Steve_Bamlett_blog

Violence: How should we respond, and how do we respond? The tragedy born out of inappropriate response

Above are the bare facts of the violence that occurred at Heaton Park Synagogue m Manchester. People died as a result not only of the violence of one man (and others if others backed him up) but also because the signs of violence create the conditions for over-response, based on the fear of our stereotypes of what certain kinds of violence look like, when we are primed for then. An appliance on the body must be a bomb and to shoot to kill, using random spray that kills and injures others is then thought permissible. These consequences need still to be blamed on the perpetrator of this knifing of an Jewish attender of a service on Yom Kippur and the terror wearing a bomb-like device encourages of yet another suicide bombing, but it does not justify the escalation of blame that follows.

And then the political response. Here is Keir Starmer:

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who returned early from a meeting in Denmark, said Britain must defeat rising anti-Jewish hate.

What appalls me is that this response is not only inappropriate but validates greater misunderstanding that feeds the already massive ignorance of this event to what might be an appropriate responses, including a loving one to the victims’ families. To say this is evidence of ‘rising anti-Jewish hate’ is to hide so much that we have yet to learn about this attack. And it is to begin a process of scapegoating. The next day the new Home Secretary is reported thus:

Shabana Mahmood has called on pro-Gaza demonstrators to stop protesting in the wake of the terror attack at a synagogue in Manchester.

The home secretary condemned a protest that took place in Manchester in the wake of the stabbing, calling on those who attended to “show some humanity”.

Now we see how our government interprets ‘rising anti-Jewish hate’; it is laid at the feet of those who protest at a genocide in Palestine that few nations in he world deny – with the exception of Israel, the USA and the UK, still shy of offending the the USA. and losing arms sales.Immediately the people who stand by Palestine are seen as the cause of ‘hate’ and a decline of ‘humanity’. Nothing in the movement against genocide is aimed against Jews, only an Israel that refuses to countenance the existence of a Palestinian homeland and prosecutes its views by armed aggression against all Gazans irrespective of their age, sex/gender or political and cultural affiliation, even after the terrorist organisation that committed atrocities in Israel so long ago has been disabled of pursuing further action.

How dare a government that supplies arms to aid in this process call on people to ‘show some humanity’ when they have shown none, even defending the right of Israel to cut off vital supplies of food and water to Gazan citizens from the beginning of this one-sided attack on those civilians?

There is no proven or even suggested relationship been claimed of the one-man perpetrator of the synagogue attack to the Palestinian cause, except that he is Arab, a Syrian. Meanwhile the government allows speculation to mount that this is the case, just when they need to grow not diminish cultural misunderstandings between communities in Britain and loose the tie of these communities from a struggle for existential rights between many cultures and religions in Palestine that Israel wants to express alone as a theocratic and dominant hegemoic state, with differing degrees of citizenship implied and enforced by them. Should there turn out to be formal links to an organisation related to Palestine, even then it is clear that this job was done by people without any training in terror tactics.

Meanwhile in Crook, a sleepy enough decayed town these days, Starmer is already unpopular on the right, as this offensive use of the union flag in my home town shows:

When I complained to County Durham’s unitary council, run by the ultra-right-wing Reform Part (not I insist in defence of Starmer but for the standards of public discourse on politics it supports), their customer services representative said that it was alright to suggest the ‘Fuck’ on a poster as long as you disguised it a little (their policy. said Customer Services, is to ‘leave flags as long as they are not a traffic hazard’). Customer Services did not disclose any complicity in rising them in the first place by the ruling Party, so we will never know how they were financed. The police say it is not their business and even the local Labour MP seems to think this is merely expressing an opinion. If Keir Starmer and his government want those of us who care about genocide in a foreign country to care about abuse pointed at him, he should see where the ‘hate’ arises in the first place, and it is not in us, who want less of it in Palestine where one hateful action has been followed by one so overwhelming in its evil effects that it shadows past genocides – in say Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia – to things of no note, though terrible in their time.

What I fear is what is to come. What I know is that this government lurches from inane response to inane response.

With love and sorrow about this vile world

Steven xxxxxxxxx