The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #161452   Message #3853267
Posted By: Jim Carroll
01-May-17 - 12:54 PM
Thread Name: BS: Uk Labour Party discussion II
Subject: RE: BS: Uk Labour Party discussion II
Your link is to an article by Stephen Pollard who is an extreme right winger and a Islamophobic racist linked to extremist right-wing movements and campaigns
A summary of his views here
Interesting to read some of the others associated with his campaigns (Keith's Jim Murphyt is a hoot!!)
I was interested to see a mantion of the Holocaust
The authoir, in his attack on the left, carefully neglects to mention that the Left shared the fate of the Jews under facism
Right wing polotics broucht about the holocaust and ift was financed by German Capitalism who had no compunction in using Jews as slave labour until they had outlived their usefulness, when they were shipped off to the ovens.
It's too often forgotten that the Holocaust was not aimed solely at the Jews, even though they were the main victims
Communists, Trades Unionists,, Gypsies -or anybody considered superfluous to New Germany's Right wing Reich, all ended up in the same horrific place
Jim Carroll

Stephen Pollard
Politics
On Islam
In the London Review Blog Eliot Weinberg has described Pollard as an 'anti-Muslim hatemonger',[6] much like Bruce Bawer whose latest book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, he reviewed in the New York Times Book Review on 26 July 2009.[7] Pollard began his review thus:
There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or — to use yet another label — radical Islam. And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it...But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists.
Pollard proceeds to accuse 'many liberals and others on the European left' of 'making common cause with radical Islam and then brazenly and bizarrely denying both the existence of that alliance and in fact the existence of any Islamist threat whatever'.[8] He acknowledges that he finds "Surrender" 'at times, hard going', but this is only in part 'because of the level of detail Bawer offers in support of his argument' and because 'Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply ¬terrifying'.[9]
On Public Services
On his blog, Pollard disparages both the NHS[10] and the Royal Mail[11], and speaks approvingly of private alternatives. After accusing the Guardian and other British critics of ignorance about the US healthcare system, Pollard writes:
The plain fact is that if you have a serious disease or need long term care, if you have the right coverage you are so much better off being treated in the US that the NHS is not even comparable.
Although he qualifies the statement by adding that the 'crucial words, of course, are "if you have the right coverage", and clearly the US system is not remotely a model to be followed', he adds:
But to leap from that to the conclusion that the NHS is 'better' is dangerously deluded. The NHS is a system designed for an era when food rationing was the norm, and is metaphorically, ideologically and financially bankrupt.[12]