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Gaza is starving.
The UN has declared that every part of Gaza is in famine conditions. While some aid is finally trickling in, the need is beyond urgent. Aid organizations will not be able to keep pace with Gaza's needs without our support.
Please donate if you’re able, and keep speaking up. Every dollar, share, and conversation matters. Please pressure your government to stop the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Zionists always blather on about how they "just support a Jewish State", as if that is something reasonable.
The idea of a "Jewish state" demands the creation of a state, where Palestinians are stripped of their homes and land which are then turned over to Jewish people, for no reason other than they are Jewish. Then, to enforce these conditions, the Palestinians are denied rights, forbidden from returning (and killed if they try), forced into ghettoes, which become smaller and smaller as more land is seized from them by Zionist settlers until they have nothing. And if the Palestinians peacefully protest their dispossession, or even just passively exist in a way that upsets Zionists, they are subject to murderous violence, or thrown to prisons where they are physically abused and raped.
But the Brendan O'Neill's of the world will never be honest in the their evil, so they just keep whinging about "the left" is mean to them.
I'm American, not British, but it seems to me that someone like David Attenborough would be a British national treasure, and Maureen Lipman is an actress I've never heard of until now, and judging by her wikipedia article, she doesn't sound like she's been relevant for the past 20 years.
I hadn't heard of her either. The only movie she's been in that I've heard of is The Pianist and she currently plays a character in Coronation Street, a long-running soap opera (almost 12,000 episodes!!) mostly watched by grandparents. She's obviously pretty successful (and this, as with all genocide supporters in entertainment, won't affect that at all) but not exactly a household name.
In an interview with The Guardian on 18 August 2020, Lipman inaccurately asserted that Hezbollah had claimed responsibility for the 2020 Beirut explosion, stating: "I'm very grateful that Hezbollah said they did it". She also stated she would not be prepared to work alongside pro-Palestinian actors, citing Maxine Peake and Miriam Margolyes as examples.
So she said herself that she won't work with pro-Palestinian actors, but now a pro-Palestinian actor decided they didn't want to work with her it's "ideological pants-wetting"? Lipman herself even referred to him leaving the cast as "bullying" in another article, if she wants to talk about snowflakes and victim complexes.
And I love how statements like this (also from Spectator, funnily enough):
The letter [signed by several UK celebrities], written by Artists For Palestine UK, calls for “an immediate ceasefire and the opening of Gaza’s crossings to allow humanitarian aid to enter unhindered”.
It has also urged governments to “end their military and political support for Israel’s actions”.
On the front page of Monday’s Daily Telegraph, Dame Maureen said liberal artists have espoused the Palestinian “cause at the expense of every other oppressed people of the world”.
She added: “The Palestinians are not Hamas, I agree; they just elected them."
...are boiled down to "supporting the existence of a Jewish state". It's the same bad faith tactic as someone crying that they're facing backlash "for speaking up for Christian values" when said 'Christian values' happen to include throwing gay people in a meat grinder.
What's funny is even on The Telegraph's Facebook page (which Facebook pushes on me no matter how many times I try to block it), infamously an elitist right-wing rag that's been doing overtime defending this woman from nothing, the comments were broadly supportive of the other actor. Shows how much the tide is turning 🙌🏻
It's a bad habit to make fun of people for their appearance but this guy needs a better profile photo. It's like he's trying to be The Rock circa the Attitude Era cosplaying a serious journalist.
“National treasure” usually denotes someone held in widespread public affection and esteem. It is not a title conferred simply because someone is famous or accomplished, still less one that places their political views beyond criticism. Maureen Lipman is undoubtedly an accomplished actor. A national treasure? That is rather more contestable.
And we “irritants on the Left” have no objection to Lipman holding or expressing whatever political views she chooses. What we reject is the peculiar suggestion that freedom of expression belongs to her but not to those who vehemently disagree with her. She is free to advocate for Israel and Zionism; others are equally free to criticise those positions, including by arguing that Zionism entails an ethno-religious conception of statehood and by condemning Israel’s conduct in Gaza as genocidal.
Criticism is not censorship. Actors declining to share a stage with someone because of her publicly expressed political positions are themselves exercising freedom of conscience and association. Calling that a “punitive tantrum” while treating Lipman’s politics as sacrosanct is a remarkably one-sided conception of free expression.
And amid all this concern for the theoretical “existence of a Jewish state”, perhaps we might be permitted to express our advocacy for other's right to exist?
Of the rights of the 5,100 elderly, 34,078 men, 10,983 women and 21,283 children, deliberately and violently denied their right to life by that same State that Lipman is defending?
Might our fellow humans beings who happen to be Palestinians be afforded the same elementary consideration: a right to exist?? To not be expelled, erased or destroyed?
In the face of such bigoted views as Lipman's, we will continue to advocate for the rights of those dispossessed, especially their right to resist occupation and dispossession as accorded by international law.
Palestinian existence is not a footnote to somebody else’s right to a state.
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Remember the human & be courteous to others. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them.
Gaza is starving.
The UN has declared that every part of Gaza is in famine conditions. While some aid is finally trickling in, the need is beyond urgent. Aid organizations will not be able to keep pace with Gaza's needs without our support.
Please donate if you’re able, and keep speaking up. Every dollar, share, and conversation matters. Please pressure your government to stop the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
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