The banner you see above was carried all the way from the US to be defiantly unfurled at a conference in Brighton last October — for the benefit of a group of women who had never, ever claimed rape was legitimate resistance. Bit silly really — how did such a thing occur?

Like this:

The table is a cow: quite a useful idea, really. Rather than spending ten minutes at the counter while you fend off the barista’s 5000 new ideas about what kind of milk you might want, you could just order black coffee, go sit down and pull on an udder.

Fortunately, ideas are not reality. The idea however, is a useful illustration of ‘three-part syllogism’, which many English Literature students will have come across when they start studying the ‘metaphysical’ poets (John Donne and all that), but right now, the rest of us need to know about it. It goes like this:

1. A cow has four legs.
2. This table has four legs.
3. Therefore, the table is a cow.

Quasi-logical progressions like that, wrapped up in half a dozen fancy stanzas, allowed John Donne and his ‘metaphysical’ poetical peers to present their romantic and fanciful ideas as ‘logic’. They produced entertaining poems, so readers tended to accept the ‘logic’.

I think it’s really worth the time I spent thinking about that and writing it, and the time you just spent reading it, if it helps us unpick the nonsense that’s going around out there lately under the heading of ‘politics’. I’m going to use two current issues for practice in syllogism-spotting: the women’s rights campaign, and the Israel / Palestine divide that’s now pretty much destroyed British party politics. We socialist feminists had fair warning of it, as the two issues collided at FiLiA in the autumn, and — exploded.

Over the last decade, those of us on the women’s rights campaign have become old hands at this one:

1. Women wear make up, get emotional, need protection.
2. Vienna here is wearing make up, getting emotional and needs protection.
3. Therefore, Vienna is a woman.

And this one:

1. You’re talking about males being a danger to women.
2. Transwomen are males.
3. Therefore, you’re accusing transwomen of being a danger to women.

And this particularly annoying one:

1. Susie-May is a racist, right-wing Tommy Robinson fan.
2. Susie-May wants males out of female spaces and services.
3. Therefore, if you’re defending single-sex spaces and services, you’re a racist, right-wing, Tommy Robinson fan.

It’s why many women’s rights defenders who are on the left are very much in sympathy with comrades who are Jewish socialists, who’ve been plagued for decades now with this one:

1. You’re a Jew and you disagree with Israel.
2. Israel is a Jewish state.
3. Therefore, you are a mixed-up, self-hating Jew.

Or this one:

1. You are an anti-Zionist.
2. Antisemites are anti-Zionist.
3. Therefore, you are antisemitic.

That one is how the Labour Party managed to create a situation a few years back where Jewish people were six times more likely to be kicked out of the party for antisemitism than anyone else.

And now, the aftermath of the election

I postponed my post-election blog two, three, four times as I tried to digest the waves of rubbish going around in the weeks that followed. John Donne would have recognised a lot of it. How about:

1. Tommy Robinson/Nigel Farage is a racist/a criminal/a grifter.
2. Lots of people voted Reform UK in the local elections.
3. Therefore, lots of people are racists/criminals/grifters.

I was heartily grateful for those who were diligently going around social media, explaining wherever they got the chance, that even people who don’t follow politics that closely have, because of the endless problems we’re facing, recognised that the mainstream politicians are worse than useless, so they just tried voting for someone else and, in many places, the most obvious ‘someone else’ was the Reform candidate.

There was of course, the other side of the coin – those of us who follow politics well enough to know darned well that Reform UK is a company belonging to Farage, and that he’s been dabbling in politics for decades and evidence suggests that all he’s ever done is use political tides to sweep money into his pockets.

We swallowed hard and voted Green, in spite of the shambles that party is, in spite of their weird adhesion to queer theory, in spite of severe doubts about Zak Polanski (that is, doubts about both his political reliability and about the idea that the Green Party, mixed bag that is is, could ever unite around the Corbyn-copy ideas Polanski’s currently presenting.)

Of course, now the sitting politicians and their media hounds are all piling on their claims that Polanski is just one more confused, self-hating, antisemitic Jew (see syllogism above) a lot of other people who aren’t looking too closely have done this:

1. Jeremy Corbyn was the man we needed, but they shot him down with antisemitism smears.
2. They’re shooting Zak Polanski down with antisemitism smears.
3. Therefore Zak Polanski is the man we need.

The independents

There was a trend, visible in the last election, for people who’d lost faith in party politics to stand as/vote for independent candidates. British politics is like an oil-tanker – it takes a long, long time to turn but that trend is still growing, and some 200 independent candidates were elected, this time. More than ever before. They of course, are now having to put up with those who put together all the recent political syllogisms, and come up with something like this:

1. Your Party were a load of argumentative, wokey-looney Hamas-terrorist lovers.
2. Independent candidates were often backed by Your Party.
3. Therefore independent councillors are argumentative, wokey-looney Hamas-terrorist lovers.

As it happens, we had a chance to do some maths this weekend (despite the BBC and others trying to spike the figures). I don’t know exactly how many people attended that Nakba commemoration in London this weekend but, from the footage and photos posted by many of them, it was clearly hundreds of thousands, rather than tens of thousands whereas – if we’re going to be very generous, Tommy Robinson’s lot were maybe 5000 and those who were there clearly were not enraptured by Robinson’s fixation on his US-based, Trumpian, billionaire heroes. Therefore, by a large majority, most people aren’t Tommy Robinson fans so let’s try and put the fear of hordes of hateful, ultra-right, fascists out of our heads for a bit, shall we?

