traditions of the world ' s great religions ). The mistake is to treat any faith or other community as a monolith and thus to stereotype its members ( whether through ignorance , insensitivity or for a more dubious motive ), alienating them from politics in the process . To fall into this trap is to fail to understand twenty-first century racism and the way that race , faith and various hatreds overlap .
- I recommend that racial or religious tropes and stereotypes about any group of people should have no place in our modern Labour Party .
Insensitive and incendiary language , metaphors , distortions and comparisons
As a free-speech campaigner , I have always believed in the right to offend . But as a lawyer I know the difference between a right and a duty . Self-censorship is a terrible thing when those living under oppressive regimes bite their tongues for fear of persecution or prosecution . It is equally terrible when people restrict their political speech for fear of the lynch mob . But there is another type of restraint that you might call kindness , politeness or good advocacy that is genuinely designed to persuade people and inform debates rather than inflame them .
In day-to-day political debate , it is always incendiary to compare the actions of Jewish people or institutions anywhere in the world to those of Hitler or the Nazis or to the perpetration of the Holocaust . Indeed such remarks can only be intended to be incendiary rather than persuasive . Why ? Because the Shoah is still in people ' s living family experience and because , if every human rights atrocity is described as a Holocaust , Hitler ' s attempted obliteration of the Jewish people is diminished or de-recognised in our history as is the history of a global minority that has had cause to feel , at worst , persecuted and , at best , vulnerable for thousands of years . Other hideous human rights atrocities from African slavery to the killing fields of Cambodia , the Armenian and Rwandan genocides are all of course to be remembered and described , but diluting their particularity or comparing degrees of victimhood and evil does no service to anyone .
I am in no way suggesting that bad taste metaphors and comparisons should ever be a matter for the criminal law any more than say ill-judged and incendiary cartoons . I am told that they are frequently used in Israel . However , they are all too capable , not only of bringing the Labour Party into disrepute , but of actively undermining the cause of peace , justice and statehood for the Palestinian people which forms part of Labour ' s current " two-state " foreign policy and which so many Jewish people ( including in the Labour Party ) actively support .
I make no comment on past , present or future foreign policy in this report . Such discussion is well beyond my remit . Suffice to say that insensitive and incendiary language , metaphor and comparison is of no help to constructive debate , in general , and discourse around the future of Israel-Palestine , in particular .
- I recommend that Labour members resist the use of Hitler , Nazi and Holocaust metaphors , distortions and comparisons in debates about Israel-Palestine in particular .
- I further recommend that excuse for , denial , approval or minimisation of the Holocaust and attempts to blur responsibility for it , have no place in the Labour Party .
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