Alberto Balsam

Europe is good, but not the EU. Data Analyst, Anarchist. CDKL5 children, history, animals, cricket, Shakespeare, #FPL, Chelsea FC, jazz, funk, soul etc.

[Dirk Ehnts @DEhnts]

@Evanshm There is no Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences and the one that exists was created to fight Swedish social democracy.
https://t.co/UFCIfCvcuX

[Hamza Yusuf @Hamza_a96]

The Guardian has published a vile piece by Dave Rich accusing anyone who says Israel deliberately kills children of engaging in blood libel.

Apparently, the slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza is a byproduct of a “tragic and unbearable conflict”.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

Amid all the hysteria, it is worth remembering that “Zionism is racism” was once an official UN General Assembly position. In 1975, Resolution 3379 determined that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”

It was only repealed in 1991 after a major US campaign

[Snowleopardess 💚 @snowleopardess]

Previous Green leaders had no desire to become a real force in Parliament to challenge the status quo.
Zack is the first Green leader to raise hopes of a real alternative to policies which are keeping the rich, rich and the rest of us in our boxes.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

The only way to spin Zionism is Racism into antisemitism is to pretend the motion said “Jewish people are racist” — watch every person condemning it do this. The problem is that this isn’t what the motion said, of course, and pretending that it did is antisemitic.

[Alberto Balsam @AlbertoBaIsam]

@MCFC_Hugo yeah well, you've made a good point except for it was money that enabled all of those things.

[Alberto Balsam @AlbertoBaIsam]

@FPL_Harry he's a smooth operator

[Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook]

So many fake takes on the Greens' latest policy.

Then known as the Ecology Party, the Greens began demanding an end to apartheid South Africa from the early 1970s.

They were right then, and they are right now to be demanding an end to an apartheid, genocidal Israel.

[Council Estate Media @cem_uk_]

For decades we've been told it's antisemitic to conflate Zionism with Judaism and now the entire British establishment is telling us it's antisemitic to not conflate Zionism with Judaism. Extraordinary.

[Greens4Palestine @Greens4P]

If we passed policies that were popular with the pro-genocide media, we would just be the Labour Party….

The Greens are different.
We’ve sided with the Palestinians against racism and settler colonialism.

The media can seethe all they like.
History has been made.

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

In Britain, the establishment opinion, as we’ve learned over the last 24 hours, is that you can somehow build an exclusionary ethnonationalist colony on someone else’s land… without racism.

And if you say, “I don’t know, that sounds pretty racist,” somehow you’re the racist.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

So, the Green Party voted to brand Zionism as a form of racism - and all hell broke loose in the mainstream media that for years has been tolerating the Palestinian genocide.

Now, on the specific issue, of whether Zionism is a species of racism, here is what I can offer: A recommendation for a forthcoming book that I was privileged enough to get a chance to read before it was published.

The author is Benjamin Moser, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'Sontag: Her Life and Work'.

The book's title? 'Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History'.

Below you can find the blurb I wrote when I read it. I think it says everything I want to say on the question "Is Zionism a species of racism?"

Benjamin Moser grew up inside the Zionist story. This remarkable book is a record of his slow, painful unlearning of it – its deconstruction. Resembling some character in an Ibsen play, Moser gradually, unwittingly, discovers an unpunished crime at the heart of a storyline he had considered ‘pure’. The result is not a polemic but a resurrection of a fine tradition of Jews who resisted Zionism, whose stories were suppressed, their names erased, their portents dismissed as self-hatred. And yet, as Moser shows with devastating patience, they were right. They were right about the Nakba before it happened. They were right about the settlements before they spread. They were right about the genocide before we watched it unfold. More than any other recent book, Anti-Zionism restores our faith in what Iris Murdoch defined as the Sovereignty of Good.

https://t.co/YgoF4fE2FP

[CrémantCommunarde #GreenTransitionNow💚 @0Calamity]

I hold my hands up. I didn't vote yesterday because, frankly, I didn't know which way to vote. On the one hand, in my personal opinion, Zionism, as it has manifested in Israel, is racism. On the other hand, the three word sloganism of the motion left no room for nuance, and I knew that people would feel alienated by it. So I simply didn't vote.
Cowardly? Arguably.
But what it has done is to burst a huge, purulent boil that has been swelling and swelling for decades about the behaviour of the state of Israel towards Palestinians.
Many parties ignored the boil was there, denied its existence and went on as if it wasn't growing every bigger and ever more purulent. Some tried rubbing balm on it.
Now it has burst. Of course it is painful, for a lot of people on all sides, and for a lot of reasons. But now there is no option but for people to face up to it, and for the concept of political Zionism to be debated widely.
Also, in my personal opinion, the days of a two-state solution have long passed, unless Netanyahu and the virulent right wing of Israeli politics is excised, there is a root-and-branch reform of the Israeli system to remove all discriminatory laws, there is a "truth and reconciliation" programme of the kind seen in South Africa, and there is a guarantee enshrined in the constitution of absolute equality for all citizens, no matter their race, creed, colour or cultural origins.
Let's have the debate.
But, in the mean time, Netanyahu and his band of assassins must go.

[Tom London @TomLondon6]

I explain here why I voted for the “Zionism is racism” motion at the Green Party conference. I now find myself, despite being Jewish, labelled “antisemitic” and “extremist” or sometimes worse. Obviously, I do not accept these labels

Here is my thinking

1. The dominant Israeli and Western narrative is that Zionism means (a) the right for Jews to have a homeland in their biblical land and (b) the right to have a place of safety after persecution culminating in the horror of the Holocaust
2. ⁠This, on its face, is very reasonable, right & proper. This is the core of the UK political & media response to the Greens motion
3. ⁠Sadly, the early Zionist slogan that Palestine would be “a land without people, for a people without a land” was not true - the land DID have people, Palestinians
4. ⁠The great Palestinian-American intellectual, Edward Said, wrote a 1979 essay called “Zionism from the viewpoint of its victims”
5. ⁠That viewpoint is conspicuously absent from much discussion in the West
6. ⁠Zionism has meant decades of ethnic cleansing, oppression, apartheid & killing of millions of Palestinians BECAUSE they are Palestinians
7. ⁠This is why Zionism is racism
8. ⁠One of my (many) Jewish heroes is Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. He did not go to live in Israel. He was an anti-Zionist. He said, “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed, never with the oppressors”

[Zarah Sultana MP @zarahsultana]

Zionism is racism.

[Alberto Balsam @AlbertoBaIsam]

@thecitydefender you're just embarassing yourself. pipe down

[simon maginn @simonmaginn]

No-one's buying this crap, @AngelaRayner.
The 'antisemite' bandwagon crashed and burned some years ago, and those still trying to ride it, such as yourself, just make themselves ridiculous. You don't get away with it anymore.
The weather's changed.
#ItWasAScam

[Alberto Balsam @AlbertoBaIsam]

@thecitydefender @premierleague they've had it old chap. and there's no need for you to be upset, as you haven't supported them for that long after all, have you? just go back to supporting whatever team you supported before they started winning trophies, or pick another rich team that wins a lot

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

For the last four decades, politicians of all parties have repeated told us the only way to spark economic growth is to cut benefits, cut taxes and deregulate business. It hasn't worked; there are no signs it ever will.

[Alberto Balsam @AlbertoBaIsam]

@BINGLEYBLUE78 @ArsenalNews_Hub verdicts already in mate. you should read the news