One of the nastiest CIF posters is La Ritournelle, usually abbreviated to LaRit (‘La Ritournelle’ means ‘the old story’). She was recently ‘outed’, reportedly on CIF though Harrys Place picked it up. (She sings anti-Israel songs alongside Deborah Fink). It seems that at least some of what she writes is fantasy. When it comes to Israel, she is self-righteousness personified and an expert in hypocrisy – one moment she is questioning the sanity of pro-Israel posters, the next she is sanctimoniously telling others not to do precisely what she has done:
24 April 2008: “For one, I object to the continuous attempts to insert bigoted terminology about mental health here, as if it is somehow ‘OK’. It’s NOT.”
4 April 2008: “The anti-semitism is all in your head JeremySauce, you really, really need to see a doctor and soon.”
She constantly belittles the problem of antisemitism.
Her vitriol against Jews was shown by this exchange with Linda Grant, the author, on a thread about an article by Mark Gardner (of the Community Security Trust) about antisemitism on campus.
LindaGrant
04 Apr 07, 6:16pm
A few weeks ago, a member of my family who works in a fashionable bar in East London, was asked to take off his star of David by the management because ‘some of our customers don’t like Jews.’
I told this story to a visiting Canadian on Monday night. He was speechless. When he eventually found his voice, he said that he was unable to contemplate such an incident taking place in Canada and that perhaps the scare stories about anti-semitism in Britain were not as exaggerated as he had previously believed.
LaRitournelle
04 Apr 07, 6:50pm
Bils –
all I can say is, trust Linda Grant to dig out a nice handy anecdote like that, oooh….and in a ‘trendy’ bar in East London too!
What she doesn’t mention of course is the legions of black african women, often women with children at home, languishing in the toilets of said trendy bars and clubs, the length & breadth of London, handing out toiletries and tissues to rich clubbers off their heads on coke. I think having to remove your Star of David is small fry compared to being consigned to perpetual toilet duty like a latter day servant/slave.
To Linda, and to David, writer of this cruddy, boring and predicatable article…yawn, yawn, yawn… I prescribe enforced watching of Curb Your Enthusiasm – you need to learn to lighten up. After all, yours are the voices I hear over and over again in the media ad infinitum. Change the record, please, for all our sakes and sanity!
LaRit x
LaRitournelle
04 Apr 07, 11:52pm
Mark
(apologies, I mistakenly called you David before – too f***king pissed off with that bloody Linda ‘miss priss’ Grant and her usual, parsimonious, inflammatory self-righteous anecdotal evidence, now including her bloody family members)
BTW Linda if you’re so proud of being Jewish, why don’t you call yourself by your real name? Also, I presume you’ve now gone back to your nice intellectual non-anti-semitic dinner party in Hampstead by now? You are just a rather annoying coward letting your mates do the talking.
Anyway, Mark, thanks (but no thanks)… and thanks once again to the Grauniad for giving valuable media space to yet another bored ex-public school, Oxbridge-educated jewish person in order to spark yet another boring, boring debate about the perceived onslaught of anti-semitism in the UK, just in case we all missed it about a thousand, million times before. Shouldn’t you have been writing in the Persecution Complex blog instead? because I think this is what this is all about.
I note yet again, that there there is much bullshite being bandied around here…
Yawn, yawn and yawning YET AGAIN…
LaRitournelle
05 Apr 07, 10:03am
Shachtman: here we go, I’m now having to defend myself and prove my non-anti-semitic or ‘reactionary tosser’ credentials,
Well for a start I don’t buy the SWP rag, and no darling, I’m not a ‘failed’ writer, or a ‘failed’ anything – perhaps you’re talking about yourself? Some of my dearest friends are Jewish, including one who is an Israeli. The problem is here that these line between race, religion and racism are blurred and muddled endlessly to promote a debate which avoids the real truths of the matter – Israel being the crux usually.
A true story just for a bit of balance :
I rented a flat for about two years from (as it transpired) a very wealthy Israeli property magnate here in London. He was as nice as pie to me the whole time I was a paying tenant, until the time came when I decided to move and wanted my deposit back.
As with most private landlords, they never want to give you your deposit back, ‘cos they’re nearly ALL greedy so-and-sos, whatever their race, colour or creed. Anyway, this man came and ‘inspected’ the flat to make sure I’d ‘left it as I’d found it’. Anyway, we came to the kitchen (gleaming from all my hard cleaning work) He wasn’t happy….. he was finding it very hard to find any justification for not returning my deposit. Then he found it!! – he pulled the fridge away from the wall to look underneath and there… he finally had his excuse to steal my deposit of ?500.
Suddenly, and without any provocation, he started screaming like a banshee at me : “You haven’t cleaned under here, YOU people (I presume he meant either Gentile or Irish – not sure which) YOU people are all filthy and disgusting pigs!!!” and with that, he stormed out saying he was keeping my deposit. I was absolutely astounded.
The point is that it was OK for him to racially abuse me, however, had the boot been on the other foot, and I’d called him a ‘greedy, Jewish w****ker’ what the hell do you think the outcome would have been?
You see underneath, this man had all along thought of me (gentile/irish) as a ‘filty, disgusting pig’….an inferior and not his equal, so if an Israeli guy can think of people like me as that – i.e. an animal, in London, when I’ve been paying rent to him for 2 years, what the hell do you think the facists in Israel attitude is toward the Palestinian’s?????
Incidentally, this man’s wife was a gentile who had converted… so had he thought of her in that way too, prior to her conversion to Judaism??
Just something for you to mull over…..
LaRit x
The landlord story has never been documented but is still there.
And she is still allowed to post!