I went to a really interesting talk that a lot of people didn’t want me to go to last month. It was laid on by the local Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Apparently, even some members of their own organization had their doubts about it. It’s because the speaker was David Miller, who seems to have the knack of offending people and these days, people just can’t find the courage to be offended audibly.

Oh, they’ll do it behind the shield of a social media or email account, and they’ll do it when they’re sure they’re in the majority but, they can’t do it when it means standing up in a roomful of people to say something you’re worked up about – and find out if anyone agrees with you. What if no-one agrees with me? Oh, I’d just die… Actually no, you wouldn’t. Your heart rate will go up for a bit and if it happens very often, you’ll feel stressed and have to take a break or go find some people you can discuss it with, but you won’t die.

The group’s decision to have Miller as a speaker had consequences. Lots of people who had the guts to be angry from a distance contacted the local papers, and harangued the venue until they decided not to hold political debates any more – and so my town lost another arena for discussion. The bankrupt and distressing condition of our political scene got even worse.

There were four issues in that Miller talk that feed into our current dilemma. First and foremost, what (to me) makes Miller worth listening to: he has a lot to say about how the Israeli bully-tactics in Palestine are funded and supported from the UK. That means that if they looked into it, people in the UK could do something about it. And that means the Israel lobby and their supporters are really keen to make Miller shut up. Interestingly, three more issues came up during the event that also cause distress, but now I look back on it, it was not the speaker but the response of the audience (including me) that caused the distress.

Thorny issues: no 1

The conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

Zionism is a political view. It’s centred on the belief that Israel is a God-given Jewish state, and that bringing Jewish people, no matter where they’re born, ‘home’ to Israel is more important than even the basic rights and welfare of non-Jewish people who live in Israel or Palestine. For those who hold that view, it’s very obviously right that Palestinians are corralled into an area that leaves room for Israel to feel secure, even though the result is illegal occupation – and they think it’s anti-Semitic to criticize the occupation, or to talk of a ‘one state solution’.

By contrast, people to the left in politics see post-colonial borders as imposed quasi-solutions that merely embed conflicts (think about India-Pakistan, think about Ireland). Socialist internationalists say the only way to solve the conflict over Israel/Palestine is to give up the idea of drawing a line and make Israel/Palestine one state, to work on creating a place where all peoples can live with equal rights, together.

I think the reason Israel/Palestine has the feeling of an eternal, insoluble conflict is that instead of fearlessly debating one state v two state solutions on the public stage, Zionists call any objections to Israel as a Jewish state anti-Semitic, thus crushing debate, and leaving both sides offended and angry whenever the topic comes up.

So the problem around that meeting wasn’t that Miller was talking in terms of Palestinian rights, but that no-one of a Zionist persuasion had the nerve to come along and try to debate it. They just sent emails all over the place calling Miller, the PSC and the venue anti-Semitic.

Thorny issues: no 2

The LGBTQIA+ community

Someone who’s publicly very much with the LGBTQIA+ community read out a complaint from the local paper to give Miller right of reply. It was basically a load of whataboutery (nasty things Miller’s supposed to have encouraged re Press TV, misogyny, LGBTQ etc). He responded by saying that when you see GCHQ lighting itself up with your rainbow flags, you know you ain’t an oppressed minority.

I thought him both right and wrong (I do think Pride, Stonewall etc have become corporate virtue-signalling enablers, and I think it’s blindingly obvious those organizations have been following the money and promoting TQIA+ at the expense of LGB people, some of whom have real needs that go unsupported as a result, but there’s a baby-and-bathwater effect if you respond by writing off the whole alphabet.)

I looked around the room, waiting for the explosion. There were enough of the glittery rainbow people there you’d think they’d find the courage – after all, there were a couple of people in the audience (now studying their fingernails) who I know had been busy helping to hound opponents out of the local Labour Party and the council but no, of course, that had been from behind the shield of social media and emails. Faced with what I suppose is, to them, the enemy, they just sat there looking upset.

 Thorny issues: No 3

Women’s activism

Really, most of women’s activism goes under the radar for most people. I suppose the resulting silence is why Miller had swallowed the Iranian government’s line that the women’s campaign there is nothing but a sham, stoked by the USA to cause trouble. But he didn’t just say that, he backed it up by quibbling about what the latest Iranian woman to die in police custody had actually died of. It was when he attributed the ‘women, life, freedom’ call to US agitators that my heart rate started going up. I have to say something – this is outrageous.

That call came first in Kurdish – Jin, jiyan, azadi – women, life, freedom – a solidarity call from the Rojava women in Syria to the Iranian women who, since the first Iranian women’s march against compulsory hijab (8^th March 1980) have been trying to tell their government that something got left out of their revolution (women). Too many have been arrested, beaten up, imprisoned, killed since then, with precious little response from the rest of the world. It’s criminal that news agencies and commentators largely ignore this, and even believe the Iranian government’s claim that women’s resistance to oppression is just a US-inspired sham of a protest.

But I didn’t say anything – I was too shocked, blind-sided I guess – and too spellbound by the continuing silence of a conflicted audience. It’s a silence that I know is doing terrible harm. So yes, mea culpa.

Thorny issues: No 4

The perceived conflict between trans rights and women’s rights

I say perceived because the devil really is in the detail – the issue I’m talking about now is no more a conflict between trans people and women than the Israel situation is a conflict between Jews and Arabs. To say so is to commit a massive slander upon untold numbers of peaceable Jews and Arabs, and contributes to a lot of misplaced fear and anger. Similarly, the ‘trans issue’ is actually a conflict between gender ideology and feminism. If there really is a ‘tide of transphobia’, it certainly isn’t coming from women’s rights campaigners.

