Though Cowards Flinch

Baroness (Jenny) Tonge has been the subject of all the talk today. I won’t bother to offer opinion here, but I would like to copy here the views of former US Marine Ken O’Keefe, who Tonge recently shared a platform with.

What I’d like, primarily, to say is that not all critics of Israel have to be nutjobs, and indeed there are plenty of such people who are not. So why does O’Keefe keep being invited to talk at things like the Middlesex University Free Palestine Society? They don’t think he is the best they can do, do they?

He was the one who said 9/11 could not have plausibly been carried out by bin Laden and 19 hijackers, instead blaming the US government and Mossad. He decided to air this conspiracy theory on the new spiritual home of conspiracy theories: Press TV.

When he said the following, Tonge did not challenge him, or choose to distance herself away from this opinion. This doesn’t mean she agrees. But it does mean she didn’t find it outrageous enough to comment on, particularly as her cause could potentially be tarred with a certain kind of brush which I wouldn’t want to be associated with.

He said:

“The Jewish state (that’s not my expression), Israel, is, therefore, acting on behalf of the Jewish people. You [by which he means the Jewish people], like the Nazis, now have a special obligation. The decent Germans of World War Two, what did they do when the Nazis came to power and instituted their policies? Did they do enough to stop the Nazis? No, they didn’t.

“What are the Jewish people doing right now? Are you doing enough to stop your racist, apartheid, genocidal state?”?

The video for this is here below, and his rant, printed above, starts at around 11.14.

On what he says, firstly the comparison between Jews and “decent Germans” is flawed. Secondly, there is no reason to be this inflammatory. If he thinks all Jewish people are morally culpable for what he perceives to be a genocidal state, then he has something avowedly against Jewish people.

In brief, in O’Keefe’s mind, all Jewish people are to blame for genocide in Gaza. That’s a very serious charge.

His comments are now being reviewed by police investigation.