the party and only re-admitted just before last year’s general election.

Asked by Naughtie if she looked back on the whole incident with regret, she said: “No, not at all.”

She added: “Clearly, there must be a difference between racism which is about colour and other types of racism because you can see a Traveller or a Jewish person walking down the street, you don’t know.

“You don’t know unless you stop to speak to them or you’re in a meeting with them.

“But if you see a black person walking down the street, you see straight away that they’re black. They are different types of racism.”

Asked if she believed she had done anything wrong or had said something in her Observer letter that she did not believe in, she said: “I just think that it’s silly to try and claim that racism which is about skin colour is the same as other types of racism.

“I just... I don’t know why people would say that.”

A Labour Party spokesperson said: “There is no place for antisemitism in the Labour Party. We take these comments incredibly seriously, and will assess them in line with Labour Party’s rules and procedures.”

Baroness Shami Chakrabarti – a Labour peer and a friend of Abbott - told BBC’s Politics Live she did not interpret the interview as the MP retracting her previous apology.

“She was saying, as I understand it... that people do experience racism differently - that doesn’t create a hierarchy, that doesn’t mean one kind racism is better than another,” she said.

So, here is where I put my fourpence-worth in. Do you see anything in the foregoing that is antisemitic?

I need here to delve into my personal experiences. Would you like to come in and look around with me?

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I didn’t know she is Jewish

In 2019, I met a woman who volunteered to take a part in a play I was organising. I re-connected with her a year later because I knew she sewed, and I have my mother’s old Singer sewing machine here at the house and I asked her to teach me how to sew. She agreed. Over she came, with her own machine, on many occasions, and the two us went through sewing exercises (some basic hemming and reversal manoeuvres).

In the course of her visits, I learned that she is Jewish. She expressed surprise that I wouldn’t have worked that out, but, I asked her, on what basis would I have done that? We are still friends, and we exchange views on matters from the Christian and Jewish viewpoints. We don’t agree on everything, but we are still friends. We’re going to a concert together on Saturday.

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Can you be racist against east Germans if you’re a west German?

Yesterday, I posted about artworks and immigrants and mentioned Carolin Würfel, who I said had suffered racism between east and west Germany. I misquoted the piece, in fact, the reference was to the experience of Lynn Rother, but the comment covered all three of the women referred to in the piece, all of whom were involved in the art museum world: the author, Rother and Kathleen Reinhardt. Here’s the relevant extract (note that 2008 was 18 years after reunification):

It was similar for Rother, who was driven from early on. After studying art history, business and law, she earned a traineeship at Berlin’s state museums in 2008. There, she came to see that it wasn’t only about hard work – her origins suddenly mattered.

She was constantly asked: “Are you from East or West?” The hierarchy was obvious. Westerners ran the institutions. Eastern directors were deputies – at best. Even the art mirrored this: East German works were written off as second-rate.

Both women have long rejected the patronising West German gaze. The “east”, Reinhardt argues, is not a special case, but a prism – a way to look at broader geopolitical lines and ask bigger questions about how we approach history and transformations in societies. Or in Rother’s words: “With artworks, labels matter. But we as people shouldn’t be bound by them.”

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Sie müssen erzogen werden

I used to be a member of the Rheinischer Juristenverein (Rhine Lawyers’ Club)—a posh name for an annual lunch and booze-up, comprising students who had completed the German law immersion programme for young lawyers organised by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, or DAAD. My year was the year that the Berlin Wall fell, and that fact was prominent in the day’s official proceedings at the club’s next meeting, in May 1990. I remember two statements that were made at that meeting to this day: Germans will never give up their speed-limitless motorways, since they are the encapsulation of one of the few freedoms left to us (according to a former partner of Skadden, Arps). The other was die Ossies müssen erzogen werden (the easterners have to be educated). I’m still not quite sure which of those two statements shocked me more.

There is still antagonism and rivalry between east and west in Germany, 35 years later. Not so much because the communist easterners need to be taught capitalism, but more because the capitalist westerners need to be reminded of their Nazi roots. Just who has ended up educating whom in Germany remains an open question. But a racist-style differentiation still exists there. It used to be identified by way of cars: BMW, Daimler and VW for the west, and Trabi and Moskvitch for the east. The old cars may be gone on the whole, but the token marks of differentiation can still be felt, if you’re sensitive to them. In the end, all Germans look the same as they walk down the street. But a prejudice still exists between them, like some invisible Wall.

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Bad bitch white boys

Back in the 2010s, I was a regular holiday visitor to Palm Springs, California, and got to know people, one person in particular, who became a lifelong friend and who may well be reading this. I wonder if he remembers taking me aside and coaching me, under the watchful eye of a Jamaican friend of his, on how to react if stopped in the car by the police. I was vaguely amused by the whole process until I caught the look of deadly earnest in his eye. “Keep your hands on the steering wheel. Don’t reach into a pocket, don’t open the window, don’t get out of the car, keep looking straight ahead.”