We just need, then, to sort out the ‘argumentative, wokey-looney Hamas-terrorists’ bit. Well here’s one piece of evidence we could use:

For all the politicians’ and media’s attempts to paint anti-genocide campaigners as hate-filled, dangerous or antisemitic, they have proved, time and time again, that they organise effectively, include many Jewish organisations in their numbers, and don’t cause a fraction of the trouble far-right gatherings do.

But it’s very, very hard to get people down off the conclusions they’ve drawn once the three-part syllogism has done its bit. I remember in the early days of the current Gaza situation, an old friend of mine turned up on my Facebook page, lecturing me, and those discussing how Israel’s violence might be stopped. He was working really hard trying to persuade us that Hamas are a) not angels and b) not popular in Gaza. I kept telling him that no-one, anywhere in any conversations on my page had been bigging up Hamas. We were just trying to stop the bombing but he came back with his non-sequitur arguments time and time again, and clearly getting increasingly angry as the only replies he got were ‘we’re not the Hamas fan club’. You can see what had happened to him, can’t you. Someone had persuaded him that:

1. Israel says it’s killing Hamas terrorists.
2. These people want Israel to stop attacking Gaza.
3. Therefore, these people support Hamas terrorists.

Meanwhile, my Jewish socialist friends (you know, those confused, self-hating antisemitic Jews) are now being kept busy trying to slap down the results of Israel’s latest (what was it, £25m worth of) propaganda. Israel’s hasbara team appear to have kicked off by re-hashing all the (mostly debunked) evidence of Israeli victims of the violence on October 7^th, 2023. Which brings me back to what happened at FiLiA last autumn.

It’s like this:

1. Hundreds of Israelis were raped and/or killed by Palestinians on 7^th October.
2. These women are wearing keffeyahs and carrying Palestinian flags.
3. Therefore these women think it’s okay to rape/kill Israeli women.

Here are the banners ‘the two sides’ used at conference…

You’d think wouldn’t you that, given all that’s gone on, it would by now have been possible to get across to them that a) we care what happens to women, whatever their nationality; b) we’re not sure who did what to whom on 7^th October as Israel has refused to allow proper investigations, very few survived Israel’s helicopter gun-ship sweep of the area and anyway c) we said Palestinians have a right to resist, NOT that anyone has a right to rape.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that sooner or later, things’d calm down enough for them to contemplate the idea that we (the keffiyah wearers at FiLiA) never, ever said we didn’t care about Israeli women — and it would be discussable, if not for those who I can only think are deliberately stirring up and rehashing the confusion. Look as this…

I don’t read the Daily Telegraph (it’s one of those corporate, billionaire-owned outlets that feed on hate and division) and it’s an article in that paper that’s got this going so — I conclude from social media clips — apparently, amongst the evidence of ‘anti-Israel voices’ and ‘rape apologists’ in Lampert’s article is a comment by Jane Clare Jones, taken from Twitter, and applied by Lampert to a report about October 7th.

Tagging someone’s reply to something onto something else just isn’t something you could do by accident, is it?

JCJ responded immediately…

The result, however, is one more tremendous Twitter-storm and I daresay a few more grey hairs for JCJ and her associates during which, it would appear, endless numbers of feminists have completely forgotten that we know, and have always known, that rape is a weapon of war, and that sooner or later, every side in every armed conflict has its share of atrocity-stories to deal with. Stories of rape are not a reason to ‘take sides’ in a war.

[If the media’s disregard for people’s integrity and reputation annoys you as much as it does me, please make use of the Telegraph’s complaints link – click here.]

So let’s all pause to listen to this clip from an Oxford debate (on the other topic) — never mind whether she’s ‘on your side’ or not, she said those rare and magical words, right at the start…

‘I don’t think you’re bad people.’

You don’t have to hate everyone that disagrees with you. Don’t assume they hate you.

Revolutionary!

So let’s go talk to the people who are saying things like this…

I can’t remember the details now, of the logical leap it took for so many people to conclude that women talking in terms of biological reality, for whatever purpose, equals women hating trans people, but I know there’s no chance they’ll hear the actual views of their ‘opponents’ while they only get to express themselves on channels ‘the left’ would not dream of watching, like here, on GB News; and the only channel I’ve seen flagging up the reason many women won’t vote Green is LBC, and if you want the truth about anti-genocide campaigners, you’ll be relying on Double Down News, a channel you can pretty much guarantee those on the right would never listen to…

So how do we ever bring these polarized groups together?

Thing is, we just did…

There’s a glimmer of hope in the current chaos, as councils reconvene with a bigger-than-ever-before mix of parties and independents: no-one has yet called me a lefty-hippy-wokey looney for voting Green on May 7th. I suppose it would have been hard to make it stick, as I’m still known as a trans-hating, right-wing bigot amongst the chatterers — but in an odd way, that’s a good thing — maybe all the hate-narratives are beginning to collide, and break each other.

A new perspective?

Maybe in those mixed-up councils up and down the land, Green and Blue councillors are talking to each other right now. Maybe over coffee, the Blues are telling the Greens that actually, there’s no way the majority of women are ever going to accept being told to shut up about biology and give away their legal rights. Maybe around the water-cooler, the Greens are telling the Blues that actually, they go on anti-genocide marches because they want our government to spend our money on housing and the environment, not drones, bombs and airbases to feed wars a thousand miles away.

In this country, when there’s no clear majority in the national government, we call the result ‘a hung parliament’ and when the same thing happens to councils, they bewail them as ‘NOC’ (no overall control) but in some countries, that result would be called something else — it would be called ‘representative’. Because we really are not all the same.

Maybe, just maybe those councillors will do us all a favour by learning to talk to each other. Not compromise their beliefs, not ‘side with the enemy’, but just – talk to each other. Maybe learn something.

Next demo, I’m going out with a placard that says ‘this table is not a cow’.

See you on the streets!

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