Whatever you think of all that, it was when someone almost mentioned this particular issue that Miller said something like, oh let’s not talk about that, I have enough targets on my back. So even the famous Mr Controversial can back into the great silence sometimes.

David Miller is a great bloke

That isn’t irony. It was the response I got from a PSC organiser when I brought up some of these issues (or tried to) after the event. I do not doubt for one moment that if I sat down over a beer with Miller, I’d agree he is a nice bloke. I wasn’t saying ‘that David Miller’s a terrible person’, I was saying ‘there are these issues that need to be considered’. Can people really not tell the difference between a debate point and a demand for someone’s condemnation? I think Miller is a typical academic – he has much of interest to say, because he’s drilled down so deep on his own specialist topic – so much so that, like many academics, he doesn’t notice when he’s swallowing and passing on misleading ideas on another.

I blame the audience

None of it was Miller’s fault, and I don’t want to condemn or cancel him, so why do I believe harm was done at that PSC event?

It was the anxious, stress-inducing silences that did the harm. If the Zionists had had the nerve to come along and enter the debate, it would have been a political discussion instead of an anti-Semitism v Israeli exceptionalism contest waged from a distance, a war with such a huge silencing effect that it makes room for aggressive Israeli forces to advance, year in year out, arresting, displacing and killing any Palestinians they feel are ‘in their way’.

If the rainbow-glitter crowd had defended their corner, someone could have stood up and spoken up for those lesbian and gay people who feel crowded out of ‘their’ community by the corporate beano that ‘trans rights’ has become, and we could have discussed it, and quite likely discovered in the course of the discussion that the women’s rights issue wasn’t really about transphobes v misogynists at all, but about two different belief systems that need to be analyzed and tested.

But they didn’t, so gay and lesbian people can be taken to court for daring to set up their own organizations, and schools can teach kids you can change sex easy as winking, and everyone continues to think we have to accept those things because trans people are at risk from a bunch of wild, reactionary women who won’t shut up about sex-based rights.

If I’d had the wits to get my act together and speak up for the women of Iran, Syria and Afghanistan, the much-needed awareness of their campaigns would have spread a little further, instead of being squashed by an unchallenged assertion of an Iranian government line. We might even have had a very useful discussion about, for example, why people like Miller end up working with Press TV or al Jazeera – something that makes the right call them dangerous radicals but is actually caused by the appalling silence of the UK media on contentious issues.

It’s the silence that does the harm, and the blame for it lies with every single one of us who’s got tired, or stressed, and stopped speaking out when things strike us as wrong (I can excuse those desperately trying to hang onto jobs to feed their families. It’s appalling, but people do succeed in hounding others – usually women – out of jobs over these issues. As ever, it’s the bullies who are to blame, and those who fear challenging bullies who perpetuate the problem).

To illustrate the point, here’s a video of Miller talking in another arena, one where the audience had their act together, and had the confidence to call out his dafter ideas. (Click on the text link below the image. The bit I’m talking about is around 25mins in).

Miller didn’t listen, but that doesn’t matter. The rest of the audience heard two sides, were able to think about it, and so no harm was done (except for a raising of the heart rates of a couple of Iranian women – my, do I know how they felt!)

I’ve been trying to write this piece for weeks – but finally got around to it when I heard the following Briefing TV piece with Ben Sellers, in which I managed to be shocked (again) by the anxious silencing imposed by Jon Lansman and a startling number of supposedly radical MPs – the silencing that, in the end, made the failure of the Corbyn movement inevitable.

I’ve listed four thorny issues above. I think they are the main ones – there’s Brexit of course, and maybe you can think of others but, I’m thinking now about those MPs Ben Sellers’ team lost a vote to, about their fear of ‘uncontrolled’ grassroots democracy, and I’m thinking about the potential consequences of a generation that have grown up to fear debate, and to think that silencing, bullying, cancellations and no-platforming are legitimate conflict-avoidance techniques and, indeed, to think that conflict-avoidance is a good and necessary thing. Both those groups – the supposedly radical MPs and the supposedly revolutionary young people – are driven by the same neurosis – the need to be in control of the ‘debate’, a need that’s born of fear.

There sure as heck is not going to be any solidarity on the left, nor any sort of revolution, until we’ve found our way out of this mire and rediscovered the ability to research, debate, and argue without fighting. We need the confidence those Red Labour organizers once had, to allow a nationwide array of groups with varied ideas and forms of expression to flow freely, clash, zip around, test each other, and grow.

Meanwhile

Countless women across the world have lost their lives. People in Palestine are being driven to extremes just to try and stay alive. Hundreds of our girls are being led into trying to be boys. We’ve lost everything that an inept, right-wing led Brexit could drain us of, and we’ve lost the chance of a democratic socialist government – all because those with a bit of power feared the chaos of grassroots democracy, and started apologising to bullies. The rest of us ducked out of open, comradely debate on ‘difficult’ issues, or else joined in the shouting down of anyone we considered ‘off message’. How many have dropped out of politics, how many have fallen into a silent, despairing rage? How do we calm down, and invite them back?

So rather than working up a blood pressure problem in angry, frustrated silence, let’s use all that anger and anxiety to power ourselves up again, to stand up and talk – talk properly, talk fearlessly – talk into every one of those fearful silences, until everyone understands all those thorny issues. Let’s stand up and expect to be heard, and earn the right to be heard by allowing others to be heard and – for goodness sake, repay their courage by listening and questioning, instead of silencing, threatening and sabotaging.

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