Finally, he chuckles: “You’ll probably be all right, though. You’re a bad bitch white boy.” He’s black. And being white or black of skin colour can be enough to decide between whether you’ll be stopped by the highway patrol or not and, if so, what the consequences of that can be, for instance, whether you will be arrested, detained, or shot.

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Now, Diane Abbott would like to draw a distinction between prejudice, on the one hand, a dislike people have of people from a certain background, based on generalisations about what certain aspects of their life betoken for their suitability within a given circle of people, and the dislike that is harboured for those of a racial background in particular. There is a recognisable chumminess among Old Etonians and Oxford students who make it into the Houses of Parliament. The same for Ivy League graduates in the US, or the Grandes Écoles in France. And, therefore, those whose education was at a comprehensive school or State university are disadvantaged from the outset. But blacks, well, people don’t need to wait to receive a CV and job application from them to know they’re black. They just need to look at them. I know a Colombian dancer in Brussels who constantly has to put people he meets right: he eats pork, because he’s not Muslim, he’s South American.

There is a film featuring Oxford-educated black poet Femi Nylander, retracing the path of destruction that was the French colonial massacre in Niger, in 1899-1900. He made it with the BBC; it’s called African Apocalypse. In it, he explains that, although he is black, researching a white European outrage against African peoples, he cannot reveal to the people he talks to the fact he is British. His interlocutors would have turned against him and refused their cooperation if they’d known that fact.

In a way, the Nylander story encapsulates perfectly the point that Abbott has made: the Nigériens could not express their prejudice (however validly founded it might be) against Englishmen until they were further informed of the nationality of the man that stood before them. And they never made the inquiry, because Nylander is black.

But a California police patrol will be 62 per cent more inclined to stop a motorist who is black simply on the grounds that he is black, without any inquiry into his nationality. And there, Abbott again is right: racism trumps prejudice. You can survive in a world of prejudice, as Nylander did in Niger, simply by not mentioning the ground for the other’s prejudice. After all, it’s how undercover police agents work: not revealing the factor that would make them the enemy. But police services wanting to send undercover agents to infiltrate neo-Nazi organisations would be ill-advised to send agents who are black. I suspect they would not infiltrate very far.

Racism—itself a misnomer since we all belong to one and the same race the world over—is invidious, because the racially hated cannot escape the invective directed against them. They are what they are, and cannot hide the fact. But those against whom prejudice is expressed only really need to disguise the ground for the prejudice. Whether it’s their homosexuality (as depicted in the 1961 groundbreaking film Victim) or even, as Dustin Hoffman did in the film Tootsie, his masculinity (which led to such complications that he eventually had to blow his own gaffe in order to preserve his sanity).

Actress and TV presenter Whoopi Goldberg was criticised by network ABC for saying on a broadcast of The View that antisemitism is not racism, because it can be expressed between two parties of the same skin colour. I don’t think that either Abbott or Goldberg were trying to belittle the oppression and social exclusion that any grouping within society can suffer from if they happen to be bearers of the wrong characteristic. When he had one, a friend of mine in Brussels who was allocated a Tesla car by his company before the brand got into the news for the wrong reasons told me people would walk up to the vehicle and spit on it. That’s an irrational dislike, expressed in a graphic manner. But it’s hardly racism, is it? Perhaps people already disliked Mr Musk, or they felt some other reason to dislike Teslas. But to spit on a man’s car is to suppose that one is prepared to spit on the man, and there’s no more rationale to doing it because he owns a Tesla than because he happens to be Jewish.

The fact remains that disliking people for a characteristic that is only discernible on enquiry, on the one hand, and disliking them for one that is obvious to the naked eye, on the other, does nothing to render the dislike any less dislikable, even if that distinction might raise the question of whether prejudice against the disabled is or is not akin to racism. Akin yes, but if racism is to be based on race, and race alone, what makes Jewishness, Irishness or Traveller a race—or is race now to mean nationality?

When a black woman like Ms Abbott makes the observation in such simple terms as she does, I can but agree with her, that hiding your Jewishness, Irishness or Traveller roots, should the occasion necessitate, is a somewhat easier task than hiding one’s skin colour. But suffering an accident that renders you paraplegic can hardly be said to alter your race, even if it can make you the object of immediate discrimination. It’s perhaps the disabled who offer the clearest distinction, because the characteristic that causes many of them to suffer prejudice is not one with which they are born, but which they acquire during their lifetime.

That one should require to hide any of these characteristics is a matter to be reprehended. But lumping them together does nothing to achieve that; instead it treats all injury the same way, and thereby belittles the burden of him who ultimately bears the greatest one.