A reply to Neil Sinclair and Gordon Millar: sorry chaps, but this blog does have an active moderation policy. Dehumanising language about the Palestinian ethnic group, and justifications of the calls for the extermination of that group, are not welcome here and never, ever will be.

Until today I was a member of a chat group which was mostly comprised of a number of former Alba members, plus also a small number of current Alba members who have severe concerns about the direction of the party.  For the most part I will not be identifying the members of that group, or revealing anything at all that they've said, because I still hold the vast majority of them in the highest regard and owe them personal loyalty.  However, what I will say is that the group was set up and administered by Neil Sinclair.  He imposed a strict rule on the group that no discussion of the genocide in Gaza (or "the war" or "the conflict" as some people still inaccurately call it) was permitted.  That was ostensibly because there was actually quite a sharp divergence of views among members of the group, with some people expressing a surprising amount of sympathy for the mass killings conducted by the IDF over the last eighteen months.  Arguably that says something quite revealing about the underlying nature of Alba as a party, because I suspect in the SNP and the Greens, for example, it would be a lot harder to find members or former members who don't find Israel's actions objectionable.

So over a period of months I've largely bit my tongue in deference to Neil's wishes whenever support for Israel was expressed on the chat, although that didn't stop my jaw dropping to the floor on a regular basis about what I was seeing.  However, today something bizarre happened.  Totally out of the blue, Neil theatrically announced on the group that we all needed to have a discussion about my supposedly unacceptable decision to "censor" Gordon Millar's comment on Scot Goes Pop a few days ago, in which Gordon made what can only be described as Nazi-like remarks portraying the entire Palestinian ethnic group as undesirable vermin, and arguing that this made it understandable that there was a poll showing that 47% of the Israeli population wanted to exterminate the entire two million strong population of Gaza.  Gordon's views are, frankly, indistinguishable from the prevailing attitudes in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s which paved the way for the mass-murder of six million Jews.  I was shocked when I read those views and I had no hesitation at all in deleting them.  This blog's comments section is not some sort of free-for-all, and it hasn't been since at least December 2014.  I make no secret of the fact that I have an active moderation policy, and that I often delete comments for reasons that fall well short of apologism for genocide.  Gordon's appalling views were never going to be welcome here, and they never will be.

But the reason that Neil felt he had licence to tell me how my own blog should be moderated is that Gordon is also a member of the chat group, and he apparently privately complained to Neil about the deletion of his comment and asked for something to be done about it.  Now, even just in terms of basic internet etiquette this makes no sense whatsoever.  Neil has jurisdiction over his online space (ie. the chat group) but he doesn't have jurisdiction over my own online space (ie. this blog).  So while he would have been entirely within his rights to give me a dressing-down if I hadn't followed the rules of his group, he had no business whatsoever telling me what the moderation policy on my own blog should be, even if a fellow member of the group happened to be incidentally affected by it.  If Neil personally agreed with Gordon that his comment on Scot Goes Pop shouldn't have been deleted, his response to Gordon should have been: "well, I fully sympathise with you, Gordon, but I'm afraid there's nothing I can do.  It's James' site and James' rules."

Instead, it quickly became clear that Neil was saying to me that I was no longer welcome on the chat group unless I did special favours for the other members by effectively making them immune to the normal moderation rules on this blog.  Expecting me to do that just simply isn't on, but even leaving the presumptuousness of the demand aside, it was just brazen hypocrisy.  In fact it was so blatant that it was almost beyond belief. Neil has been blanket-censoring views on Gaza in the part of the internet he controls while demanding that no censorship on views about Gaza should be imposed at all on a website that he doesn't control.  I mean, he's a highly intelligent man, and on some level he must know he doesn't have a leg to stand on here, but he blustered his way through just the same.

After no more than a few minutes of back and forth, he announced that he was permanently removing me from the chat group, which is fine - I think it was the only possible outcome, because as I pointed out, if he was going to demand that no comments about Gaza should ever be deleted on my blog, he couldn't realistically expect to continue forbidding me from saying openly on the group that I think mass murdering thousands of children is a crime against humanity on the part of Israel.  And he clearly wasn't ever going to accept that, so my removal was the only way of resolving his own hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.

The real problem here, I suspect, is not that Neil thinks that no views on Gaza should ever be censored (by definition he doesn't), but that he thinks that Gordon's views in particular shouldn't have been censored because he personally agrees with them and finds them entirely reasonable.  Even after removing me from the chat group, he started messaging me privately with demands that I should go through Gordon's deleted comment line by line and explain "what I thought each part meant" and why I disagreed with it.  I told him that if he wanted to make demands like that, I'd be making a reply here, not anywhere else.  If ever there was going to be a time for Gordon to get his way by having his mates lean on me in private, without anyone ever knowing what had happened, that time is now over.

As I understand it, Gordon has already posted the deleted comment on Twitter (he apparently did it in a reply to Stew Campbell, who he also went blubbing to), so unless he's edited it, people can already see for themselves that the dehumanising comments about the Palestinian ethnic group were indeed made, and also the context in which they were made.  To my mind, this is the most disgraceful section - 

"No Arab country is prepared to accept the Palestinians, who they regard as troublemakers and terrorists, who destroyed Lebanon. Egypt is firm on this and the Jordanian army fought the Palestinians to remove them from Jordan."

That is exactly what the Nazis said about the Jews.  Nobody wants them.  They're nasty.  Undesirable.  They cause trouble wherever they go.  So if we can't persuade others to take them in, we'll have to deal with the "problem" ourselves.  We'll have to find a "solution".

And if you doubt that Gordon was intending to give succour to calls for a "final solution" to the "Palestinian problem", I'm afraid his entire comment was pursuing the point that it was understandable that 47% of Israeli citizens want to exterminate the entire population of Gaza.  He started the comment by complaining that I hadn't provided the necessary "context" for the genocidal views held by Israelis in the poll, and immediately after his dehumanising comments about Palestinians, he added this - 

"So it's just possible that the above has influenced the opinions of the ordinary Israelis who responded to the survey."

Gordon freely expressed those views.  I did not misunderstand them.  I did not misrepresent them.  Their meaning is plain and devoid of all possible ambiguity.  It is for Gordon to answer for those views, not for me.  And there is certainly no obligation on me to allow Gordon a platform for those views, or to amplify them for him, or to play along with a charade to downplay the significance of them under private pressure from Neil Sinclair.

Even as I've been writing this blogpost, I've checked back and found yet more new demands from Neil that I "immediately restore Gordon's comment" and even "apologise" (!) to him.  No, Neil.  No.  

You've made your decision today in the corner of the internet that you control.  I personally think it's a shameful decision driven by your inability to resolve a basic point of hypocrisy in any other way, but I do accept your right to take it.  I will not be begging you to change your mind.  So I simply request that you show the same basic dignity and respect and stop trying to claim rights of overlordship on this blog.  You do not possess those rights and you never will.  Genocide apologism is not welcome here.  Full stop.