No, Keir Starmer isn't having a good Gaza genocide

It's necessary to reverse a lot of evidence and ignore a lot of facts to pretend that Keir Starmer has handled the Gaza genocide "rather well".

Hugo Rifkind and the Times clearly realise the depravity of what they’re saying, otherwise they wouldn’t be advising their readers to whisper their assertion that Keir Starmer is having a good genocide in Gaza, rather than say it out loud.

Rifkind has hastily backtracked from the stomach-churning headline by changing his bio on Xitter to "I didn’t write the headline though" and publicly disowning the standfirst about Starmer only losing some Muslim support too.

The problem of course is that the article itself is just as depraved as the headline and subheading, with a load of reality-reversing nonsense thrown into the mix too.

Owen Jones invites people to imagine if an article like this would ever have been written in a British newspaper if the scenario was reversed and Israel had suffered tens of thousands of civilian deaths, unlawful siege and starvation tactics, the systematic destruction of hospitals and schools, rampant looting, the use of aid convoy trucks as bait to massacre starving civilians, etc.

Imagine if Keir Starmer had refused to call for a ceasefire, stated that the hypothetical attackers laying waste to Israel had the right to cut off food, water and energy supplies, and then mass expelled people from the Labour Party for objecting to his refusal to condemn the genocide or to call for a ceasefire.

Would an article like this have been written about how he was doing "rather well"?

Would anyone be making out that it’s no real problem if Labour genocide complicity was eroding Jewish support?

Of course not.

The fact this article’s been written at all is yet another demonstration of the Islamophobia that infests the Westminster establishment order and Britain’s depraved political media class.

Rifkind plays mind games with his readers by claiming the phrase "from the river to the sea" is genocidal when used by Palestine supporters to call for freedom for Palestinians, but completely ignores its widespread use by Israelis, including Benjamin Netenyahu, to call for ever more land-theft, illegal settlement, and subjugation of people outside of Israel’s current borders.

Rifkind also neglects to mention the absolute litany of genocidal statements made by senior Israeli politicians, military leaders, and media figures, or the fact that Israel is being prosecuted for genocide at the ICJ in the Hague.

A slogan projected onto a building calling for Palestinians to be free is apparently "genocidal" while the demonstrably genocidal actions and intentions of Israel somehow don’t warrant a mention!

Then there’s Rifkind’s use of reality-reversed assertions to underpin his argument.

There’s a reason Rifkind uses the cumbersome formulation "As such, he has broadly tracked the position of not only the White House but also, I expect, of the bulk of the non-marching electorate".

Rifkind can only "expect" the wider electorate supported Starmer’s belligerent refusal to call for a ceasefire because he knows there’s no polling evidence to back his assertion, so he had to use the qualifier of his own expectation because to claim such a thing as fact would be to trap himself in a demonstrable lie.

In reality the British public overwhelmingly supported a ceasefire from the first polls on the subject, and the desire to see a ceasefire only strengthened in the months since, as Starmer continued refusing to call for one.

It’s absolutely beyond doubt that Starmer defied public opinion for months on end with his outright refusal to call for a ceasefire (and with his punitive reprisals against Labour politicians and party members who wouldn’t participate in his genocide complicity) but Rifkind pretends that Starmer’s stance was tracking public opinion, rather than defying it.

It’s true that Labour have taken advantage of the Tory implosion to build large and consistent leads in the polls, but this obviously has very little to do with Gaza because for months Labour and the Tories shared virtually identical stances on the issue.

The Tories refused to call for a ceasefire, abstained on UN ceasefire motions, and continued signing arms export licences despite knowing the weapons would be used in Israel’s genocide.

Starmer refused to call for a ceasefire, and failed to condemn the Tory government either for their abstentionism, or for the genocide complicity of continued arms sales.

If Labour has maintained poll leads throughout the genocide, it clearly has nothing to do with Gaza, because the two parties are virtually inseparable on the issue.

It’s also arguable that the Labour poll leads have a lot more to do with public infuriation at the Tories, than with approval of Starmer, given that significantly more people keep on believing that Starmer is doing badly rather than well.

Rifkind mentions George Galloway’s by-election win in Rochdale, but only as an aside as he talks about Labour’s poll leads.

As much as Rifkind wants to dismiss it, Sunak’s panicky authoritarian rant the next day and the vitriolic outpouring of hate from Starmerites demonstrate that the establishment have definitely been rattled by it.

They’re still deeply traumatised by the 2017 general election, when the triumphant destruction of Corbynism the establishment order had expected turned into the biggest surge in Labour support since 1945, resulting in Theresa May losing her majority and bribing the far-right DUP bigots for support to cobble a government together.

The establishment order are worried that the traditional voter loyalty of the past is dying away and that insurgent results like Galloway’s could be replicated in general elections to return non-conformist candidates and oust high profile establishment figures like Starmer himself from their once-safe seats.

Galloway’s by-election win and widespread disgust at Starmer’s genocide complicity amongst British Muslims (and plenty of non-Muslims too) aren’t mere asides in a broader Starmer success story, they’re evidence that genocide complicity is a very heavy weight to be carrying across the thin ice of public opinion.

Then there’s the farcical scenes in parliament when the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle ripped up parliamentary convention to sabotage the SNP’s Gaza ceasefire motion and effectively hand their opposition debate over to Starmer.

Does Rifkind really believe that this shambolic mess was a sign of Starmer handling the Gaza situation "rather well"?

If Starmer had actually wanted a ceasefire motion, Labour could have used one of their 17 opposition days to draft one exactly as they wanted it, but because they chose not to do that, they found themselves in the situation where they were faced with an SNP ceasefire motion that referenced Israel’s collective punishment of civilians.

Starmer outright refuses to call Israeli genocide and war crimes what they are (because to do so would be to admit UK genocide complicity) so he cooked up a scheme with the Speaker to sabotage the motion so Labour could strip out any reference to Israeli atrocities.

When they came under fire for this cynical and outrageous collusion, Starmer and Hoyle deliberately triggered an Islamophobic panic by citing unspecified threats from unspecified people as the reason parliamentary convention had to be sabotaged, a move that caused a tsunami of Islamophobic hatred and conspiracy theories from the Tories and the right-wing press.

The Islamophobic panic they initiated has taken hold so firmly that Sunak even referenced it in his sinister Downing Street rant.

Although Rifkind doesn’t mention it directly, maybe this is what he’s getting at?

Maybe he’s seen the way Starmer and Hoyle successfully directed negative attention away from themselves by throwing British Muslims to the baying pack of Tory wolves?

Maybe he thinks a dangerous Islamophobic panic and even more authoritarian Tory attacks on our civil liberties are a price worth paying for Keir Starmer to avoid saying that war crimes are war crimes?

If you see Westminster politics as game in which nothing else matters besides party political advantage - not tens of thousands of civilian deaths, not mass starvation, not sabotage of parliamentary convention, not soaring Islamophobia in our own country, not deranged politicians baying for even more authoritarian crackdowns on our rights to protest and free speech - then maybe it is possible to think Starmer was playing 5D political chess when he leaned on the Speaker to bin parliamentary convention, initiating a sinister Islamophobic panic in the process?

Maybe it’s possible to think that it’s a sign of political mastery that Labour have distracted attention away from their own corruption by triggering the Tories into an orgy of Islamophobic conspiracy theories and authoritarian hankering?

But then you’d have to be a fucking monster to think like that, and perhaps this monstrous indifference to anything other than party political advantage is the reason that Rifkind feels so confident in his assertions that "Starmer isn’t a monster" and that he’s handling the Gaza situation "rather well"?